Transient feelings: Sex panics and the politics of emotions

GLQ

Volumn 14, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 1-40

  Irvine, Janice M ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 38049076607     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-2007-021     Document Type: Article

References (169)

1. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (London: MacCibbon and Kee, 1972). The well-known first sentence reads, "Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic."
2. Carole S. Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 434.
3. See Estelle Freedman, "'Uncontrolled Desires': The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920-1960," Journal of American History 74 (1987): 83-106;
4. Gayle Rubin, "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality," in Vance, Pleasure and Danger;
5. Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths, and Modern Sexualities (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985);
6. Lisa Duggan and Nan D. Hunter, Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995).
7. Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London: Longman, 1981), 297; Rubin, "Thinking Sex," 14-15.
8. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002), xxxi.
9. Michel Foucault, "On the Genealogy of Ethics," in Michel Foucault, beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 238.
10. Ian Hacking, Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 1.
11. Stuart M. Hall (Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order [London: Macmillan, 1978]) approached moral panics as discrete but interconnected eruptions in which the media operate to secure consensus and establish legitimacy for punitive state control. Simon Watney rejected the moral panic concept, however, arguing that it is unable to account for the generalized climate of sexual policing that comprises the "overhead narrative" of each distinct controversy about AIDS. Moreover, he argued that media representation is an ongoing rather than episodic location of ideological struggle and suggested that "we do not in fact witness the unfolding of discontinuous and discrete 'moral panics,' but rather the mobility of ideological confrontation across the entire field of public representations, and in particular those handling and evaluating the meanings of the human body, where rival and incompatible forces and values are involved in a ceaseless struggle to define supposedly universal 'human' truths."
12. See Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 41-42.
13. Janice M. Irvine, Talk about Sex: The Battles over Sex Education in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
14. Sociology and cultural studies were likely more comingled in the United Kingdom than in the United States. While sociology is far too capacious a discipline for making generalizations, I would venture that some contemporary points of difference among certain scholars in sociology and cultural studies might concern methodologies, the nature and quality of evidence, and the bases for making claims about the social world. Still, there are many points of overlap between cultural sociologists and cultural studies scholars. For example, there are many sociologists, myself included, who resonate with the cultural theorist Judith Halberstam's notion of a scavenger methodology that refuses strict disciplinary confines (Female Masculinities [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998], 13).
15. I largely discuss moral panic and sex panic work done by historians and social scientists. For key examples of a cultural studies approach, see Angela McRobbie and Sarah L. Thornton, "Rethinking 'Moral Panic' for Multi-Mediated Social Worlds," British Journal of Sociology 46 (1995): 559-74;
16. Arnold Hunt, '"Moral Panic' and Moral Language in the Media," British Journal of Sociology 48 (1997): 629-47 (note the UK sociology-cultural studies crossover in terms of publication venue);
17. and Joanna Zylinsak, "Ethics and 'Moral Panics,' " in The Ethics of Cultural Studies (London: Continuum, 2005), 41-61.
18. Sara Ahmed's book The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004) is an exception. Ahmed references the work of sociologists such as Emile Durkheim, Arlie Hochschild, and Jack Katz, along with anthropologists such as Catherine Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod. Still, her book resides largely in cultural studies. Conversely, the present article draws on cultural studies while residing mainly in sociological theory.
19. Andrea Friedman, Prurient Interests: Gender, Democracy, and Obscenity in New York City, 1909-1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000);
20. Weeks, Sexuality and Its Discontents;
21. Rubin, "Thinking Sex";
22. Duggan and Hunter, Sex Wars;
23. Janice M. Irvine, "Emotional Scripts of Sex Panics," Sexuality Research and Social Policy: Journal of NSRC 3 (2006): 82-94.
24. David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004);
25. Neil Miller, Sex-Crime Panic: A Journey to the Paranoid Heart of the 1950s (Los Angeles: Alyson Publications, 2002);
26. Freedman, "Uncontrolled Desires"; Philip Jenkins, Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
27. Johnson, Lavender Scare, 9.
28. Friedman, Prurient Interests.
29. Miller, Sex-Crime Panic.
30. Stuart M. Hall, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978);
31. McRobbie and Thornton, "Rethinking 'Moral Panic' ";
32. Hunt, " 'Moral Panic' and Moral Language in the Media."
33. Miller, Sex-Crime Panic, 85.
34. Freedman, "Uncontrolled Desires";
35. Weeks, Sexuality and Its Discontents;
36. Jenkins, Moral Panic;
37. Irvine, "Emotional Scripts of Sex Panics."
38. James A. Morone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 11.
39. Lisa Duggan, "Censorship in the Name of Feminism" and "Sex Panics," in Duggan and Hunter, Sex Wars, 30-42, 74-78.
40. Vance, Pleasure and Danger. Also, Diary of a Conference on Sexuality (New York: Barnard College Women's Center, 1982), 431-39.
41. See the following sources for the quotations in this sentence: Friedman, Prurient Interests, 32;
42. Miller, Sex-Crime Panic, 191;
43. Duggan and Hunter, Sex Wars, 78;
44. Miller, Sex-Crime Panic, 87;
45. Jenkins, Moral Panic, 185.
46. Vance does not use the sex panic framework in this discussion, but it remains an influential analysis of emotional strategies in volatile political conflicts. See Carole S. Vance, "Negotiating Sex and Gender in the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography," in Uncertain Terms: Negotiating Gender in American Culture, ed. Faye Ginsburg and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (Boston: Beacon, 1990), 118-34.
47. One notable exception is Elaine Showalter, who writes about "hysterical epidemics," of which her examples include chronic fatigue syndrome and Gulf war syndrome, and "hysterical movements," of which her examples include witch hunts and the recovered memory movement. Showalter sees hysterical epidemics and movements as universal and transhistorical. Contrary to my own argument, she largely situates hysteria as a psychological process through which "human beings convert feelings into symptoms when we are unable to speak," and she concludes that "if we can begin to understand, accept, pity, and forgive ourselves for the psychological dynamics of hysteria, perhaps we can begin to work together to break the crucible and avoid the coming hysterical plague." See Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 207.
48. See the following sources for the quotations in this paragraph: Rubin, "Thinking Sex," 297;
49. Eric Rofes, "The Emerging Sex Panic Targeting Gay Men" (speech given at the Creating Change Conference, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, San Diego, November 16, 1997);
50. Morone, Hellfire Nation, 3;
51. Jenkins, Moral Panic, 62;
52. Freedman, "Uncontrolled Desires," 206;
53. Jenkins, Moral Panic, 62.
54. Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda argue that although there may be disagreement, a moral panic is marked by consensus about folk devils. They note that "while there is often - usually - disagreement concerning definitions of a condition as a threat, a substantial segment of the public must see threat in that condition for the concern to qualify as a moral panic." See Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), 35.
55. See Cohen, Folk Devils, 49-58.
56. For example, the degree of consensus that citizens publicly report about their attitudes toward sex education is striking, even in embattled communities. Public opinion polls since the sixties have consistently shown widespread support for sex education. A 2000 poll sponsored by the Kaiser Family Foundation indicated that by a large majority, parents want their children to have more classroom hours of sex education that covers "sensitive topics" than such programs currently do.
57. Nancy Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy," in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 15.
58. For discussion of counterpublics, see Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002).
59. Michael Warner, "Publics and Counterpublics," Public Culture 14 (2002): 52.
60. James M. Jasper, "The Emotions of Protest: Affective and Reactive Emotions in and around Social Movements," Sociological Forum 13 (1998): 397-424;
61. Jasper, The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
62. William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 9.
63. Michel Foucault, "The History of Sexuality," interview with Lucette Finas, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 186.
64. Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta, Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 20.
65. Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004);
66. Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).
67. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, a Study in Religious Sociology (London: Allen and Unwin, 1915);
68. Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains.
69. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd, a Study of the Popular Mind (London: Unwin, 1896), 10.
70. Robert Ezra Park, The Crowd and the Public, and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 76.
71. Wilfred Trotter, The Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (London: Unwin, 1916).
72. Park, Crowd and the Public, 49.
73. Herbert Blumer, "Collective Behavior," in Principles of Sociology, ed. A. M. Lee (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1951), 176.
74. Gabriel de Tarde, The Laws of Imitation, trans. Elsie Worthington Clews Parson (New York: Holt, 1903).
75. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).
76. Quoted in Stuart Ewen, PR! A Social History of Spin (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 72.
77. Quoted in Ewen, PR! 72.
78. Blumer, "Collective Behavior"; Neil J. Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963), 153.
79. Cohen, Folk Devils, 3rd ed., xxx.
80. Cohen does discuss crowds in Folk Devils, but his crowds are the milling youth and their audience. This is distinct from the social reaction, which is the "panic." Still, like most theorists of collective behavior, Cohen had harked back to Le Bon in his examination of the crowds at Brighton. In contrast to Le Bon, however, Cohen saw emotional crowd behavior as meaningful and interactive. Whereas Le Bon had compared crowd sentiment to windswept grains of sand, Cohen described the affective "air of expectancy" as "a process of communication" in which the members of a crowd send and decode social cues (Folk Devils, 129). "A common emotional tone develops," he argued, through a collective process of interpretation (129). This happens not through the organic reaction whereby flowers turn en masse to seek the sun, the metaphor described by Park early in the century.
81. Cohen, Folk Devils, xxx.
82. Mayer ZaId and John McCarthy, Dynamics of Social Movements (Cambridge, MA: Winthrop Publishing, 1979);
83. Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1978).
84. Jeff Goodwin, James Jasper, and Francesca Polletta, "Why Emotions Matter," in Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta, Passionate Politics, 1.
85. V. Taylor, "Watching for Vibes: Bringing Emotions into the Study of Feminist Organizations," in Feminist Organizations: Harvest of the New Women's Movement, ed. Myra Marx Ferree and Patricia Yancey Martin (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 223-33.
86. James Jasper, "The Emotions of Protest: Affective and Reactive Emotions in and around Social Movements," Sociological Forum 13 (1998): 397-424.
87. Helena Flam and Debra King, Emotions and Social Movements (London: Routledge, 2005). See also the special issue on emotions and contentious politics in Mobilization 7, no. 2 (2002), guest edited by Ronald Aminzade and Doug McAdam.
88. Peter N. Stearns, American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New York: New York University Press, 1994);
89. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003);
90. Lauren G. Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
91. Linda Kintz, Between Jesus and the Market: The Emotions That Matter in Right-Wing America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Ann
92. Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
93. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion;
94. Deborah Lupton, The Emotional Self: A Sociocultural Exploration (London: SAGE, 1998).
95. Le Bon, Crowd, 22.
96. Laud Humphreys, Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places (Chicago: Aldine, 1970).
97. This experience is not uncommon for field research with social movements, and Kathleen Blee has also discussed this phenomenon in relation to her work with organized racist groups in the United States (Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002]). Such homogenization of discussion about sexuality education is an important indication of how national organizations can authorize particular ways of thinking and talking through discourses. Additionally, I argue that these national discourses can also evoke routinized feelings and emotional expressions in local community debates.
98. Goode and Ben-Yehuda, Moral Panics.
99. Their four indices of measurement are exaggerated figures, fabricated figures, comparison to other harmful conditions, and changes over time.
100. Irvine, Talk about Sex.
101. I use the term dramaturgy in this article in its sociological sense, as a form of symbolic interactionism, rather than in its theatrical meaning as a term related to writing and representation of drama. I use the terms performance and performativity in ways that draw from both sociology and queer theory, perspectives that actually overlap in significant ways. In the 1990s, feminist and queer theorists posited the performative aspects of both gender and sexuality. The concept of performativity drew on diverse intellectual influences such as philosophy, psychoanalysis, and performance studies, while as Eve Sedgwick noted, it carried "the authority of two quite different discourses, that of theater on the one hand, of speech-act theory and deconstruction on the other." Theorists deployed the concept of performativity in myriad ways, for example, to challenge stable notions of identity, to examine how gender performativity produces (hetero)sexuality, and to interrogate the power and practices of speech acts such as coming out. While interpretive sociology of the 1960s and 1970s lacked this sophisticated theoretical power, the Meadian concept of the interactive self, along with dramaturgy and ethnomethodology, did support a body of sociological work that prefigured at least one dimension of the concept of performativity that emerged in the 1990s -it used metaphors of the theater to challenge both gender and sexual essentialism. Using the language of their time period, sociologists in the 1960s and 1970s argued that sexuality and gender were dialogic performances, dramatic roles, scripted dramas, displays, and accomplishments. Judith Butler rightly emphasizes that performance (a bounded act) cannot be conflated with performativity (a coercive and productive reiteration of norms). However, the work of sociologists such as Harold Garfinkel, Erving Goffman, and William Simon and John Gagnon much anticipates this later notion of performativity without using the term itself. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Queer Performativity: Henry James's 'The Art of the Novel,"' GLQ 1 (1993): 1-16;
102. Judith Butler, "Critically Queer," GLQ 1 (1993): 17-32;
103. George H. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934);
104. Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Cambridge: Polity, 1967);
105. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959).
106. Dennis Brissett and Charles Edgley, eds., "The Dramaturgical Perspective," in Life as Theatre (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1990), 1.
107. Goffman, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 24.
108. No one comes to sex education debates devoid of prior experiences that might shape an emotional response. Nor, conversely, is the particular reaction of anyone involved in a community dialogue fixed or determined. Individual predispositions interact with contextual dynamics in a person's response to the emotional triggers that abound in local sex education debates. Predispositions might include factors such as strong political inclinations, personal experiences with sexual diversity, and openness toward sexual pluralism. Religious commitments can mediate emotional responses in important ways. Values can predispose an individual toward specific feelings, while the display of intense emotions can also be a means by which one demonstrates religious or political affiliation. Still, many people come to community debates without extreme predispositions. I am suggesting that the polarization of debates over the last decades stems from practices purposely intended to evoke passionate feelings.
109. Arlie R. Hochschild, "Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure," American Journal of Sociology 85 (1979): 551-75.
110. Peggy Thoits, "The Sociology of Emotions," Annual Review of Sociology 15 (1989): 317-42.
111. Irvine, Talk about Sex; Irvine, "Emotional Scripts of Sex Panics."
112. Hochschild, Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure, 557.
113. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132.
114. George Lakoff, Don't Think of an Elephant! (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2004);
115. Geoffrey Nunberg, Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show (New York: PublicAffairs, 2006).
116. Marc Steinberg, "Tilting the Frame: Considerations on Collective Action Framing from a Discursive Turn," Theory and Society 27, no. 6 (1988): 845-72.
117. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 92.
118. Rubin, Thinking Sex;
119. Berlant, Queen of America Goes to Washington City;
120. Anne Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998).
121. Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999), 23.
122. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 147.
123. Gary Clabaugh, Thunder on the Right: The Protestant Fundamentalists (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1974), 43.
124. Don Feder, "What's Wrong with Sex Education Anyway?" public forum sponsored by Newton Citizens for Public Education, Newton, MA, March 31, 1993.
125. Judith Riesman, "What's Wrong with Sex Education Anyway?"
126. Miller, Anatomy of Disgust, 9.
127. Robert Boston, The Most Dangerous Man in America? Pat Robertson and the Rise of the Christian Coalition (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1996).
128. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 82-100.
129. Richard Goldstein, "Petaphilia: The Great American Man-Dog Marriage Panic," Village Voice, March 23, 2004.
130. For new work in this area of space and emotion, see Joyce Davidson, Liz Bondi, and Mick Smith, eds., Emotional Geographies (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2005).
131. Vance, "Negotiating Sex and Gender," 129.
132. Vance does not use the sex panic framework in this discussion, but it remains an influential analysis of emotional strategies in volatile political conflicts. See Vance, "Negotiating Sex and Gender."
133. Local activist, interview with author, 1994.
134. Local activist, 1994.
135. Local activist, interview with author, 1993.
136. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990);
137. Sedgwick, "Queer Performativity";
138. Butler, "Critically Queer";
139. Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997).
140. Marjorie Heins, Sex, Sin, and Blasphemy: A Guide to America's Censorship Wars (New York: New Press, 1993);
141. Nadine Strossen, Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women's Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2000).
142. Local activist, interview with author, 1994.
143. Local activist, interview with author, 1990.
144. As Ahmed notes, signs become more affective the more they circulate (Cultural Politics of Emotion, 45).
145. Vance, "Negotiating Sex and Gender," 126.
146. While in 1988 only 2 percent of teachers taught abstinence as the sole means of pregnancy and disease prevention, 23 percent did so in 1999. A poll of schools in September 2000 indicated a sharp increase to 30 percent among instructors who taught abstinence only and did not provide information about condoms and other contraceptives. A study of public schools revealed that among all districts in the United States, 10 percent had a comprehensive sexuality education policy, 34 percent promoted abstinence as the preferred option for teenagers but allowed for discussion of contraception, and 23 percent required the sole promotion of abstinence. The researchers concluded that of all U.S. students who attended a public school including grades six and higher, only 9 percent were in districts with a comprehensive sexuality education policy. See Tina Hoff and Liberty Greene, Sex Education in America: A Series of National Surveys of Students, Parents, Teachers, and Principals (Menlo Park, CA: Kaiser Family Foundation, 2000).
147. National Coalition against Censorship, "Abstinence-Only Education: A Joint Statement," NCAC, New York, Winter 2000-2001.
148. See also Gary Simson and Erika Sussman, "Keeping the Sex in Sex Education: The First Amendment's Religion Clauses and the Sex Education Debate," Southern California Review of Law and Women's Studies 9 (2000): 265-97. Thanks to Joan Bertin for a discussion of these issues.
149. Hochschild, Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure, 561.
150. Jack Katz, How Emotions Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 407.
151. Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains, 2004;
152. Thomas Scheff and Suzanne Retzinger, Emotions and Violence: Shame and Rage in Destructive Conflicts (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1991);
153. Katz, How Emotions Work; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, eds., Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tompkins Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995);
154. Brennan, Transmission of Affect. Sedgwick and Frank criticize the approach to emotions in much of contemporary cultural studies as an antiessentialism that morphs into a highly moralistic, antibiologism. They criticize a simplistic binarization of concepts such as internal/external, natural/cultural, biological/social.
155. Although not directly relevant to this article, in Mass Hysteria: Critical Psychology and Media Studies (London: Palgrave, 2001), Lisa Blackman and Valerie Walk-derdine challenge Le Bon and early notions of the crowd mind through analysis of media coverage of events such as the mourning following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
156. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 85.
157. Brennan, Transmission of Affect, 1.
158. Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains.
159. Merrimack School District, "Prohibition of Alternative Lifestyle Instruction," policy 6540, August 1995, New Hampshire.
160. Jeffrey Merritt, "Opponents of Gay Policy Plead with Board to Rescind Vote," Nashua Telegraph, September 6, 1995.
161. See Don Botsch, "Meanwhile in the Parking Lot," Merrimack Village Crier, August 22, 1995;
162. and Jeffrey Merritt, "Enforcement of Gay Policy Stirs Concern," Nashua Telegraph, August 16, 1995.
163. Merritt, "Enforcement."
164. Local activist, interview with author, New Hampshire, July 29, 1996.
165. Jenkins, Moral Panic, 216.
166. Butler, Excitable Speech.
167. Steinberg, Tilting the Frame, 17.
168. Joshua Gamson, Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 126.
169. Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 316.