Abstract
It is a privilege to write for the journal’s 20th anniversary, and many congratulations to all concerned in making it such a success! For the 10th anniversary, I highlighted six interconnecting dialectics for sexualities in the future, relating to: LGBTIQ+ movements, persistence of (sexual) violence, population ageing, environmental change, problematization of sex and biology, and ICTs and virtualization – that together are likely to produce significant changes for sexualities, and what sexuality is (Hearn, 2008). The prospects still seem not so different, perhaps even more dramatic, and so I would not want to disclaim any of these tendencies.
But now I’m drawn to a related but slightly different discussion, namely, the blurred boundary between what has to be called sexualities, with all the desire, orientation, arousal, fantasy, and practices involved, and what I will call ‘non-sexualities’. To put this another way, what are the boundaries around sexuality? As so often, that boundary – and the word ‘boundary’ isn’t quite right, so I shall refer to this as a zone of uncertainty – applies, albeit with different languages, dynamics and implications, in personal practice, sexuality politics and policy, and theorizing on sexualities.
So let’s start here: have you ever had an acquaintanceship, perhaps a friendship, that is impossible to categorize, as not sexual and not non-sexual? Having talked to various people about this, I gather this is not such a rare occurrence. Many years ago, I started trying to ‘conceptualize’ this; categories that came to mind included: ‘friends that don’t fit’; ‘soulmates without sex’, ‘lovers without lust’, ‘cool companions’, ‘intimate acquaintances’, ‘couples that are not’ … you can make up your own terms, in both senses. This might sound similar to what Lilian Faderman (1981) and others have called ‘romantic friendship’ or ‘passionate friendship’ (see Deitcher, 2001), but I think that may be fixing it too much as about romance and friendship. It is of course tempting to say that this is all about sublimated, repressed or latent sexuality (how to avoid Freud?), and it might be in some instances, but that seems too reductive and simply inaccurate. There is a zone of uncertainty that is usually unnamed. But now of course we have the internet; apparently, Tumblr (2016) lists some 90 different sexualities including ‘alterous’ which ‘can best be described as desiring emotional closeness with someone; is neither platonic nor romantic but rather somewhere in between the two’. Nonbinary wiki (2018) lists about 177 nonbinary identities.
This conundrum of the boundary of sexuality and non-sexuality also seems present in public, collective politics and policy on sexualities, perhaps increasingly so. Struggles for sexual justice, sexual equality, and sexual self-determination have long been in conflict with patriarchal, heteronormative, criminalizing and downright murderous forces. Countering that, many social movement organizations have been vital in pushing for sexual rights, even with their uneven impacts across the globe – as, for example, in the World Association for Sexual Health’s 1999 Universal Declaration of Sexual Rights, revised 2014; the 2007 Yogyakarta Principles for a global charter for LGBTI+ (expanded in November 2017 to The Yogyakarta Principles plus 10 [YP+10]); rights; and the 2015 Joint Statement on Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Expression and Intersex Status from 417 NGOs from 105 countries. This is all good, and sexual rights are an essential base, but seeing sexuality political struggles as primarily or only about the pursuit of sexual rights is not unproblematic, especially from the perspective of some queer-influenced, anti-statist politics. Sexual rights approaches can suffer the limitations of human rights approaches, and may feed into state reformism, as in some same-sex marriage debates. Assessing this, Sofia Aboim, Tamara Shefer and I (Hearn et al., 2018) concluded: ‘a narrow, instrumental and non-contextualized focus on sexual justice can itself bring dangers of reproducing the very power relations that many seeking sexual justice set out to challenge’. The restrictions of a sexual rights politics, rather than a wider framing in (non-sexuality) politics, that is not easily separable, may become apparent.
Moreover, strategies for ongoing political change in sexuality tend to shift in form and direction as non-normative sexualities become more legitimated, especially through state reforms, perhaps through alliance politics, and such legitimation is materialized more fully. It may then become more difficult to separate sexuality politics and policy from non-sexuality politics and policy, in terms of, say, housing rights, pay and pensions. I’ve just come back from Örebro (Sweden) Pride, advertised and ‘designed’ for ALL: an exceedingly calm mix of state (city, region, police, prison and probation service, army, etc.), business (Burger King cardboard crowns everywhere) young sexpol groups, and families, in roughly equal measure, 8000 people in a city of 115,000 – all very different from the previous one I went to, Khayelitsha (Cape Town, South Africa) Pride. Questions arise: should the struggles for non-normative sexualities necessarily prioritize sexuality or even gender? Why assume that sexual dissidents are primarily, even only, interested in sexuality?
At the same time, arguably the extent of the zone of uncertainty between sexuality and non-sexuality appears to grow in social-sexual practice. On one hand, there is a range of evidence of decline or redirection in sexual activity from various surveys, along with somewhat greater prominence of asexualities (Carrigan et al., 2013). In some formulations, LGBTI becomes LGBTIA. Reduction in (with-other, in-the-flesh (ITF)) sexual activity has been reported from many parts of the world, including Finland (Kontula, 2009), Japan (Haworth, 2013) and USA (Twenge et al., 2017). Such reports on sexual activity amongst young people, married couples, and older people have been framed variously as lowering of sexual desire, sex drive, sperm count and testosterone (perhaps the result not cause of reduced sexual activity (Hsu et al., 2015)), and flights from intimacy or shifts to serial monogamy. Data from the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention indicate significant decreases in teenage sexual activity since 1988, with reported rates 22% higher then among males and 14% higher among females (Leonard, 2015). According to the Japan Family Planning Association, ‘45% of women aged 16–24 “were not interested in or despised sexual contact”. More than a quarter of men felt the same way’ (Haworth, 2013). In many parts of the world, increased time seems to be spent on looks, ‘looking good’ and self-grooming, especially by girls and young women, but also boys and young men, and older people too. There is also growing debate on whether younger people are experiencing more depression and lower social skills, which might link with such possible changes in sexual desire and activity.
On the other hand, at the same time as possible moves towards desexualization and asexualities, there are profuse extensions of sexualizations, most obviously in the pornographization and anti-feminism of much media, culture and public space, but also in many wider spheres of life, in, for example, sport-sexuality, music-sexuality, economy-sexuality, politics-sexuality. Together, these two counter trends represent in quasi-Marxist terms the growing contradiction of the means and relations of sexuality (production).
Some of such contradictions of sexual decline or redirection and greater sexualization would seem to follow from the impacts of technologization, ICTs and virtualization, even without assuming any fixed determinism. Proliferating information and communication technologies facilitate new and diverse virtual/ITF sexual practices. Grindr, Tinder (and their many derivatives), sexting and the rest are normalized; talk of machinic sex robots is almost mainstream. Writing on Japan, Abigail Haworth (2013) stressed the prevalence of ‘easy or instant gratification, in the form of casual sex, short-term trysts and the usual technological suspects: online porn, virtual-reality “girlfriends”, anime cartoons. Or else they’re [young people] opting out altogether and replacing love and sex with other urban pastimes’, suggesting that future Japanese relationships will be largely technology-driven; likewise, humans doing ‘robot-style dating’ may themselves become metaphorical ‘sex robots’ (Kilberd, 2017). Close intersections of sexuality, non-sexuality and ICTs likely expand further the zone of uncertainty between sexuality and non-sexuality.
There is currently much analysis of the impact of artificial intelligence, augmented reality, robotics and related technologies on labour markets and distributions of political power. In part following the Moravec paradox (contrary to some assumptions, high-level reasoning requires very little computation, but low-level sensorimotor skills require large computational resources), many middle-class jobs needing rational calculation may be replaced by algorithms (Davis, 2016; Elliott, 2017; Frey and Osborne, 2013; PwC, 2017). Meanwhile, the masses left with limited resources may provide low-paid labour (individually, but not so easily generically, replaceable), based on perception, mobility and contact. What might this mean for sexuality? Will there be an entrenchment of the elite, and the sexuality elite? Will the (sexuality) elite employ a stratum of high-tech sexuality technocrats, controlling (all?) (online) sexuality, sexual data/images and their consumption? Will there be an uberization of mobile, proximate sexuality? Or what if, to take the theme of The Untamed (dir. Escalante, 2016), there are technological possibilities of total sexual immersion that made anything else seem ‘bland and banal’? How would that change everything?
Struggles in sexuality politics also seem to be being sharpened by contemporary, polarizing socio-politics, often under the gloss of neoliberal globalization. While the clash of civilizations thesis (Huntingdon, 1996) is widely discredited, polarizations in sexuality politics persist, even with occasional crossovers. Sexuality politics are in long-term, ongoing struggle with hyperpatriarchal, sometimes fundamentalist, neo-nazi, fascist or far right politics. In these globalizing politics, the separation of sexuality and non-sexuality politics is difficult to make. This may eventually lead at some point to some reconciliation or bloody confrontation, a global elite-masses ‘macro-Stonewall’ showdown in and beyond the sexuality–non-sexuality zone of uncertainty.
These various zones of uncertainty around sexualities/non-sexualities bear on sexuality studies itself. With the pervasiveness of sexuality, yet possible desexualizing processes, a zone of uncertainty recurs around how sexualities are to be identified, analysed and circumscribed, empirically and theoretically. How separate can sexualities be from non-sexualities in analysis? How separate can sexuality studies as a critical field be from other academic fields, especially with sexualities being so theoretically inspiring? Should sexualities be studied as a specialism or integrated and mainstreamed? I see no better time than now to both distinguish and deepen sexuality studies, even with these paradoxes. Such questions underlie the very project of studying sexualities, including the construction of the journal. So, many congratulations to all, again!