This dissertation is a study of the political and economic significance of gender and sexual identities. It demonstrates that sex and gender are material relations integrally connected to labor, production, consumption, and the accumulation and circulation of capital. The establishment and naturalization of binary cisgender and compulsive heterosexuality continue to generate inequality, undermine social justice, and reinforce existing hierarchies delineated by races, class, and citizenship. In the first chapter, titled “The Political Economy of Heteronormativity,” I argue that heteronormativity provides an ongoing condition of possibility for capitalist accumulation, and non-normative forms of sexuality threaten the stability of accumulation. Applying to our current moment, I suggest that many LGBT subjects have been assimilated into the neoliberal mainstream. This points to a broader need to re-examine the meaning of “progress” from the perspective of subjects who are marked as unproductive, nonreproductive, and unprofitable by the neoliberal regime. In the second chapter, titled “Femininity and Care Work,” is investigation of the association between femininity and care work. The dominant theories of care often feature a particular version of femininity that also contains traces of racial ideology and class hierarchy, which leads to the alienation of men and masculine-gendered people from doing care, while also masking the coercion of racialized and poor women to care for the white, high-income elite. Using data from the AddHealth survey, my empirical analyses show that the care economy itself is stratified and there is no simplistic link between femininity and working in care occupations. In the third chapter, titled “Gender-Based Discrimination in Care Service Occupations,” I conduct an online experiment to investigate discrimination based on gender expression in hiring for care service occupations. The results show that gender expression leads to economically meaningful disparities in hiring outcomes, but the effects are mediated by racial identities and occupation-specific gender norms. Even after controlling for workers’ characteristics including human capital, Asian masculine workers and Black feminine workers still receive 10-20 percentage point higher interview rates than White feminine workers for two entry-level care service jobs. I also find suggestive evidence of heterogeneity due to participants’ gender, race, and sociopolitical values.