Abstract
The 20th anniversary edition of Sexualities prompts a question: What is the relationship today between critical studies of sexuality and ideas of progress and sexual justice? The answer is not straightforward in the way it seemed to be in the early days of sex research. As sexual studies have become more mainstreamed, professionalized, academicized and ultra theorized, the link is becoming severely stretched. Sexual studies, many complain, have become battlegrounds of ideas long detached from any but the most etiolated of practice. The convolutions of queer theory offer the classic example.
This is not how it began. From the late 19th century there was a symbiotic relationship between the study of sexuality, the construction of sexual knowledge and ideas of sexual progress and sexual justice. Pioneer sexologists, from Magnus Hirschfeld to Havelock Ellis and Freud saw themselves as both sexual scientists and sex reformers. With the establishment of the World League for Sexual Reform in the early 1920s, genuine global encounters and dialogue across difference were developing, unified in a commitment to ideas of sexual justice under the slogan coined by Hirschfeld, ‘through science to justice’ (Bauer, 2015; Weeks, 2016) until the (temporary) collapse of both under the impact of fascism and world war. Both the science and the notions of justice have been problematized by contemporary scholarship but the link between theory, social investigation, and the promotion of sexual justice (and therefore activism?) has notionally at least remained a core aspiration of critical writing (as the term suggests).
Of course, the terms of trade have changed profoundly over time. From the late 19th century to the mid 20th sexual subjects, especially if they were non-male, non-heterosexual, non-conventional. were largely spoken for, ventriloquized through the often latinate and medicalized language of the first sexological textbooks or later through the various editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and similar categorizing endeavours, as they still are in certain fields (APA, 2013). But since the 1960s, as Gayle Rubin (1984) famously said, a whole host of the sexually marginalized have walked, with ever-increasing speed, out of the pages of Krafft-Ebing onto the stages of history. The new subjects offered an alternative set of knowledges to that proposed by the sexological tradition, based on experience rather than science, a history of struggle rather than elevated debate, subjective commitment rather than a spurious objectivity, a sexual politics rather than ivory-tower sex research. Sexual justice was now seen as part of a wider movement for social justice, and progress depended on political and cultural shifts rather than scientific enlightenment. It is striking that symbolic gains, such as the battle in the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from the list of mental disorders in 1974, or the later World Health Organization’s decision in 1990 to declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder were the results of political struggles rather than any shift in scientific paradigms (Bayer, 1981).
The critical study of sexuality as we know it today is a product of this history of agency. It now embraces a vast range of topics and disciplinary inputs. It has moved vastly from the simple essentialism and pieties of the 1970s, and has embraced intersectionality, globalization, post-coloniality, and queerness. We have flirted with no end of theoretical ‘turns’: cultural, linguistic, psychoanalytical, Foucauldian, poststructuralist, queer, affective, materialist, historicist, transnational, Butlerian, Deleuzian, ethical, posthumanist and anti-social, to name but a few. We have become heavily freighted with theory as all that was solid and given in the old sexological tradition has melted into air.
My worry is that, in the process, the link with those people walking into history, struggling on a national and global scale for progress and justice, is in danger of being severed. Theory and practice often seem to be operating on separate plains. The arcane language, convoluted arguments, and the sense of talking only to the cognoscenti of much critical sexual writing are deeply alienating. We are gaining sophistication and losing voice.
As the late Stuart Hall reminded us, ‘Theory is always a detour on the road to something more important’ (in Procter, 2004: 54) What is important in this case is that ‘critical’ sexual theory is only useful if it shines light on actual situations in all their complexity and subtleties, if it can illuminate critical moments, and show the contours of the battlefield. The battle against HIV/AIDS dramatized the absolute necessity of a committed scholarship, a matter of life and death.
The early scholarship revealed clearly the partial and incomplete nature of the sexual revolution that had ostensibly already happened, generating a devastating backlash against people with HIV and those most at risk, especially gay men and racialized minorites. Yet at the same time these people at risk became central to the response to the epidemic, through self-help organizations, campaigns for resources and against discrimination, treatment activism, and strong voices, enhanced by community experience and alternative knowledges, in what Steven Epstein (1996) called a battle for credibility: about who could speak most effectively for the millions living and dying with the syndrome, and which voices would be heard. In practical terms, vast national and international resources were needed to combat the epidemic, and traditional forms of scientific investigation were necessary to produce knowledge of the virus and various therapies. In historical perspective, however, what stands out are the ways in which the people most affected by HIV/ AIDS were involved in shaping the response, and the significance of grass-roots forms of knowledge.
Today the voices speaking about sexualities and genders and creating forms of knowledge have increased multifold, and as Ken Plummer (2015) observed in his landmark book, Cosmopolitan Sexualities, this sexual pluralism simultaneously causes many of our troubles and provides the basis of politics – because people disagree, and often disagree vocally, and violently, increasingly on a global scale.
Global flows force different sexual worlds into confrontation, dialogue and hybridity. While these globalizing flows, from economic, social and cultural encounters, to the digital revolution, from the spread of human exploitation to transnational campaigns against injustice, affect all parts of the world, their impact is uneven on individuals, groups, states and regions because they are enmeshed in huge disparities of power and gross inequalities, and this is manifest in persistent inequities between cultures, and in continuing sexual injustices, especially against women, children and lesbian, gay, bi or trans identified peoples.
It is striking how globalized struggles around sexuality and gender have become the focus of wider political divisions, played out in individual countries as well as transnationally, amongst self-declared supporters of sexual justice as well as social conservatives. The liberal reforms in many western countries in recent years have been dismissed by queer and other radical critics as little more than adaptations to neo-liberalism, heralding homonormativity or ‘pinkwashing’ rather than sexual freedom. Continuing sex panics tighten the grip on sexual freedom by recategorizing people as sex addicts, or new types of sexual criminals such as those who visit sex workers. Issues such as pornography, sexual trafficking, sex work and transgender have bitterly divided ostensibly progressive sexual movements and campaigners (Weeks, 2016). The idea of progress itself has been weaponized by conservative forces. Some ultra nationalists, as in the traditionally liberal Netherlands, have used newly gained homosexual rights as a touchstone of western values, and as a weapon against Islam. As Joseph Massad, one of the most trenchant critics of this history has caustically observed, whilst the imperial West previously attacked Islam’s alleged sexual licentiousness, the modern liberal West now attacks the alleged repression of sexual freedoms in the contemporary Islamic world. He has condemned the ‘gay international’ for trying to impose western definitions and identities on the rest of the world (Massad, 2007; see also Altman and Symons, 2016).
At the same time, a form of political homophobia has become a ‘core instrument of governance’ in the contemporary world (Weiss and Bosia, 2013). As deployed by post-colonial states from central and east Africa to Indonesia, and post-Communist states including parts of eastern Europe and above all post-Soviet Russia, it deflects attention from wider economic and social restructuring, pre-empts gay rights mobilization, and reaffirms traditional gender and heterosexual values, as the bedrock of national unity against the sexual Other. The spectre of same-sex marriage and ‘gender ideology’ have become symbolic foci for conservative mobilization.
In these debates, ideas of sexual progress are increasingly obscured and the idea of sexual justice has itself become a battlefield, even amongst self-declared radicals and liberals. Yet surely this is not the time to retreat into sectarianism and obscurantism. The idea of sexual justice and progress is more necessary and alive than ever, manifest in continuing resistances to oppressive norms, especially in the global South, and, whatever the problems associated with it, in the global discourse of human sexual rights (Correa et al., 2008; Weeks, 2017: 197–201).
Campaigns for human sexual rights have, since the 1990s, become the main vehicle for discussion of the relationship between our common humanity and diverse sexual needs and gender variability. Many especially in the global South see human rights as themselves proof of ethnocentricity and neo-imperialism. But in their articulation, I would argue, they carry the hope and promise of a continuing dialogue that goes back to the birth of the science of sexuality. In the words of Carol Gilligan (2013: 167), ‘underneath the terror, the war, the bullying, there is a human face. And voice, however suppressed’. A discourse of sexual rights gives form and focus for that voice.
As the sexual pioneers of a hundred years ago showed, and as many advocates of sexual justice across the disciplinary and political spectrum since have demonstrated, it is through finding our voices in debate, dialogue and engagement that we can continue to work towards justice and rediscover the meanings of human progress.
In Cosmopolitan Sexualities, Ken Plummer (2015) provides a vigorous defence of what he calls ‘critical humanism’, which recognizes a rich diversity of human goals but within a framework of agreed and negotiated common values, a ‘differential universalism’ that seeks not to impose a single notion of humanity but to offer the possibility for working through differences and divisions. Humans live in cultures that are human constructs. They might appear incommensurable at times, but they can never be hermetically sealed from one another. Because of this connectedness, dialogue must always be possible, and in the possibility of dialogue across the chasm of difference lies the potentiality for new understandings of what it is to be human, sexual and just. The encouragement of that necessary dialogue is surely a worthy goal for a journal like Sexualities in the next 20 years – with theory the servant not the master of acute analysis and the making of new knowledges.