Gay Shame and BDSM pride: Neoliberalism, privacy, and sexual politics

Radical History Review

Volumn , Issue 100, 2008, Pages 87-101

  Weiss, Margot D ^a  

^a Dept of Economics and Thomas Jefferson Program in Public Policy at the College of William and Mary

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 38749101989     PISSN: 01636545     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01636545-2007-023     Document Type: Article

References (58)

1. I use the acronym BDSM (bondage and discipline, domination/submission, and sadomasochism) to connote a diverse community that includes consensual bondage, power exchange, pain/sensation play, leathersex, role-playing, and fetish.
2. That same year, for example, same-sex marriages were authorized in Massachusetts, but eleven states banned same-sex marriage in constitutional amendments.
3. Gay Shame, "Gay Shame Opposes Marriage in Any Form," www.gayshamesf.org/endmarriage.html (accessed May 12, 2007).
4. Ibid.
5. Lisa Duggan understands "the new homonormativity" as "a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption." Lisa Duggan, "The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism," in Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, ed. Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 179.
6. Joe E. Carmean, "Black Rose Cancelled," Daily Times (Salisbury, MD), October 7, 2003.
7. National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, "Why Should You Care?" www.ncsfreedom.org/whycare.htm (accessed May 12, 2007).
8. Joe E. Carmean, "Black Rose Protest," Daily Times (Salisbury, MD), September 26, 2003.
9. Many theorists of contemporary activism argue that the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle marked a new kind of activism. As Michael Hart and Antonio Negri put it, "the magic of Seattle was to show that these many grievances [agribusiness, prisons, African debt, IMF, war] were not just a random, haphazard collection, a cacophony of different voices, but a chorus that spoke in common" against global capital (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire [New York: Penguin, 2004], 288).
10. These new antiwar, anti-IMF/WTO, and anticonsumerism activisms are coalitional, networked, a "movement of movements" (Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 86).
11. See also Benjamin Shepard and Ronald Hayduk, eds., From ACT-UP to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the Era of Globalization (London: Verso, 2002);
12. and Bad Subjects's special issue (no. 65, January 2004) on "Protest Cultures," eds. Cynthia Hoffman, Joe Lockard, J. C. Meyers, and Scott Schafer. As many have noted, the chorus in Seattle did not include many voices of sexual activists, who tend to be analyzed in terms of gay/lesbian versus queer political strategies. This essay attempts a different reading of sexual activism in an age of neoliberalism.
13. Duggan, "New Homonormativity," 177.
14. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2.
15. Neoliberalism is contradictory: it simultaneously separates the economic realm from the political, cultural, or social realm; obscures critical connections between these realms; and "organizes material and political life in terms of" these relationships (Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy [Boston: Beacon, 2003], 3). This is, in part, what accounts for the rise of neoliberalism as commonsense, so that other ways of understanding or ordering the world are seen as impractical, even silly.
16. Ibid., 12.
17. See Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997);
18. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, "Sex in Public," in Intimacy, ed. Berlant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000);
19. and Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).
20. In Hardt and Negri's work on the multitude and the common, they ask us to imagine "a conception of privacy that expresses the singularity of social subjectivities (not private property) and a conception of the public based on the common (not state control)" (Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 203-4). Whether these conceptions work as praxis is precisely the question of this essay.
21. Duggan, "New Homonormativity," 179.
22. My thanks to the anonymous reviewer who pointed out that although the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom is, perhaps, sexually conservative, BDSM practices are anything but. Unpacking the links between representation (activist discourses) and practice (what this reviewer termed the "steamy sexual jungle" of eros) is beyond the scope of this essay. However, I do address some of the tensions between a narrow definition of sexual normalcy and a broader range of what might be called queer practices briefly below and, at length, elsewhere (Margot Weiss, "Techniques of Pleasure, Scenes of Play: SM in the San Francisco Bay Area" [PhD diss., Duke University, 2005]).
23. See George Sanchez, "A Question of Pride," Mother Jones, June 28, 2002, www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2002/06 /gay_shame.html;
24. and Rusty Dornin and the Associated Press, "Gay Pride Parade Attracts Gay Protesters," CNN.com, June 29, 1998, www.cnn.com/US /9806/29/gay.parade.
25. Gay Shame, "About," www.gayshamesf.org/about.html (accessed May 12, 2007).
26. Gay Shame, "2003 Awards," www.gayshamesf.org/awards2003.html (accessed May 12, 2007). All subsequent references to the awards were taken from this Web page.
27. See Ilene Lelchuk, "'Care Not Cash' Thrown Out," San Francisco Chronicle, May 9, 2003.
28. Mattilda, aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore, "Gay Shame: From Queer Autonomous Space to Direct Action Extravaganza," in That's Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull, 2004), 237-62.
29. Gay Shame, "Hot Pink Protest," www.gayshamesf.org/hotpink.html (accessed May 12, 2007). All subsequent references to the protest and attendant press releases were taken from this Web page.
30. See "Queer Anti-capitalist Protestors Attacked by SFPD," San Francisco Independent Media (online media collective), February 8, 2003, www.publish.indymedia.org/en/2003/02/107227.html;
31. and David Moisl, "Shame on the SFPD," San Francisco Bay Guardian, February 12, 2003, www.sfbg.com/37/20/news_shame.html.
32. Gay Shame, "Be a Bitch," www.gayshamesf.org/beabitch.html (accessed January 15, 2007). The ways Gay Shame uses creative reappropriation as a strategy to reveal how sexuality, race, class, and gender are not just interlinked in the production of subjects but can also be strategically expropriated by these same subjects is beyond the scope of this essay. The "Don't Be a Bitch" campaign can be viewed at www.homoboy.org/crunk.html (accessed July 13,2007).
33. Gay Shame, "Points of Unity," www.gayshamesf.org /about.html#unity (accessed May 12, 2007).
34. Annie Nakao, "Rejecting 'Normal' in Favor of a Distinct Gay Identity," San Francisco Chronicle, September 19, 2004.
35. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner offer a clear definition of heteronormativity as "the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent - that is, organized as a sexuality - but also privileged" in their "Sex in Public," 312.
36. National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, "Why Should You Care?"
37. The National Coalition for Sexual Freedom worked with Barbara Nitke, a BDSM photographer, and argued that the Communications Decency Act would "violate the free speech of Internet content providers and inhibit the discussion of sexual issues on the Internet among consenting adults." A New York court had dismissed the case in 2005. See National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, "Communications Decency Act," www.ncsfreedom.org/CDA/index.htm (accessed May 12, 2007).
38. The right-wing organizations AFA (American Family Association) and CWA (Concerned Women of America) have campaigned against BDSM conferences in Chicago; Southfield, Michigan; Oklahoma City, Okalahoma; and St. Louis. The St. Louis event ("Beat Me in St. Louis") also generated legislative action; the Missouri Republican state senator John Loudon introduced a resolution calling for an ongoing investigation of the legality of such events in April 2002. Two weeks after the Black Rose cancellation, perhaps building on the success of the Ocean City protests, organizers canceled a New Orleans - based BDSM conference ("Fetish in the Fall") after the police chief urged local hotels to refuse to host the event.
39. The NCSF reported that in 2001, it responded to 461 complaints regarding child custody or divorce proceedings and 392 cases of job discrimination. A survey the NCSF conducted in 1998 and 1999 indicated that among the 1,017 respondents, 36 percent had experienced violence or harassment and 30 percent had experienced discrimination because of BDSM practices (National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, "Violence and Discrimination Survey," www.nesfreedom.org/library /viodiscrimsurvey.htm [accessed May 12, 2007]).
40. This is a reminder of the dense historical relationship between privacy and private property.
41. In Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), the court decided that sodomy (an act) was not protected because homosexuals (an identity) did not deserve the right to privacy, thus erroneously equating sodomy (historically, nonprocreative sexuality) with homosexuality. For more on the legal history of sodomy and Bowers v. Hardwick, see Nan Hunter, "Life after Hardwick," in Sex Wars, ed. Lisa Duggan and Hunter (New York: Routledge, 1995), 85-100;
42. and Janet Halley, "Reasoning about Sodomy: Act and Identity in and after Bowers v. Hardwick," Virginia Law Review 79 (1993): 1721- 1780. Lawrence reversed Bowers, arguing that consenting adults have the right to sexual privacy in their homes.
43. See Bernard E. Harcourt, "'You Are Entering a Gay and Lesbian Free Zone': On the Radical Dissents of justice Scalia and Other [Post-]Queers," Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 94 (2003): 503-49,
44. for an analysis of the Lawrence decision in the context of queer critique. Also see Richard Green, "(Serious) Sadomasochism: A Protected Right of Privacy?" Archives of Sexual Behavior 30 (2001):543-550, for a discussion of the 1987 UK play party arrest case ("Spanner") in terms of UK law on privacy, consensuality, and sex acts.
45. David Bell and Jon Binnie, The Sexual Citizen: Queer Politics and Beyond (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 3.
46. Nick Economidis, "Black Rose Not a Big Deal," Maryland Coast Dispatch, October 2003.
47. NCSF, "Media Tips," www.ncsfreedom.org/library/mediatips.htm (accessed January 15, 2007).
48. Berlant and Warner, "Sex in Public." See also Berlant, Queen of America.
49. Berlant and Warner, "Sex in Public," 313-14.
50. Duggan, "New Homonormativity," 181. Work on the restriction of sexuality in the public sphere includes Patrick Califia, "Public Sex," in his Public Sex (Pittsburgh, PA: Cleis, 1994);
51. Samuel Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: New York University Press, 1999);
52. and Dangerous Bedfellows, eds., Policing Public Sex (Boston: South End, 1996).
53. This normalizing mode of SM politics is not, of course, the only discourse produced. Indeed, on the mailing list SM-ACT, some people expressed dismay at the denial of sexuality that forms the basis of the NCSFs defense. They pointed out that conferences were times to play, to revel in SM sexuality with other practitioners, and to celebrate SM sex, not only to sit around in rooms listening to panel presentations. As Susan Wright asks, "Why can't I wear my collar in public? Why do I have to be ashamed of my affectionate embraces or the clothes I wear? Because it makes you uneasy?" (Susan Wright, "The Joy of S /M:" Lesbian and Gay New York, September 10, 1999). At the same time, some on the list suggested that the way to counter the public's hostility was by stamping bills with "BR" to show how much money the conference was bringing to the local economy. A more defiantly neoliberal strategy is hard to fathom.
54. Gay Shame, "Points of Unity."
55. Gay Shame, "Where Is This the Tenderloin," www.gayshames.org/ index2.php (accessed May 8, 2007).
56. Andrew Boyd ("Phil T. Rich" of Billionaires for Bush [or Gore]), describing the Seattle protests, notes that "to some it's just kids cutting up in the streets. To others this brand of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) street politics represents a new kind of anti-corporate movement distinguished by creativity, self-organization, coalition building, and the will to take on global capitalism." (Andrew Boyd, "Irony, Meme Warfare, and the Extreme Costume Ball," in Shepard and Hayduk, From ACT-UP to the WTO, 245).
57. For Michel Foucault, "discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy" (Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley [New York: Vintage, 1990], 101.).
58. See also Judith Butler, "Imitation and Gender Insubordination," in Inside/Out, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 13-31.