Abstract
As Sexualities enters adulthood it seems appropriate to think about the connections between academia and activism. In his introduction to the founding issue Ken Plummer wrote that: ‘Human sexualities have to be socially produced, socially organized, socially maintained and socially transformed. And as cultures change, so do sexualities’ (1998: 5).
It's worth going back to that statement at a time when most homosexuals seem to believe that we were ‘born that way’, and when many trans people insist that they are enacting their authentic gender. It's also worth thinking about the political implications of Ken's words in a world which is experiencing bitter disputes globally around sexuality, with authoritarian religious and political leaders targeting expressions of sexual non-conformity.
From its inception, the journal was commited to thinking beyond the rich Atlantic world, and the third issue was centred around articles on ‘transgender in Latin America’. But while there has been an enormous growth of writing by and about people concerned with sexuality across the world, the dominant discourses are set within the academic institutions of the first world, as Raewyn Connell has persuasively demonstrated in Southern Theory (2007). I’ve had conversations with several graduate students from southeast Asia who are trying, often with considerable frustration, to match their lived experiences of sexual politics to the increasingly abstract constructions of western queer theorists.
If we take seriously Ken's stress on the social we must recognize that all theorists are writing out of particular times and places, and we cannot just superimpose the words of Foucault or Butler onto very different societies. There is a risk in universalizing culturally specific concepts, as in the use of the term ‘LGBTI’, a category which conflates both biological and cultural understandings of sexuality and gender, but also distorts the ways in which these are understood in many non-western societies.
In the heady days of Women's and Gay Liberation, namely the late 1960s and early 1970s, a generation of young scholars became activists, and started excavating unknown histories and literatures. If one looks back at the publications of the movements one is struck by the number of people who went on to have academic careers, or who were students at the time.
This was a period when the phrase ‘organic intellectuals’ seemed particularly appropriate: the term was coined by Gramsci to describe intellectuals whose work was intimately linked to the mission of a movement or party. Those of us who wrote out of the liberation movements may not have so described ourselves, but even when we were building academic careers we felt a deep connection to the struggles we were describing.
Tensions could of course arise between writers and activists: I recall a very tense meeting in New York when Kate Millett, a pioneering second-wave feminist, faced a large room of people demanding that she be more forthcoming about her personal life. As movements developed so too did divisions, which were reflected in academic disputes. The most dramatic example may have been the 1982 Barnard Women's Conference, organized by a group of ‘pro-sex’ feminists, who so infuriated other feminists, deeply opposed to pornography and the language of sexual pleasure, that they demanded the Conference be shut down.
I am one of the generation of gay authors whose work grew directly out of the explosion of activism and consciousness that took place almost half a century ago. Like Mario Mieli (1977) in Italy, Guy Hocquenghem (1972) in France, Jeffrey Weeks (1977) in Britain and John d'Emilio (1983) and Lilian Faderman (1981) in the USA, writing about the new worlds of gay liberation would not have been possible without immersion in the heady and sometimes acrimonious politics of the new assertion.
D'Emilio and Weeks were part of the first wave of pioneers of a new type of homosexual history, which included work by people outside the academy – I think of Jonathan Katz (1976) and Alan Berube (1990) – and started to explore the histories and experiences of lesbian and gay life (we were much slower to fully comprehend the full dimensions of the trans experience, which we tended to dismiss as a product of homophobia rather than a fundamentally different understanding of one's gender). Esther Newton (1972) explored Fire Island; Elizabeth Kenney and Madeline Davis (1993) told us about lesbian life in Buffalo; in Sydney my friend and colleague, Garry Wotherspoon, unravelled the homosexual histories of the city (1991).
Lesbian and gay studies, as it came to be termed, seemed to be flourishing; there were conferences, study groups, new publications which started to fill the shelves of community bookstores. By the 1980s there were courses in several universities, and graduate students were embarking on research that would in turn lead to a new output of scholarly works on (homo)sexualities. The Gay Academic Union was founded in New York in 1992 and gay studies developed on both sides of the Atlantic, with the Dutch playing a significant role.
The AIDS epidemic saw a revival of organic intellectual work, as people like Simon Watney, Cindy Patton and Douglas Crimp merged intellectual work and street activism to explain the new epidemic (Crimp, 2002; Patton, 1985; Watney, 1987). In the first decade of the epidemic, when no successful biomedical interventions existed, a whole body of social analysis flourished, which opened up resources and energies for further exploration of homosexual worlds, albeit heavily male-biased.
Progress carries within it the constant risks of recuperation and respectability. Increasingly the academic and activist worlds seemed to divide, as scholars started speaking to other academics and activists were less likely to be engaged with scholarly writing. Nor has there been much interconnection between work in queer studies, as we now term it, and work related to HIV. At a recent conference on Gender and Politics in Lausanne, there were a great number of queer related papers, only one of which made any reference to HIV. Humanists, and now social scientists have found decreasing space in the very large international AIDS Conferences to discuss work which is neither biomedical nor ‘community’.
I recognize the danger of nostalgia in harking back to a mythical past of organic intellectuals striding between academia and the barricades. I also recognize that the academic environment has changed considerably; yes, it is far easier to be ‘out’ in most academic settings in the West, but the pressure to publish in approved journals means that academics have less time and incentive to write for anyone other than their professional colleagues. At the same time the professionalization of the movement, which now supports numerous relatively well-funded organizations with full-time staff, means increasing interactions with governments and international organizations, and less dependence on academics for ideas and research support.
Interestingly somewhat similar concerns were expressed in the fourth issue of the journal by Tim Edwards (1998). I don't necessarily share his polemic against queer theory – indeed, he himself may no longer support everything he wrote then – but for all its strengths, the queer turn in sexuality studies has contributed to widening the gap between activists and academics. Of course many queer theorists are also activists, but increasingly they feel pressure to compartmentalize their lives. I recall an early Queer Zagreb Conference, attended by several prominent American theorists, at which the local folk called themselves ‘queer’ in formal discussion and lesbian and gay when talking about their actual lives. And too many theorists who demand that the voices of the most marginalized be heard write in intentionally opaque language that is only accessible to the initiated.
I am often struck in talking with younger – often much younger – queer activists and academics alike by the recognition that they don't read fiction. My generation learnt about our sexuality through fiction, sometimes coded, often hidden. (When I was writing Homosexual in 1971 I had to use the rare books library at Sydney University to read James Baldwin's Another Country (1962), and was involved in an obscenity case resulting from a Customs seizure of my copy of Gore Vidal's 1968 novel, Myra Breckinridge). With so little available, fiction was an essential tool in developing an understanding of our sexuality.
Today there is a great deal of queer fiction, some of which is now taken up by the mainstream literary world, but it is rarely referenced in writings from academics outside departments of literature and cultural studies. Sexualities has made space for discussion of creative writing, films, music and so forth, but these are almost always seen as discrete activities, not as part of the expanding understanding and theorization of sexualities. At International AIDS Conferences, discussions of culture are seen as extra-curricula add-ons, rather than integral parts of the ‘scientific program’. Yet maybe it is through cultural forms, in the broadest sense, that we can build new links between academia and activism.
In his introduction to the new journal Ken nowhere mentioned activism; Sexualities was intended as an academic journal, albeit one with a broad mandate across the humanities and social sciences. Maybe it now needs to engage in a dialogue with activists, to seek to demonstrate the relevance of our academic work in a period of growing uncertainties and mixed gains for sexual freedoms.