Ask the Queer Ethicist!
Why Sex? Asks Janet Jakobsen in her new book The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics
In The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics (NYU Press), queer feminist scholar and trained ethicist Janet Jakobsen follows up on the question Gayle Rubin posed in her groundbreaking 1984 essay “Thinking Sex”— why is US culture so perpetually at “war” over sex? To answer that question she makes three major interventions: (1) Busting up the usual binary oppositions that structure our debates about sex, (2) Clarifying and complicating feminist intersectional analysis of issues relating to sex, and (3) Drawing on collaborative research and activist projects for the most expansive and innovative approaches to the question.
Busting Binaries: A major goal of the book is to counter what Jakobsen calls “the usual story” that answers the question “why sex?” with “because religion.” The author meticulously deconstructs the assumptions behind the religious conservatism vs. secular religious freedom opposition, elaborating the range of views on gender and sexuality among religious people, and the very conservative views often held by secular progressives. She also sets out to show us how sex is both overvalued and undervalued—seen as enormously consequential and defining, or as utterly trivial and beneath the notice of “serious” politics. Will trans people in bathrooms threaten women’s safety and the future of civilization? Or is the issue too ridiculous to engage? Neither, of course. The problem to be addressed is this kind of binary thinking, and the framing of sex, or gender and sex, as single issues in culture wars. In order to begin the work of thinking outside the “usual” frames, Jakobsen disassembles a range of binaries often related to religion vs sex—morality vs. materiality, culture vs. economics, exploitation vs. domination. Following the lead of Eve Sedgwick’s introduction to Epistemology of the Closet ("an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition"), she sets out to show us how issues of gender and sexual politics are related to all the core aspects of economics and politics (race, class, dis/ability, citizenship and more) in deeply embedded, constantly shifting formations. So, why sex? Because everything…..
Clarifying and Complicating: To offer us a way out of this thicket of ensnaring binaries, Jakobsen conjures some new tools to add to the widespread use of intersectional analysis in queer/left/feminist/anti-racist activism and scholarship. She proposes we consider the operations of a kaleidoscope. As you turn a kaleidoscope, the same glass fragments shift their arrangements and form new patterns or assemblages (ref Deleuze). We can see the same elements reassembled in new relations to each other, altering the overall pattern. One might see shifting social arrangements of race, class, gender, sexuality shift with changes in the economy and the state. Theories of racial capitalism and social reproduction might then be realigned over time and from differing perspectives.
This kind of fluid conceptualization is sometimes attacked for its theoretical or political incoherence. Critics will point to contradictions and inconsistencies, to sometimes incommensurate frames of reference at work in this kind of intersectional/kaleidoscopic approach. Jakobsen acknowledges this, and argues for the value of productive incoherence. She draws on the work of Annemarie Mol in The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice to argue for a social body multiple. As Mol shows that different ways of representing and accessing the physical body produce actually different bodies that do not cohere, Jakobsen demonstrates the way different investigations of social life produce sometimes incommenurate analyses. But rather than see that as any kind of problem, Jakobsen insists that there is no way to create a singular social analysis. And, as any Trump fact checker can tell you, pointing out contradictions and inconsistencies in no way disables the efficacy of a set of arguments.
Jakobsen illuminates this approach by analyzing some major policies of four US presidential administrations—Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump—and a group of Supreme Court cases decided in 2013. For example, she outlines the apparent contradiction between the decision that granted the right to same sex marriage, and the one that gutted the Voting Rights Act, the former functioning almost as a kind of alibi for the latter, Jakobsen takes apart the assumption that the marriage decision was simply “progressive,” situating both decisions as (in part) efforts to preserve capitalist property relations and social hierarchies that defy the conservative/progressive binary. To help make this clear she deploys another key concept in the book—mobility for stasis. Social change can obscure the persistence of the same old structures of inequality. Gay marriage, for instance, though celebrated as a progressive victory, was also a reinscription of social hierarchies.
Creative Collaboration: How many works of scholarship on politics have you read lately that thread their major arguments through readings of individual theorists? I really do love me some Gramsci too! But this mode of launching an argument is tired and constricting. Jakobsen devotes the last part of The Sex Obsession to drawing on the work of collaborative research and activist projects to lay out a range of imaginative possibilities for political thinking and organizing. How do we address violence without recourse to the criminal justice system? Jakobsen looks at what the work of the New York City Project Responding to Violence, Restoring Justice, that draws on the earlier work of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence and of Critical Resistance and Generation Five. These are not non-profit corporations that distribute bounty at the behest of boards of directors, but social research and political activist projects focused on the interrelations of intimate and state violence with histories of colonialism and slavery. They have produced both ideas and practices of transformative justice, evolving and imperfect, loaded with contradictions and difficulties—marked by productive incoherence. This search for grassroots visions and strategies does not evade the large questions of power and how to seize it that occupy the left, but rather shows us new ways to think about what and where power is located, and how its mechanisms can be transformed.
One of the ways we know our Ethicist Author hails from a queer context is that she promotes theoretical promiscuity and perverse justice as Good Things! In her quest for a post-capitalist, radically democratic accessible future (ref. Alison Kafer), she has given us this book to chew over.
Janet Jakobsen is Claire Tow Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, where she also served as Director of the Center for Research on Women and Dean for Faculty Diversity and Development. She is the author of Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference: Diversity and Feminist Ethics and the co-author with Ann Pellegrini of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance.
Coming soon to Commie Pinko Queer: After a delay getting going with the new design, CPQ will be back on a Sunday schedule with reviews, short and longer essays, scraps of memoir, guest posts and … an audio option soon! Stay tuned. Please post and share with your networks.