SAGE Handbook of Feminist Theory by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SAGE
Published: 2015-09-19T15:04:53.708000+00:00

Sex Panics and the Cultural Turn

The early 1980s were a pivotal period for feminism. The New Left was becoming incorporated into the professions and the historical forces that summoned it to attend primarily to culture were drawing more and more feminists away from the systemic analyzes of Marxist and socialist feminism. Liberal feminism proved incapable of challenging the class divide between women. One symptomatic example in the US registered in the fact that both inside and outside the academy socialist feminist responses to the recruitment of middle-class women into the workforce were calling for socialized collective responsibility for childcare, but they were not the dominant voices in debates over sexuality (Sangster and Luxton, 2013).

Increasingly sexuality was being understood and debated in individualized terms as a practice and as pleasure discrete from labor and care, and gay activists were increasingly affirming homosexuality as a single issue discrete from race, gender or class. The sex panics of the 1980s largely consolidated this shift. They ranged over many topics, among them the regulation of pornography, legal protections for gay people, the scope of reproductive freedom for women and the content of safe-sex education. The ‘sex wars’ waged in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom drew battle lines between positions that emphasized sexual danger and those that argued for valorizing sexual pleasure. The first camp continued to embrace radical feminism’s emphasis on women’s oppression and sexual violence; unfortunately it joined feminist interests with the gathering forces of a radical Right waging anti-pornography campaigns. In the second camp were pro-sex supporters. While the debates suggest the degree to which sexuality was serving as a linchpin in the turn to cultural politics, they also generated important theoretical work, some of which advanced socialist feminist approaches.14

The 1982 Scholar and Feminist IX Conference ‘Towards a Politics of Sexuality’ held at Barnard College in New York City has been seen as a defining moment in pro-sex history. Its aim was ‘to expand the analysis of pleasure’ and ‘create a movement that speaks as powerfully in favor of sexual pleasure as it does against sexual danger’ (Vance, 1984: 3). The collection of papers from the conference includes authors such as Dorothy Allison, Amber Hollibaugh, Cherríe Moraga and Hortense Spillers. Rubin’s essay ‘Thinking Sex’, which appears here, challenges the assumption that feminism is or should be the privileged site of a theory of sexuality (Vance, 1984: 307). The introduction by the editor, Carole Vance, takes a more measured stance, acknowledging the continued importance to feminists of attention to the sexual dangers women confront and of theorizing women’s pleasure. The absence of any socialist or Marxist feminist analysis in the volume would seem to imply that these analytical perspectives have fallen through the cracks between danger and pleasure.

However, the collection Powers of Desire (1984), edited by Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson and published by Monthly Review the year after the Barnard Conference, demonstrates that socialist feminist analysis of sexuality was very much alive. The editors’ introduction provides a

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