The Social Construction of Sexuality (Essay)

This is an essay I wrote for my Feminism Today! class last semester, which was really useful in helping to clarify my thoughts on issues of sexuality and gender.

Feminism would hold that sexuality is socially constructed. Discuss how and why women’s sexuality and femininity is socially constructed and how these constructs may be the site of oppression, regulation and control.

Sexuality – its origin, content, and political meaning – has been an important concern for the feminist movement. Key in understanding and articulating a particularly feminist picture of the sexual has been the idea that sexuality is socially-constructed. This essay explores the ideas of social construction and anti-essentialism in the context of female sexuality. No definition of the sexual is taken, rather I agree with Stevi Jackson that ‘an act is not sexual by virtue of its inherent properties… [but] becomes sexual by the application of socially learned meanings’.¹ The construction of sexuality involves complex interactions between the body, the self, culture, power, the state, etc., which are explored throughout the essay. First, the issue of essentialism and the meaning of the categories of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ are discussed. Next, Freud’s account of psychosexual development is discussed in relation to critical feminist perspectives. Drawing on Foucault’s analysis of power and of social control, a framework for understanding the mechanisms by which sexuality is constructed is sketched. Next, with Foucault still in mind, the analyses of radical feminists are drawn on to discuss the political implications of normative forms of sexuality. Finally, the tensions between ‘sex-positive’ and ‘sex-negative’ feminism as forms of resistance are briefly discussed.

As it’s presently constructed, to talk of sexuality presupposes gendered subjects. Consequently, to understand how female sexuality is socially constructed, one must first understand how women are constructed as women, by looking at the social construction of sex and gender. Most feminists hold that gender difference is largely if not entirely socially constructed. However, there has always been an essentialist current within feminist thought, which holds that femininity is biologically determined (for example, Naomi Wolf’s recent book Vagina: A New Biography²), but contests the patriarchal conception of femininity as inferior. This viewpoint is criticised by Andrea Dworkin, who argues that essentialism is always reactionary (Fascist, even) in its political implications.³

Many feminists maintain a radical separation between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, with ‘sex’ referring to the biological differences between male and female bodies and ‘gender’ referring to masculine and feminine behaviours, attitudes, identity, modes of thought etc. However this sharp distinction, while useful in some respects as a counter to reactionary bio-essentialist arguments, is problematic. The sexing of the body is also an act of interpretation, and as such relies on a socially-constructed interpretive framework within which gendered meaning can be ascribed to (or imposed upon) bodies: this or that particular feature of the body (such as the capacity for reproduction, or a certain arrangement of chromosomes, or a certain morphology) is taken as the salient feature of that body and its associated sex.⁴ In the case of intersex bodies, this act of interpretation is often accompanied by the physical imposition of this interpretation via coercive surgery on infants to ‘normalise’ their bodies within a schema of anatomical norms. Transexual individuals, by radically decoupling bodily sex as interpreted by medical professions from sex as a lived experience, and, in some cases, by transforming their bodies to match their understanding of themselves, also undermine notions of an underlying biological facticity of ‘sex’.⁵ As such, ‘sex’ is not a neutral pre-discursive surface on which gender is inscribed, but rather the construction of ‘sex’ is an aspect of the social process of gender formation.⁶

In Gender Trouble Judith Butler argues that gender (including ‘sex’) should be viewed as a performative utterance: a discursive act which brings into being that which it names.⁷ In this, she echoes Monique Wittag’s argument⁸ that ‘sex’ as a category is inseparable from the power relations in which it is constructed. ‘It is oppression that creates sex and not the contrary.’ To argue the contrary would be to naturalise the oppression of women with reference to a constitutive difference between the sexes that exists prior or external to society, either biologically (the physical sense) or ontologically (the metaphysical sense).⁹

Among the first feminist works to contest the idea of a ‘natural’ sexuality existing prior to culture is Ann Oakley’s Sex, Gender and Society.¹⁰Drawing on anthropological evidence, she compares (hetero)sexual attitudes and behaviours among various indigenous groups, and discovers a wide divergence. Commonsense notions of a qualitative difference between male and female sexuality, in which the male is active and the female is passive (her sexuality is held to involve ‘long arousal and slow satisfaction, inferior sex drive, susceptibility to field dependence… and romantic idealism’), are found to be culturally-specific rather than universal. Cultures are also found to vary widely in the meaning and importance afforded to sexual activity. Oakley’s work provides an empirical support to an anti-essentialist account of human sexuality.

Psychoanalysis is among the key analytical tools for the understanding of sexuality. Sigmund Freud’s male-centric analysis of the psychosocial construction of sexuality, which has had an important influence both on academia and in shaping commonsense understandings of sexuality in wider society, has been contested by feminists. One such critique of Freud is offered by Stevi Jackson.¹¹ She rejects the notion that sexuality is driven by some ‘animal’ or ‘instinctual’ side of human ‘nature’ which is then repressed and shaped by social forces – the Freudian libido – rather it is produced socially, with the biological serving merely as the surface onto which socially-learned meanings are inscribed. Sexual learning involves the assimilation of these social meanings into one’s self-concept, rather than learning to repress or express one’s innate desires. For Freud, libido is an active masculine force, symbolised by the phallus, and the female is defined and understood in terms of its absence, not just sexually, but in her whole personality. Women are, he says, from an early age overcome by an intense envy of the penis and a concomitant feeling of being mutilated which determines her entire personal and sexual development. This assertion, according to Jackson, is unfounded: there is no reason to assume that little girls evaluate themselves negatively on encountering the penis, let alone that penis envy develops to the obsessive proportions Freud gives it. In making this leap, Freud is in fact imposing his own meanings upon children’s behaviour. Simone de Beuvoir¹² argues that Freud’s theory makes little effort to study female psychosexual development in itself, rather he simply modified his masculine model, and in doing so obtained the conclusion that the female is a mutilated male, a complex deviation from the human norm, who is male. She argues that while for little boys, who obtain a living experience from their penis, the penis may be a source of pride, little girls are often only dimly aware of the male genitalia, and thus there is no necessary corollary that they should be humiliated by its absence in them. Further, she argues that Freud’s generalisation of the male Oedipus and female Electra complexes (i.e. that a boy’s affection for his mother and a girl’s for her father during their development have a distinctly genital aspect) is spurious and without foundation, particularly in the case of girls.

The regulation of sexuality per se and women’s sexuality in particular has often been a pre-occupation of political powers. This, according to Foucault, is due to sexuality’s two-fold importance: on the one hand, powers are concerned with the regulation and discipline of bodies, on the other with the regulation of populations.¹³ ‘Regulation’ here should not be confused with ‘repression’: the exercise of control over sexuality may involve ‘refusal, blockage and invalidation, but also incitement and intensification’.¹⁴ From the 18^th century onwards, Foucault argues, biopolitics – that is, a governmental practice concerned with the rationalisation and control of phenomena of populations of living beings, such as birthrate, health, hygiene, etc. – increasingly formed part of governmental practice and became and important concern of governmentality.¹⁵ It is important to note here that, while power often acts through the state, the state should not be seen as a universal and autonomous source of power with a will or intent of its own, but rather as a conduit and series of mechanisms through and by which powers act.¹⁶ In Discipline and Punish, Foucault develops two particularly important concepts in this regard. First, biopolitics involves the development of technologies of the body, often diffuse in application and effect, by which the body, understood more or less as a machine, can be explored, shaped and reorganised by disciplinary institutions according to the logic of various powers. These processes produce ‘docile bodies’ shaped and habituated to practices of submission.¹⁷ Second, the ‘panopticon’ is used by Foucault to denote a society in which people are subject to continuous surveillance, which functions to remove the need for coercive force in the exercise of social control. The subject of surveillance, aware of her own visibility, is made to apply constraints automatically to herself, and thus becomes simultaneously both agent and subject of her own subjection.¹⁸

For Foucault, power is not held or exercised by one group over another, rather it is composed of ‘multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization’.¹⁹ As a result Foucault arguably offers a somewhat depoliticised account of the regulation of sexuality: there is no patriarchy as such in Foucault’s analysis; gender is not of particular concern: it is just one sphere of regulation among many.²⁰ Nonetheless, feminists have found in Foucault important analyses and tools which aid the understanding of female sexuality – in particular, a move away from understanding social control as purely a repressive force, which allows for a more nuanced discussion of how and why female sexuality is repressed in certain directions and encouraged in others. Susan Bordo²¹ draws on Foucault’s ‘docile bodies’ in discussing how particularly gendered forms of submission are inscribed onto female bodies. Andrea Dworkin’s description of women as being ‘made for intercourse’ (discussed later) can be read in this light.

Radical feminists in particular have been significant in theorising the political significance for women of various forms of normative socially-constructed sexuality. Adrienne Rich, writing in the context of a period of feminist debates on the role of lesbians and lesbianism within the feminist movement, identifies ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ and lesbian erasure – i.e. the idea that women have an innate orientation towards men and the definition of lesbianism as less natural, deviant, a product of bitterness towards men, or an alternate lifestyle choice to the heterosexual norm – as an important form of male power.²² She details a range of manifestations of male power ‘ranging from physical brutality to control of consciousness’ which, in aim or effect, subtly or forcefully, convince or coerce women towards heterosexuality (particularly within the marriage construct) and away from lesbianism, in the furtherance of a male-oriented political economy of female sexuality.

In Intercourse²³, Andrea Dworkin critically interrogates the act of heterosexual intercourse within the context of a patriarchal society. Within this context, intercourse is understood as both a physical and metaphysical occupation of a woman’s body, which places her in a subordinate position and denies her the integrity and privacy of her own body. She is ipso facto less human than a man, for whom being physically entered is never a normative use of his body. In male discourse, she argues, this is simultaneously both the proper use and a violent abuse of a woman. It further dictates that intercourse is synonymous with and totally delineative of sex. Since men control both the terms on which the act takes place and the ways in which the act may be understood, and since it takes place within a context of fear and inequality, women never fully have ownership of the experience, even if they formally consent to, or even desire intercourse. For Dworkin, private sexual activity is not discontinuous with the social or political spheres: women’s position in the bedroom and in society are inter-related and co-productive of one another. Women must make and remake themselves into the objects of men’s fantasies, failure to do so leaves a woman no longer legibly human. Dworkin leaves open, but does not presume, the possibility that intercourse can survive the dissolution of male power and represent an expression of sexual equality; however, in order for this to happen, women must be equally empowered both to control both the physical and experiential content and to produce the metaphysical meaning of sexual activity.

Dworkin’s argument should be read carefully, however. While she explicitly denies the interpretation that all intercourse is rape²⁴ there is nonetheless a failure to adequately delineate discourses from essences, which leaves similar interpretations open. Read together with Foucault, one might agree that intercourse means violation and domination, and that women may be socialised to experience that domination bodily as pleasure and as desire, but it is not essentially so. It does not follow immediately that entering a person’s body dehumanises and objectifies them – discourse and power relations make it so.

The critical analyses of radical feminists, such as Dworkin, have been criticised by ‘sex-positive’ feminists on the grounds that they are ‘sex-negative’ – i.e. that they reproduce sexually-repressive conservative moralism within the feminist movement in a way that ultimately harms women’s ability to self-determine their sexuality. On her blog²⁵, Lisa Millbank attempts to sketch an ‘authentic’ (non-pejorative) sex-negative feminism, based in the understanding that sex is often in varying ways an imposition, to which feminists can positively subscribe. She argues that sex-positive and sex-negative feminism needn’t be seen as opposed to one another, but rather, that both can act in concert as progressive forces in opposition to patriarchal demands on women. That is: sex-positivity acts as a countervailing force to sex moralism while sex-negativity acts against compulsory sexuality, both of which co-exist as contradictory regulatory forces acting on women. Ariel Levy²⁶, meanwhile, while not opposing sex-positive feminism as such, criticises the utilisation of sex-positive narratives which reposition the sexualising demands and sexually exploitative practices of patriarchy as forms of feminist liberation. These issues are significant when we move from describing the social forces that construct sexuality to formulating a praxis of effective resistance: progressive intentions, such as the creation of counter-hegemonic spaces in which sexuality is celebrated, are susceptible to recuperation by patriarchy, turning them against other women in complex and often unpredictable ways.

In conclusion, a multiplicity of forces and interests are involved in shaping female sexuality. Often, these forces act to naturalise the present position of women by reference to some essential true sexuality: biologically determined, in the case of the bio-essentialists, or ontologically in the case of Frued et al. However, as seen above there is no truth of sexuality that is prior to culture, only discourses and mechanisms which both produce and constrain sexuality according to the logics of various political powers. Patriarchy is the key focus of feminist agitation, but patriarchy is not a monolith, and women are often made to embody contradictory demands simultaneously: for example, that women must be continually sexually-available, but must never be sexual in their own right. Agreeing with Judith Butler, what is clear is that, given the diffuse and multifaceted character of women’s oppression, there ‘is no one site from which to struggle effectively. There have to be many, and they don’t [necessarily] need to be reconciled with one another’.²⁷

Bibliography

Bordo, Susan, “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity” in Writing on the body: Female embodiment and Feminist theory, eds. Katie Conboy, Nadia Median and Sarah Stanbury, 309-26. US: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble. London: Routledge, 1990.

Butler, Judith, Undoing Gender. London: Routledge, 2004.

De Beauvoir, Simone, The Second Sex. UK: Vintage, 1997.

Dworkin, Andrea, “Biological Superiority: The World’s Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea” in Feminism and Sexuality, A Reader, eds. Stevi Jacson and Sue Scott, 57-61. UK: Edinburgh Univerity Press, 1996.

Dworkin, Andrea, Intercourse. New York: Basic Books, 2007.

Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. UK: Penguin, 1991.

Foucault, Michel, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1978. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. London : Penguin, 1990.

Jackson, Stevi, “The Social Construction of Female Sexuality” in Feminism and Sexuality, A Reader, eds. Stevi Jacson and Sue Scott, 62-73. UK: Edinburgh Univerity Press, 1996.

Levy, Ariel, Female Chauvanist Pigs, US: Free Press, 2005.

Millbank, Lisa, “The Ethical Prude: Imagining An Authentic Sex-Negative Feminism,” A Radical TransFeminist, February 29 2012, http://radtransfem.wordpress.com/2012/02/29/the-ethical-prude-imagining-an-authentic-sex-negative-feminism/

Oakley, Ann, “Sexuality” in Feminism and Sexuality, A Reader, eds. Stevi Jacson and Sue Scott, 35-9. UK: Edinburgh Univerity Press, 1996.

Osborne, Peter and Segal, Lynne, “Extracts from Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler”. Theory.Org.Uk. Accessed 26 November 2012, http://www.theory.org.uk/but-int1.htm

Moore, Suzanne, “Naomi Wolf’s book Vagina: self-help marketed as feminism”. The Guardian, 5 September 2012. Accessed: 1 December 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/05/naomi-wolf-book-vagina-feminism

Rich, Adrienne, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” in Feminism and Sexuality, A Reader, eds. Stevi Jacson and Sue Scott, 130-43. UK: Edinburgh Univerity Press, 1996.

Scott, Sue and Jackson, Stevi, “Sexual Skirmishes and Feminist Factions: Twenty-Five Years of Debate on Women and Sexuality” in Feminism and Sexuality, A Reader, eds. Stevi Jacson and Sue Scott, 1-31. UK: Edinburgh Univerity Press, 1996.

Wittag, Monique, “The Category of Sex” in Sex in Question: French materialist feminism, eds. Diana Leonard and Lisa Atkins, 24-9. UK: Taylor & Francis, 1996.

Endnotes

1Stevi Jackson, “The Social Construction of Female Sexuality” in Feminism and Sexuality, A Reader, eds. Stevi Jacson and Sue Scott, 62-73. UK: Edinburgh Univerity Press, 1996.

2Suzanne Moore, “Naomi Wolf’s book Vagina: self-help marketed as feminism”. The Guardian, 5 September 2012. Accessed: 1 December 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/05/naomi-wolf-book-vagina-feminism

3Andrea Dworkin, “Biological Superiority: The World’s Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea” in Feminism and Sexuality, A Reader, eds. Stevi Jacson and Sue Scott, 57-61. UK: Edinburgh Univerity Press, 1996.

4Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal, “Extracts from Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler”. Theory.Org.Uk. Accessed 26 November 2012, http://www.theory.org.uk/but-int1.htm

5Judith Butler, Undoing Gender. London: Routledge, 2004 pp.4-5

6Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. London: Routledge, 1990, pp.6-7.

7Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. London: Routledge, 1990; Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal, “Extracts from Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler”. Theory.Org.Uk. Accessed 26 November 2012, http://www.theory.org.uk/but-int1.htm

8Monique Wittag, “The Category of Sex” in Sex in Question: French materialist feminism, eds. Diana Leonard and Lisa Atkins, 24-9. UK: Taylor & Francis, 1996.

9For the remainder of this essay I will discuss ‘femininity’ and ‘female sexuality’ in terms of cisgendered and cissexual women – i.e. those with normative gender identity, gender expression and bodily sex – and accept, for example, the normative assumption that men have penises and women have vaginas. However, with the above discussion in mind, it is important to note that to do so is, in itself, an act of social construction with political consequences.

10Ann Oakley, “Sexuality” in Feminism and Sexuality, A Reader, eds. Stevi Jacson and Sue Scott, 35-9. UK: Edinburgh Univerity Press, 1996.

11Stevi Jackson, “The Social Construction of Female Sexuality” in Feminism and Sexuality, A Reader, eds. Stevi Jacson and Sue Scott, 62-73. UK: Edinburgh Univerity Press, 1996.

12Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex. UK: Vintage, 1997, pp 70-4

13Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. London : Penguin, 1990, pp145-6

14Ibid. p.11

15Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1978. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, p.317

16Ibid. pp.76-8

17Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. UK: Penguin, 1991, pp 135-69

18Ibid. pp 195-228

19Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. London : Penguin, 1990, p.92

20Sue Scott and Stevi Jackson, “Sexual Skirmishes and Feminist Factions: Twenty-Five Years of Debate on Women and Sexuality” in Feminism and Sexuality, A Reader, eds. Stevi Jacson and Sue Scott, 1-31. UK: Edinburgh Univerity Press, 1996.

21Susan Bordo, “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity” in Writing on the body: Female embodiment and Feminist theory, eds. Katie Conboy, Nadia Median and Sarah Stanbury, 309-26. US: Columbia University Press, 1997.

22Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” in Feminism and Sexuality, A Reader, eds. Stevi Jacson and Sue Scott, 130-43. UK: Edinburgh Univerity Press, 1996.

23Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse. New York: Basic Books, 2007, pp 153-82

24Ibid. pp xxxii

25Lisa Millbank, “The Ethical Prude: Imagining An Authentic Sex-Negative Feminism,” A Radical TransFeminist, February 29 2012, http://radtransfem.wordpress.com/2012/02/29/the-ethical-prude-imagining-an-authentic-sex-negative-feminism/

26Ariel Levy, Female Chauvanist Pigs, US: Free Press, 2005.

27Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal, “Extracts from Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler”. Theory.Org.Uk. Accessed 26 November 2012, http://www.theory.org.uk/but-int1.htm

Towards a Critique of Tumblr Theory

(Note: I no longer agree with some of the central claims of this piece and am hoping to write a new piece some time in the near future. Particularly, I think the idiosyncratic way I use the term “class” here is both confusing and ontologically suspect. That said, I think the general critique of idealism here remains useful.)

This piece aims to critique a particular representation of social justice (which sometimes even calls itself anarchism) prevalent in online political discussion spaces, with a particular focus on tumbr social justice blogs. Centrally, I will contrast ‘privilege’ and ‘class’ as objects of political struggle, and discuss the limitations of identity politics and call instead for a revolutionary praxis that is conscious of identity-based oppression but enables us to move beyond identification.

This piece is incomplete and unsatisfactory, and I welcome criticism.

I. Class, oppression, metaphysics

Class is commonly understood as a system of categorization of individuals on a socio-economic basis – e.g. the three class model (lower, middle and upper class) or proletariat and bourgeoisie – but here we understand class as occurring in between individuals and groups. Class is a set of social relations that position the subject relative to power. Class has both an objective and subjective component: objective material forces create the basis for the subjective experience of class. Our definition of class is not a narrow economistic one, but includes patriarchy, racism, heteronormativity, etc. and understands particular oppressions as inter-related and mutually supporting.

It follows immediately that privilege – the experience of being empowered relative to another – is an aspect of class but not the whole picture. Privilege often presents itself as a social fact without any apparent material cause, as if racial privilege, for example, is created by racist ideas, which simply appeared out of the ether. (In truth, race-thinking has historical roots in colonialist strategic thinking, which required the creation of races both as an ideological justification for colonialism and as a way of managing recalcitrant populations in colonised areas.)

II. Check your liberalism privilege

When separated from class as an object of analysis, the focus on privilege lends itself to a form of liberal idealism and moralism. Awareness-raising becomes the central form of political intervention as though, once we make everyone aware of their privilege and get them to act according to a particular set of moral standards, then privilege will disappear. Thus political struggle becomes political correctness.

Once class is reduced to privilege, then privilege is further reduced to a list of privileges – specific ways in which the privileged group are treated differently, such as men being allowed to have pubic hair etc. – which are endlessly cataloged. Thus, particular manifestations of class are made to appear to be constitutive of class itself. Capitalism, a real material phenomenon with concomitant processes of biopolitical control, is replaced by ‘kyriarchy’, the union of all master-slave relations, presented with no apparent underlying cause.

This is not a dismissal of kyriarchy or intersectionality as such, but rather a critique of an idealist conception of intersectionality which mystifies the material basis of oppression. Without intersectionality, the class struggle becomes identified with the concerns of white cisgendered heterosexual men, but conversely, without class struggle, intersectionality becomes critique without transformative potential. Concretely, awareness of privilege is of central importance if we are to prevent the replication of gender/racial hierarchies within the struggle, but awareness of privilege alone offers little in terms of possibilities for transformative direct action, or, put another way, awareness of ones own privilege is substituted for the kinds of actions that could pose a threat to systems of oppression.

III. Identities, identification, legitimacy

The tumblr social justice community adopt a kind of incoherent synthesis of queer theory, post-structuralist feminism, and liberal rights discourse and identity-politics, constructed, Chinese Whispers style from half-understood fragments of theory abstracted from their metaphysical framework. The postmodernist framework of queer theory entails a radical critique of essentialism and a rejection of fixed and stable identities. To try and reconcile it with the thoroughly modernist framework of identity-politics produces absurdities.

Genderqueer, for example, is not a gender identity, but an approach to performing gender: a radical attack on essentialist conceptions of gender which, through the body, exposes the performativity of gender and thereby undermines the ideological and semantic basis of heteropatriarchy. To claim to be genderqueer and to be oppressed on the basis of being genderqueer is to miss entirely the point of what you’re supposed to be doing: that gender is something you do, not something you are. The very act of defining oneself as genderqueer is to replicate the process of definition which reifies binary gender in the first place.

But that is precisely what tumblr genderqueers do. Genderqueer is claimed first as an identity and secondarily as a basis to make demands for recognition and protection, with performativity playing at best a supporting role, turning attack into defence. Worse, this becomes a basis for appropriating the language and laying claim to the legitimacy of trans* struggles by people who are, in the final analysis, thoroughly cisgendered.

Worse still are the entirely artificial identities and spurious associated oppressions – e.g. transethnics (white people who decide that they really belong to another race, usually one strongly associated with anime production), otherkin (non-humans trapped in human bodies), multiples (bodies supposedly containing multiple identities who ought to be recognised as real and autonomous individuals, an idea which would mean that people with real and serious mental illnesses would be denied treatment) – conjured ex nihlo by those wishing to feel special on the internet.

While these made-up oppressions are dismissed by the more sensible elements of the community„ the basis on which they do so is often theoretically inconsistent. A politics which is built entirely around the right of individuals to define themselves subjectively, with no material or historical basis in the real world, has no real basis for defending against parodies of itself. To dismiss otherkin on the basis that they appropriate trans* stuggles, for example, while obviously correct, within this context amounts to an a priori assumption that trans* struggles are legitimate and otherkin aren’t. It is only by returning to materialism (and to class) that we find a basis for doing so. Trans* struggles have a material and historical reality (real processes by which gender is imposed upon their bodies), which flows ultimately from the particular historical development of capitalism as a gendered power structure, which cannot be said of kids who think they’re dragons.

IV. Against identity

Identity is a cage. That is to say: identity, being, is the antithesis of spontaneity, doing. Identities are alien categories imposed upon us by biopolitical processes of identification, with which are constantly in conflict. Capital needs us to be certain things at certain times and in certain places in order to effectively police and manage us. The revolutionary subject, then, is one without identity. They act authentically in their situation, inhabiting their history without being constrained by it, acting against identity-based oppression in order to open up new possibilities and new experiences, rather than to reify the same categories of cold capitalist managerial logic. Ultimately, freedom means a world beyond identity, beyond capitalism, built on the basis of human solidarity, with a diversity of experiences and ways of living. This means that, while we struggle based on who we are, or who we are made to be (and thus autonomous identity-based organising is sometimes the most effective form of resistance) there is only one revolutionary class and one world to take.

Everyone who does not exist has been murdered: An introduction to anti-choice metaphysics

TRIGGER WARNING

Discusses shaming of women who have had abortions.

Anyone who was ever curious about what kind of conversations the sort of young people who join Youth Defence have when they’re hanging out should check out this piece on their website (trigger warning for this link).

Apparently, they sit around and think about marrying aborted fetuses:

A few weeks ago, some of my friends and I were talking about Baby X. I was telling them that I was thinking we might have been friends with Baby X, or gone to college with him or her, and one girl nearly broke my heart when she said “He might have been my husband.”

Assuming Maryanne, the “student with a dream”, actually exists at all, which is doubtful¹, there’s something both hilariously tragic and incredibly fucked up about young women fantasising about the awesome relationship they would have with the aborted fetus of a 14-year-old rape victim.²

1. “Ireland’s largest and most active pro-life organisation, led by young people who believe that life is worth protecting” actually doesn’t have all that many young people involved, and is in fact an astroturf group funded by American ultra-conservatives.

“I’m only single because my husband was aborted.” Yeah sure. *ahem*

The rest of the article is more or less the usual “abortion is mass murder” drivel, but with a curious sci-fi twist:

You know those movies where the main character thinks “What if I’d never been born?” and then wakes up the next day to find that nobody knows who he is and he sees what life would have been like without him? Well, we’re living in that kind of parallel universe every day of our lives… there are people missing!

2. Miss X actually miscarried, in part, as a result of the incredible stress put on her by the likes of Youth Defence.

Instead of talking about how every zygote is actually a fully-formed human because God or angels or something injected a soul into it at some arbitrary point called “conception”, instead, Maryanne relies on parallel universes to explain how statements like “imagine if everyone in China were to die tomorrow… well that’s the destruction we’re facing today” make any sense, a deus ex machina that’s gotten many a bad author out of a plothole.

It’s probably not strictly Biblical though.

What if the person who would have discovered a cure for cancer has been aborted? What if the next great leader of our country has been aborted? What if you’ll never meet your true best friend? What if you’ll never grow old with your soul mate because he or she was violently torn away from this world when they were only a few weeks old?

Ever notice how only good people get aborted? Never rapists or serial killers? Odd that.

Every person has a purpose in life, and over the past half century we’ve wiped out more than one billion people. That’s one billion lives, one billion lifetimes, one billion contributions that the world has been deprived of… Millions of people have lost their husbands and wives to abortion! And now there are millions of family trees that will never happen, generations wiped out for thousands of years to come.

And that’s only counting abortions. If we considered every potential parallel-universe baby, every sperm in every ejaculation throughout the entire of human history, every nine-month window during which a fertile woman wasn’t pregnant… we’re talking about slaughter on an unprecedented scale. The people who have never existed vastly outnumber the people who actually have, which leads to a startling conclusion:

To a first approximation, the entire human species has been wiped out by the combined forces of masturbation and contraception. Almost everyone has been murdered.

Scary stuff.

EDIT: Looks like I was right about those young people not actually existing. Thanks to the cool people at Rabble for bringing this pic to my attention.

You can also check out the cool kids of Youth Defence being cool at last year’s acid house themed Rally for Life.

How Gay Liberation became a Family Values movement

As it’s presently constructed, the LGBT movement is probably less than a decade away from achieving all of it’s major aims in most Western societies: centrally, same-sex couples having the right to marry and raise children, and, more broadly, equality, understood as assimilation within already-existing conservative institutions such as the military, the police, or the boardroom. Inevitably, this will mean a massive demobilization and depoliticisation among LGBT people and the collapse of much of whatever activist networks currently exist, as, demonstrably, we will have achieved pretty much everything we are currently demanding.

But equality is not liberation. Paradoxically, even as gay concerns become increasingly mainstream and everyone from major corporations, to the English Defence League, to apartheid Israel scramble to feel the benefits of positive pink PR, we are hardly closer to liberating our sexualities from the bridle of conservative/religious moralism.

Instead, we have sought, and are beginning to be granted, inclusion within heteronormative structures, namely marriage, but only on the understanding that the basic form and logic of marriage is to remain unchanged. In fact, this very concession is at the core of much of the smug liberal advocacy for “marriage equality”: of course conservative concerns are irrational, we have no intention of threatening their family values ideology, we just want in.

Marriage as an institution is the antithesis of free love, the mechanism by which the state bludgeons our sexualities into the most useful shape for reproducing the next generation of labour, and the word-made-flesh of anti-sex theology.

However marriage is redefined, it will never be ours. The State retains the power to define what constitutes a “normal” relationship, to write the relationship script for the vast majority of society, while those who don’t or won’t fit the script are pushed to the margins. This doesn’t just affect people at the point where they “choose” to get married, but in fact all relationships are expected to be proto-marriages: monogamous, and aiming at permanence, with a series of predefined stages (which vary according to culture) on the way to marriage. Romantic narratives about “finding your soulmate” (i.e. expectation that you will only legitimately love one person in your entire life) are bound up with the institution of marriage, and shape people’s expectations around sex and relationships in an often damaging way.

Marriage is the institution of an ideology that sees human sexuality as a threat, and seeks to constrain it. Ideally, sex should only happen for the purposes of procreation, but failing that, only within the bounds of stable monogamy, and not in any way that might be considered kinky or weird. There is no room for fluidity, or polyamoury, or promiscuity, which are at best tolerated among young people with the expectation that they will “settle down”.

It’s an institution borne out of sexual repression and patriarchy, and inseparable from its history as male ownership of women – a history which still shapes the lived realities of married people.

Generally speaking, within the structure of marriage, women are still expected to do the work of child-rearing for no money, and their work isn’t even considered work. Often this is on top of having a full time job, so women work a double-shift, usually for less pay than a man on a single-shift. While same-sex marriage may begin to decouple this expectation from gender somewhat, the child-rearing-as-unpaid-labour problem remains embedded into the very construction of the nuclear family.

Necessarily then, we can only participate in marriage on their terms. However much it changes, we will always have to change more in order to assuage the fears of conservatives that we pose a threat to their vision of sexual morality. Within the LGBT community, there is political pressure, particularly on those who are the most visibly queer, to reshape our sexualities into forms that are more palatable to conservative moralists and legislators, to have a binary-identified sexuality that was fixed at birth, or to ditch the concerns of trans* people altogether because they make us look bad. In other words, gay marriage takes a certain section of the queer community and makes them just like straight people, casting the rest aside.

This process of recuperation has happened over a relatively short historical period. Within decades, we have gone from being a radical sexual liberation movement which challenged and threatened the foundations of conservative sexuality morality, of which marriage is a keystone, to being little more than a movement beating at the door of family values ideology begging to be let in. In order to claim the right to be included within marriage, we place ourselves in the position of defending marriage, or cementing its position in the centre of society – we become it’s biggest cheerleaders, pushing out endless stories about happy gay couples who just want to get married because marriage is such an awesome institution – the fullest and most natural expression of love between two human beings – or of gay couples who raise perfect children (according to conservative standards) because we’re such awesome parents.

In short, as long as we continue to aim for equality-through-assimilation, we concede that we will never win the struggle to free love from the grip of bourgeois morality, and to experience love as we see fit, with whoever we see fit. In fact, we strengthen the institutions that keep our bodies and our hearts in chains.

EDIT: It has been pointed out to me that the usage of LGBT here for what is essentially an LGB movement focused on LGB concerns erases trans* people. I use LGBT in a referential rather than descriptive sense because that is how the majority of the movement self-describes.

COMBAT ŽIŽEK

Reblogged from infolepsia:

I was certain this was common knowledge, but two people have asked me to clarify, so I'm providing the full Žižek quote here. Bear in mind that this is my retranslation into English from the Polish translation that I own, so it will definitely differ from the original text. Still, the gist will be there, I'm sure.

One of the specifically pernicious effects of the politically correct Cultural Studies position is a (concealed, but hence even more effective) prohibition against revealing the structural problem of lesbian subjectivity; against an attempt to understand the clinical fact that most lesbian relationships are unusually cold, emotionally distant, radically narcissistic; that love within their context is impossible, and the subject's own position is problematic.

Read more… 373 more words

Lest we forget.

Let’s all have a minute’s silence for Youth Defence’s right to free speech

TRIGGER WARNING

Contains some discussion of psychological responses to crisis pregnancy which may be triggering. Some of the links may also be triggering in other ways.

Over the last few days, a number of those awful Youth Defence posters that have been appearing on billboards all over Dublin have been ripped-down, paint bombed, stickered over with Joyce quotations or otherwise vandalised. (Video here.)

The story was picked up by Broadsheet this afternoon and predictably the comments section is filled with the usual tedious liberal bleating about freedom of speech. Here’s a couple of randomly chosen examples:

Hate this. Am very pro-choice but I also believe in free speech. Just like I don’t agree with the BNP but I hate they way people attempt to stop them attending debates but have no problem with radical leftists attending similar debates.

This is against freedom of expression. Very naive thing to do even to God bothering moral nazis.

The rest is more or less the same: people who vandalise posters are against free speech/worse than Nazis/thugs etc. etc.

First of all, we need to recognise that Youth Defence have deliberately designed these posters to evoke feelings of shame, guilt and distress in order to bully women into doing what they want. Crisis pregnancy and termination can cause acute feelings of distress and anxiety in women, much of which can be linked to pervasive conservative ideas about the immorality of abortion. These posters are designed to be deliberately triggering for women who have been through traumatic situations (triggering here means provoking extremely strong or damaging emotional responses,for example, post-traumatic flashbacks or urges to harm themselves – see here for more).

For that reason alone these posters shouldn’t be all over the city forcing themselves into people’s consciousness without their consent, and people are right to rip them down. The potential for actual tangible harm to vulnerable people trumps whatever abstract rights Youth Defence can lay claim to.

But we should also think about what exactly free speech means, who gets to lay claim to it, who benefits from it and so on.

Liberals conceptualise freedom of speech in negative terms, as the ability to say whatever you want without any coercive force preventing you from doing so. That’s a useful freedom from the point of view of those with access to the political, social, economic and cultural capital to turn their negative freedom into positive expression. It’s really useful for groups like Youth Defence, who are given massive funding by wealthy anti-choice individuals and groups in the United States, and who operate in a country in which patriarchal Catholic conservatism is embedded culturally and institutionally, but for those without access to those forms of power, their voices remain excluded.

In her testimony to the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography, Andrea Dworkin criticised the (liberal) ACLU because “they have convinced many of us that the standard for speech is what I would call a repulsion standard. That is to say we find the most repulsive person in the society and we defend him. I say we find the most powerless people in this society, and we defend them. That’s the way we increase rights of speech in this society.” (source)

In Ireland, people don’t come much more powerless than women in situations of crisis pregnancy – doubly so if they are children, or victims of rape, or in institutional care, or undocumented migrants, or simply too poor to travel to England for an abortion. Every attempt by women to pursue the access to free, safe and legal abortion in this country, either through the courts or through parliament has failed. It’s been 20 years since the X-case ruling established the on-paper right to lifesaving abortion in this country, but since then, actual legislative remedy has been prevented by kicking it back and forth between committees for two decades. In this society, for women who have found themselves, may one day find themselves, or currently find themselves faced with situations of crisis pregnancy and whose voices are routinely dismissed and ignored by state institutions, vandalism like this is their speech and should be defended.

Why monogamy isn’t the problem

In a Facebook thread discussing this rather excellent post on polyamory and the objectification of women within activist circles, a friend of mine (who is a bit of a polyamory evangelist) said:

“Nobody says that polyamory is a cure-all for sexism. It’s a cure for monogamy, which is inherently propertarian and unquestionably allied to patriarchy”¹

1. Also “If monogamy is patriarchal, then by contraposition, feminism is polyamorous”, apparently. I’m not entirely sure how monogamous lesbian relationships contribute to patriarchy, but I’m sure there’s a suitable analysis out there somewhere… Probably something about using the master’s tools.

This kind of sentiment is pretty common in radical circles, to the point that people are told they’re bad anarchists/feminists for choosing to be in monogamous relationships.

I don’t agree with this. I don’t think monogamy is inherently propertarian or that polyamory is inherently the opposite (the opposite of owning one house is not owning many houses, it’s changing the way people relate to houses).

I’ll illustrate using examples:

1. Alice and Bob are starting a relationship. They sit down and talk and both decide that while neither has the right to control the other’s actions, they are both more comfortable in a monogamous relationship. They agree to be monogamous, but leave open the possibility of future renegotiation of their relationship. Alice meets Carol, and finds herself attracted to her. Alice tells Carol that she is in a monogamous relationship and that nothing can happen between them until she has spoken to Bob. Alice goes back to Bob and explains the situation. They talk. One of several things happens:
   1. Bob is comfortable with the situation and a polyamorous relationship is formed,
   2. Bob is uncomfortable with the situation, they decide to split up so Alice can pursue her relationship with Carol,
   3. Bob is uncomfortable with the situation, they decide to stay together and Alice doesn’t pursue the relationship with Carol.
2. Alice and Bob are starting a relationship. They assume that the relationship is monogamous because “that’s what people do”. Both are constantly jealous when they see each other with friends of the opposite sex. Bob meets Carol, and finds himself attracted to her. He doesn’t consider the possibility of renegotiation because talking about that kind of thing is weird. He cheats on Alice and doesn’t tell her, Alice still can’t pursue other romantic interests because “she’s his girl”.
3. Alice and Bob are starting a relationship. They decide to be monogamous. Bob meets Carl, and finds himself attracted to him. He tells Alice he wants to have a polyamorous relationship involving Carl. Alice doesn’t like the idea, because she doesn’t want to put her emotional/sexual/whatever needs on hold while Bob is spending time with Carl. Bob pressures Alice into agreeing by telling her she’s being a bad feminist and is trying to oppress him.
4. Alice and Bob are starting a relationship. They decide to have an open relationship. Bob is much more confident and socially outgoing than Alice. Whenever Alice tries to assert herself Bob pretty much disappears from her life to have casual sex with random people until Alice drops the issue. Alice realises she would much rather be in a monogamous relationship, but every time she raises the issue, Bob reminds her that she agreed (enthusiastically even) to be in a open relationship, and that he can always find someone else who “won’t try to monopolise his love”.

All of the examples in 1 are non-propertarian, and are based in explicit negotiation, consent and mutual respect. It begins as consensual monogamy, in 1a it evolves into consensual polyamory, in 1b and 1c it continues as consensual monogamy. It could also obviously have started out and continued as consensual polyamory, that’s cool too, but I didn’t want too many examples.

Example 2 is oppressive monogamy, of a depressingly standard kind, and 3 and 4 are polyamory in which Bob exploits a power imbalance to get what he wants.²

2. I’m sure someone will probably argue that this is not polyamory, or something similar, but then we’re into a situation where polyamory is good by definition, which seems pretty useless to me.

All of these things happen, or at least could happen, and I think it demonstrates that being non-hierarchical in relationships has a lot more to do with how people behave in relationships and how people make decisions about what relationships they have than it does with how many people are involved.

Monogamy isn’t the problem. Compulsory monogamy (as in example 2) is a problem, certainly, as is any kind of compulsory sexuality, and the possibility of  polyamory is certainly important, but simply practising polyamory does little to combat propertarian male attitudes towards women. Actually challenging propertarian male attitudes towards women is how you do that.