Abstract
As we were pulling together this anniversary issue, the annual Pride in London parade was disrupted by a group of anti trans protestors with banners and flyers describing the trans movement as ‘anti-lesbianism’ and calling for ‘The L to leave this absurd coalition called LGBTQIA+’ (see Gabbatis, 2018). As Sally Hines (2018) has argued, although this represents a minority position within feminism – a point made in a number of reports and tweets which emphasized that there were only 10 protestors in a parade of 30,000 – transphobia has become highly visible in the UK because of its support by a number of high-profile journalists and its amplification through social media. It also draws its strength from a long and turbulent history of disagreement over the ‘correct’ feminist views of bodies, sex and gender; a history that has played out in what are commonly described as the ‘sex wars’, as Dennis Altman and Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad note in their pieces for this issue. This has led to some bitter divisions in sex and gender politics, with particular groups of women – notably those who engage in kink and BDSM practices, produce or consume pornography, sex workers and trans women – continuing to bear the brunt of these disputes and to become symbolic as sticking points or limit cases for certain types of feminist politics. In the UK, the group Object! continues to represent this kind of politics with its objections to ‘5 key issues’ of pornography, prostitution, sex encounter venues, surrogacy and transgender practices. Across the broad fields which mark out the study and politics of sexuality and gender, more complex, critical and inclusive forms of theory and activism have developed since the sex wars, but what is often most visible and therefore apparently ‘mainstream’ – certainly in Anglo-American contexts – is a version of feminism that embraces conservative views of sex and gender, and is neglectful of – or even antagonistic towards – marginalized identities and practices.
At the same time we are in a hopeful and interesting historical moment when gender and sexual diversities have quite strikingly challenged established ways of thinking about sex and gender. A number of contributors to this issue – including Christian Klesse and Jeff Hearn – remark on this shift towards the celebration of diversity. Susanna Paasonen – who devotes her contribution to this theme – shows that the diverse and multifaceted range of sexual self-identifications that are currently being made, particularly amongst younger generations, represent the increased visibility of all kinds of sexual orientations, attachments and cultures. As she explains, this seems to mark a move from the conceptualization of sexuality ‘in terms of taxonomies’ or categories to one that foregrounds variation, becomings, works in progress – ‘a profound shift in the notion of identity’.
Yet as she also notes, it is privilege that makes this kind of experimentation with identity safe, allowing individuals to play with ‘degrees of unruliness without becoming ruptured or undone’. For those who do not have privilege, there is much more to risk – and less privileged positions continue to be marked by a burden of sexual shame; with shaming ‘a mechanism for social and personal control’ as John Mercer also argues.
Positions of privilege are also marked by respectability. As Janice Irvine notes in this issue and elsewhere, our area of study continues to be a particularly difficult one to work in, but all the same, as Arlene Stein documents, the field of sexuality studies has become more professional and enjoys a ‘growing legitimacy’. Yet in academia and politics it tends to be particular discourses and issues that are taken up; for example, as Yvette Taylor shows, the discourse of ‘gender equality’ most often translates to the promotion of women in leadership roles while sexual equality becomes visible as issues of ‘legal status and legitimacy such as gay marriage’. In the meantime ‘ongoing established norms and discriminatory practice’ remain untroubled and diversity and difference are re-appropriated for the few.
This tension is mapped out in the contributions of Clarissa Smith and Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad in this issue. As Clarissa Smith argues, the kinds of sexuality research that are most likely to receive public recognition and translate into policy are those that are invested in the status quo. Research that is used to underpin policy has often been commissioned to fit a particular agenda, or it is driven by common sense or conservative advocacy rather than by evidence. Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad welcome the movement away from the moralistic, narrow and exclusionary debates that characterized discussions about sexualization and new forms of critical sexual politics as exemplified in the #MeToo movement. All the same, they note that while this movement has expanded to include queer people, queer experiences remain in the margins and the movement remains rooted in a particular – ‘respectable’ – model of sex and gender relations.
These issues of policy making and activism are important to interrogate because they raise questions about the purchase of critical models of sexuality and their impact in the wider world. Sexualities has been immensely important in helping to develop these models and while the kind of thinking it promotes occupies a tricky position in relation to visibility inside and outside of the academy, it has continued to promote an inclusive, complex and – above all – critical sexuality studies. I am incredibly proud to be a part of this journal and of the community of scholars that it represents.