Sex in public

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 24, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 547-566

  Warner, Michael ^a  

^a RUTGERS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0001180094     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/448884     Document Type: Article

References (51)

1. On public sex in the standard sense, see Pat Califia, Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex (Pittsburgh, 1994). On acts and identities, see Janet E. Halley, "The Status/Conduct Distinction in the 1993 Revisions to Military Antigay Policy: A Legal Archaeology," GLQ 3 (1996): 159-252. The classic political argument for sexual derepression as a condition of freedom is put forth in Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston, 1966). In contemporary prosex thought inspired by volume 1 of Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality, the denunciation of "erotic injustice and sexual oppression" is situated less in the freedom of individuals than in analyses of the normative and coercive relations between specific "populations" and the institutions created to manage them (Gayle Rubin, "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality," in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance [Boston, 1984], p. 275)
2. See also Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1978)
3. By heteronormativity we mean the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent-that is, organized as a sexuality-but also privileged. Its coherence is always provisional, and its privilege can take several (sometimes contradictory) forms: unmarked, as the basic idiom of the personal and the social; or marked as a natural state; or projected as an ideal or moral accomplishment. It consists less of norms that could be summarized as a body of doctrine than of a sense of rightness produced in contradictory manifestations-often unconscious, immanent to practice or to institutions. Contexts that have little visible relation to sex practice, such as life narrative and generational identity, can be heteronormatiye in this sense, while in other contexts forms of sex between men and women might not be heteronormative. Heteronormativity is thus a concept distinct from heterosexuality. One of the most conspicuous differences is that it has no parallel, unlike heterosexuality, which organizes homosexuality as its opposite. Because homosexuality can never have the invisible, tacit, society-founding rightness that heterosexuality has, it would not be possible to speak of "homonormativity" in the same sense. See Michael Warner, "Fear of a Queer Planet," Social Text, no. 29 (1991): 3-17
4. See Time, special issue, "The New Face of America," Fall 1993.
5. This analysis reworks materials in Lauren Berlant, The Qiteen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, N.C., 1997), pp. 200-208
6. For a treatment of the centrality of "blood" to U.S. nationalist discourse, see Bonnie Honig, No Place Like Home: Democracy and the Politics of Foreignness (forthcoming)
7. See, for example, William J. Bennett, The De-Valuing of America: The Fight for Our Culture and Our Children (New York, 1992)
8. Peter Brimelow, Alien Nation: Common Sense about America's Immigration Disaster (New York, 1995)
9. William A. Henry III, In Defense of Elitism (New York, 1994)
10. On the family form in national rhetoric, see Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge, 1982), and Shirley Samuels, Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation (New York, 1996). On fantasies of genetic assimilation, see Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 9-33, and Elise Lemire, "Making Miscegenation" (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1996)
11. The concept of welfare state governmentality has a growing literature; For a concise statement, see Jürgen Habermas, "The New Obscurity: The Crisis of the Welfare State and the Exhaustion of Utopian Energies," The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians' Debate, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), pp. 48-70
12. Michael Warner has discussed the relation between this analysis and queer culture in his "Something Queer about the Nation-State," in After Political Correctness: The Humanities and Society in the 1990s, ed. Christopher Newfield and Ronald Strickland (Boulder, Colo., 1995), pp. 361-71
13. Congressional Record, 101st Cong., 1st. sess., 1989, 135, pt. 134:12967
14. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, 1992)
15. Gay and lesbian theory, especially in the humanities, frequently emphasizes psychoanalytic or psychoanalytic-style models of subject-formation, the differences among which are significant and yet all of which tend to elide the difference between the categories male/female and the process and project of heteronormativity. Three propositional paradigms are relevant here: those that propose that human identity itself is fundamentally organized by gender identifications that are hardwired into infants; those that equate the clarities of gender identity with the domination of a relatively coherent and vertically stable "straight" ideology; and those that focus on a phallocentric Symbolic order that produces gendered subjects who live out the destiny of their positioning in it. The psychoanalytic and philosophical insights and limits of these models (which, we feel, underdescribe the practices, institutions, and incongruities of heteronormativity) require further engagement. For the time being, these works stand in as the most challenging relevant archive: Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York, 1993)
16. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985)
17. and This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985)
18. Teresa de Lauretis, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Bloomington, Ind., 1994); Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York, 1992)
19. Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston, 1992). Psychoanalytic work on sexuality does not always latch acts and inclinations to natural or constructed "identity":
20. see, for example, Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, Mass., 1995) and "Is the Rectum a Grave?" in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge, Mass., 1988)
21. The notion of metaculture we borrow from Greg Urban. See Greg Urban, A Discourse-Centered Approach to Culture: Native South American Mytlis and Rituak (Austin, Tex., 1991) and Noumenal Community: Mythand Reality in an Amerindian Brazilian Society (Austin, Tex., 1996). On normalization, see Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1979), pp. 184-85 and The History of Sexuality, p. 144. Foucault derives his argument here from the revised version of Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett and Robert S. Cohen (New York, 1991)
22. Here we are influenced by Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life (New York, 1986), and Stephanie Coontz, The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families, 1600-1900 (London, 1988), though heteronormativίty is a problem hot often made visible in Coontz's work
23. On privatization and intimacy politics, see Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, pp. 1-24 and "Feminism and the Institutions of Intimacy," in The Politics of Research, ed. E. Ann Kaplan and George Levine (New Brunswick, NJ., 1997), pp. 143-61
24. Honig, No Place Like Home; and Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, "The Body as Property: A Feminist Re-vision," in Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, ed. Faye D. Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (Berkeley, 1995), pp. 387-406.
25. On privatization and nationalcapitalism, see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodemily: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford, 1989)
26. and Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York, 1992)
27. This language for community is a problem for gay historiography. In otherwise fine and important studies such as Esther Newton's Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America's First Gay and Lesbian Town (Boston, 1993), or Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis's Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York, 1993), or even George Chauncey's Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York, 1994), community is imagined as wholeperson, face-to-face relations-local, experiential, proximate, and saturating. But queer worlds seldom manifest themselves in such forms. Cherry Grove-a seasonal resort depending heavily on weekend visits by New Yorkers-may be typical less of a "gay and lesbian town" than of the way queer sites are specialized spaces in which transits can project alternative worlds. John D'Emilio's Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United Slates, 1940-1970 is an especially interesting example of the imaginative power of the idealization of local community for queers: the book charts the separate tracks of political organizing and local scenes such as bar life, showing that when the "movement" and the "subculture" began to converge in San Francisco, the result was a new formation with a new Utopian appeal: "A 'community,'" DΈmilio writes, "was in fact forming around a shared sexual orientation" (John DΈmilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 [Chicago, 1983], p. 195). DΈmilio (wisely) keeps scare quotes around "community" in the very sentence declaring it to exist in fact
28. Artemidorus, Oneirocritica 1.2, quoted in David M. Halperin, "Sex before Sexuality: Pederasty, Politics, and Power in Classical Athens," in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and Chauncey (New York, 1989), p. 49
29. Halperin, "Sex before Sexuality," p. 49
30. Studies of intimacy that do not assume this "web of mutuality," either as the selfevident nature of intimacy or as a human value, are rare. Roland Barthes's A Lovers Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1978), and Niklas Luhmann's Love as Passion, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L.Jones (Cambridge, Mass., 1986) both try, in very different ways, to describe analytically the production of intimacy. More typical is Anthony Giddens's attempt to theorize intimacy as "pure relationship" in The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modem Societies (Cambridge, 1992). There, ironically, it is "the gays who are the pioneers" in separating the "pure relationship" of love from extraneous institutions and contexts such as marriage and reproduction
31. Berlant and Warner, "What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?" PMLA 110 (May 1995): 345
32. Bennett, quoted in Maureen Dowd, "Talk Is Cheap," New York Times, 26 Oct. 1995, p. A25
33. Biddy Martin, "Extraordinary Homosexuals and the Fear of Being Ordinary," Differences 6 (Summer-Fall 1994): 123; hereafter abbreviated "EH."
34. See, for example, Alan Bray, "Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England," History Workshop 29 (Spring 1990): 1-19
35. Laurie J. Shannon, "Emilia's Argument: Friendship and 'Human Title' in The Two Noble Kinsmen," ELH 64 (Fall 1997)
36. and Passions of the Renaissance, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, ed. Roger Chartier, vol. 3 of A History of Private Life, ed. Philippe Aries and Georges Duby (Cambridge, Mass., 1989)
37. On the relation between Foucault and Habermas, we take inspiration from Tom McCarthy, Ideals and Illusions (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), pp. 43-75
38. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), p. 49
39. On the centrality of semipublic spaces like tearooms, bathrooms, and bathhouses to gay male life, see Chauπcey, Gay New York, and Lee Edelman, "Tearooms and Sympathy, or, Epistemology of the Water Closet," in Nationalisms and Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker et al. (New York, 1992), pp. 263-84. The spaces of both gay and lesbian semipublic sexual practices are investigated in Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities, ed. David Bell and Gill Valentine (New York, 1995)
40. Douglas Crimp, "How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic," October, no. 43 (Winter 1987): 253
41. The notion of a demand for recognition has been recently advanced by a number of thinkers as a way of understanding multicultural politics. See, for example, Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge, 1995), or Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ., 1994). We are suggesting that although queer politics does contest the terrain of recognition, it cannot be conceived as a politics of recognition as opposed to an issue of distributive justice; this is the distinction proposed in Nancy Fraser's "From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a 'Postsocialist' Age," New Left Review, no. 212 (July-Aug. 1995): 68-93; rept. in her Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the "Postsocialist" Condition (New York, 1997)
42. See Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, and Yvonne Zipter, Diamonds Are a Dyke's Best Friend: Reflections, Reminiscences, and Reports from the Field on the Lesbian National Pastime (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988)
43. Such a politics is increasingly recommended within the gay movement. See, for example, Andrew Sullivan, Same-Sex Marriage, Pro and Con (New York, 1997)
44. Michelangelo Signorile, Life Outside: The Signorile Report on Gay Men, Sex, Drugs, Muscles, and the Passages of Life (New York, 1997)
45. Gabriel Rotello, Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men (New York, 1997)
46. William N. Eskridge, Jr., The Case for Same-Sex Marriage: From Sexual Liberty to Civilized Commitment (New York, 1996)
47. Same-Sex Marriage: The Moral and Legal Debate, ed. Robert M. Baird and Stuart E. Rosenbaum (Amherst, N.Y., 199G)
48. Mark Strasser, Legally Wed: Same-Sex Marriage and the Constitution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997)
49. The phrase "the right to the city" is Henri Lefebvre's, from his Le Droit à 1a ville (Paris, 1968); trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, under the title "The Right to the City," Writings on Cities (Oxford, 1996), pp. 147-59
50. See also Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots (Berkeley, 1983)
51. The classic argument against the redemptive sex pastoralism of normative sexual ideology is made in Bersani, "Is the Rectum a Grave?"; on redemptive visions more generally, see his The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, Mass., 1990)