Abstract
Reviewed by: Anna Shadrina, Birkbeck, University of London, UK
Sexuality is a psychosocial manifesto in which Katherine Johnson seeks ways out of an impasse in the contemporary study of sexuality. The book aims at mitigating the polarisation between either psychological or sociological conceptualisations of sexuality. As Johnson demonstrates, researchers involved in the field of psychology have tended to focus on finding the biological origins of sexuality, whereas sociologists looked at sexuality primarily through historical development and culture. In providing a detailed account of existing theories of sexuality, Johnson illuminates the limitations of such polarisation and offers a transdisciplinary perspective that stiches together psychic and social realms in the field of sexuality. Drawing on ideas from developmental psychology, social constructionist sociology, social and critical psychology, psychoanalysis and queer theory, her study attempts to dismantle the split between such categories as psychic and social, subjectivity and identity, epistemology and ontology.
Johnson observes that psychologically informed research in the field of sexuality had been initially concerned with discovering biological determinants of sexual orientation. However, according to the author, as heterosexuality has rarely been of interest in such studies, the history of human sexuality has emerged as predominantly a history of homosexuality. Johnson indicates that the very question of the source of sexual desire reflects public morality that controls and normalises sexuality. In other words, the question of where sexuality comes from would not be needed if the inquiry were not motivated by an attempt to fix ‘the wrong desire’. Drawing on Dean and Lane (2001), she states that we have to analyse homophobia instead of reinforcing the idea that homosexuality is a problem (p. 110). Johnson argues that the point is not to theorise queer subjectivity without recourse to psychology and psychoanalysis; rather, that what is needed is a reimagining of the psychological. What can be useful, in Johnson’s opinion, is a return to Freud’s initial assumption that all subjectivities are contingent, unstable and, therefore, queer.
Johnson’s psychosocial analysis draws on Sedgwick’s (2003) suggested turn from language, culture and knowing to experience, community and feelings (p. 150). This turn presupposes a new mode for political transformation and a critique of a long historical privileging of epistemology as a modus of knowing over ontology as a modus of being (p. 157). Following this direction of thinking, Johnson introduces the concept of ‘affective activism’ which offers a politics that can sustain people through their everyday lives via new forms of hopeful connections across identity difference (p. 174). Affective activism can be explained as an experience taking place in the public realm without a split between the viewer and the exhibit. Instead individuals can meet and co-create the experience of co-being. Johnson also defines it as community participatory approach, the move towards togetherness (p. 171). As an example of such an attempt, she describes her experience of working in Brighton, UK with MindOut, a community mental health charity that delivers advocacy and peer support to some of the most vulnerable LGBT people in the local area. While doing research on mental health and suicide, the members of the organisation offer opportunities to engage in transformative projects that enable participants to produce preferable representations of themselves and promote connections with a wider community. As the author describes it, these transformative possibilities are experienced through affection and the act of witnessing (Radley, 2009). With this in mind, in 2008 and 2011 the community produced photographic exhibitions that were displayed for two weeks in a local art gallery. Each of seven participants introduced images they had taken, accompanied by a short text to contextualise what they wanted to express to the audience. The exhibition focused on emotions, disaffection with psychiatric practices and strategies for coping through relationships with animals, people and nature. As a means of creating a dialogue, those who viewed the exhibition were required to leave some feedback. The project enabled an ‘affective connection’ between participants and viewers as the latter told stories of ‘being moved’ and ‘touched’ by the display (p. 168). Thus, the project offered a mode of social interaction wherein people accept that bonds change us during the whole life course. Johnson offers this interrelation of the psychological and the social as the way to avoid separateness and polarisation in both the field of sexuality studies and in everyday life.