Sexual Conservative Privilege

I learn from almost everything Darkdaughta posts, but I think it is particularly worth drawing attention to this recent piece. It uses the classic essay on white privilege by Peggy McIntosh, "Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack," as a model for addressing the privilege held by those who are sexually conservative and the connected oppression of those whose desires take them to places that are more transgressive in terms of sexual and relationship practice.

Unfortunately, I don't feel like I'm in a position to respond to these important ideas right now quite as completely, personally, and publically as I would like and as they deserve, which is politically problematic of me but it is where I'm at. However, I will say a few things.

I suspect that the reactions of more than a few people to the essay will be a gut response based not in what it actually contains but based on previous encounters with superficially similar language coming from quite a politically different place. I have heard/read the use of words like "erotophobia" and "sex-negativity" and so on deployed in a very atomized, individualistic, power-blind liberal framework, where they are used as a political-sounding response to legitimate concerns about oppression, usually of women, in a way that functions to deflect rather than engage with questions of oppression. The critical thing that I would point out about this essay is that it is most definitely not using some sort of abstract, liberal notion of sexual freedom as a distraction or depoliticizing opposition to, say, an anti-patriarchal politics. Rather, it is integrating an axis grounded in sexuality into a larger framework that is intimately concerned with power and privilege and oppression, and seeking to understand how they work together.

Some political perspectives refuse to see the difference between atomized, selfish, liberal individualism on the one hand, and ethical, anti-oppressive, anti-hierarchical autonomy on the other. Even those who try to live the latter, especially those of us with a certain amount of privilege, can fall fairly easily into the former without seeing or understanding it. But the two really are quite different.

The next question, I suppose, would be whether sexuality deserves to be its own axis in anti-oppression analysis. I seem to remember encountering some fairly politically sophisticated argument that would come down on the "no" side, and I don't think I understand that argument (or remember it) well enough to respond to it effectively at this moment. But my gut is on the "yes" side.

One of the reasons why my gut comes down on that side of the issue so clearly is because I have become aware of how powerfully present sexuality is as a force in so many public contexts, yet how invisible mainstream analysis tends to make it. Anti-poverty and social welfare issues, for example, are intimately tied up with sexuality (and gender and race and ability, of course). Welfare systems tend to be organized around regulating the sexuality of poor women. And mobilizing the desire to regulate and/or the fear or hatred of the sexuality of poor women (particularly women of colour) is a standard ploy by the right in debates about welfare. Or look at the way that fear/hatred of transgressive sexual practice was used (along with lots of other things) to get working-class white voters in the U.S. to turn out in large numbers to vote for the more blatantly imperial and oppressive of the two permissible parties in the 2004 federal election. Or even look at the book that I reviewed a few days ago, which talked about how 700 years ago the Church was using fear/hatred of sexuality as a core element in mobilizing the populace against Jews and heretics and other Others as part of a broader strategy to consolidate its own power.

Some would argue that all of this is reducible to gender, I think. I'm willing to learn more about that perspective, but I don't think I agree. It is very closely related to gender (and other axes of oppression) but it is not one and the same.

One place where I might quibble a bit with the essay is around some of the the choice of vocabulary, particularly the ways that "conservative" and "radical" are used. It feels that using those terms in those ways muddies some distinctions that might be important. It seems to me that it would be useful to more explicitly distinguish between sexual practice ("fucking against the grain," as Tenacious delightfully describes it) and political practice around sexuality. For example, is someone who has engaged in a serious, self-challenging way over the course of years with their own desires and practices, and has come to a set of sexual practices for themselves that is not particularly transgressive, but who takes personal risks in supporting the creation of space that allows for sexual autonomy and expression of transgressive sexualities, really most appropriately labelled "conservative"? And is someone who practices non-monogamy, for example, but who refuses to really engage with their own "stuff" and who has trouble being honest and engaging in the commitment to process (self-oriented and with partners) that it seems to me is essential to ethical, anti-oppressive non-monogamy, really worthy of the label "radical" (which is, in many of the subcultures that most people who would read this blog inhabit, a valourizing label)?

Of course I don't mean we should lose sight of the fact that being drawn through engagement with one's own desires to sexual and relationship practice that is transgressive but not oppressive is the basis for experiencing this type of oppression; or that sexual and relationship practice (regardless of whether this is arrived at through long personal process or through unexamined acceptance of socialization) that is in line with what society tells us is and enforces as "normal" conveys privilege. I just wonder whether there might be better language for capturing it -- language that would make it more emphatically visible to people who are privileged in other ways but who want to go out and get their rocks off that being sexually transgressive is not all there is to being sexually radical, and that there are elements of responsibility that are integral to the struggle to create spaces for genuine and widely experienced sexual autonomy as well.

Other interesting reading on related issues that may not be quite as thorough in taking an integrated anti-oppressive standpoint as Darkdaughta, but that I have found useful: The Trouble With Normal by Michael Warner; a few different things by Lisa Duggan; and a few of the essays in Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de la femme Vol. 24, Nos. 2,3, "Lesbian, Bisexual, Queer, Transsexual/Transgender Sexualities."