Social Alienation, Queer Sociology, and Fetishism: Theories of Desire, Subjectivity, and Social Order

This session looks at how social alienation, queer sociology, and fetishism come together as important ways to study how desire, identity, and social relationships form in today’s world. While alienation was once mainly linked to being cut off from work, community, or oneself, recent changes in society call for a wider look at how people experience separation, exclusion, and disconnection through the control of bodies, identities, and desires. Building on Karl Marx’s critical tradition, on one hand, alienation is conceptualized not only as an economic condition of capitalist labor but also as a social and cultural process, thus shaping experiences of belonging as well as recognition. Queer sociology, on the other hand, interrogates normative assumptions about sexuality and identity, as it analyses how social structures generate distinctions, such as legitimacy and deviance. Fetishism has indeed occupied an ambiguous position within social theory, being regarded as pathological as much as symbolic displacement and social relations. This session invites theoretical and empirical contributions on how social alienation operates within queer lives and practices, hence dealing with issues such as desire, stigma, digital intimacies, identity formation, commodification, embodiment, and alternative forms of sociality. We encourage research that explores whether queer experiences and fetish practices simply embody wider social conditions or offer new perspectives on belonging, agency, and resistance in an increasingly fragmented social world. This session intends to contribute to more open discussions related to the influence of alienation on social life, while additionally considers possibilities of new forms of connection and meaning.