Suzanna Danuta Walters
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program
Northeastern University
Northeastern University
Abstract
The
eleven essays in this special issue reconsider and explore the “sex
wars” that emerged in 1982 with The Scholar and the Feminist IX: Towards
a Politics of Sexuality, widely known as the Barnard Conference on
Sexuality, and have engaged and divided feminist scholars and activists
ever since. One of the most gratifying elements of editing this special
issue was to see the ways in which feminist scholars are pushing in
directions that don’t simply (obsessively) reinscribe these splits and
divisions. Rather, the essays in this issue bring into fine relief both
the resonance of the subject and the excitement of seeing how questions
of sexuality, of desire, of violence, of identity are being thought in
altered and innovative ways. Not only are a wide range of disciplinary
and interdisciplinary locations represented here, but the eclectic
archive of sources and methodologies makes for an exceedingly robust
commitment to feminist interdisciplinarity.
When
we first imagined this special issue, we had fantasies both
retrospective and contemporary. How had the so-called sex wars—those
blistering and frustrating and sometimes invigorating debates about
hidden desires, kinky acts, dirty pictures—shaped contemporary
discussions around sexual pleasures and dangers? And how much had the
detritus of these explosive contestations seeped into this quite
different social and political moment? Were these debates still with us
in new form, or are we in a different feminist zeitgeist altogether?
What are the contours of sexual politics in an era that simultaneously
live-streams sexual assault and organizes sex workers? Where hook-up
culture is a subject of intense scrutiny and SlutWalks push back against
a still pervasive sexual double standard?
Surely, for our young students these debates are ancient history, something taught (sometimes) in feminist theory classes alongside other classic hits of second-wave feminism. But the 1982 conference, The Scholar and the Feminist IX: Towards a Politics of Sexuality, widely known as the Barnard Conference on Sexuality, and its afterlife were justly formative for many in my generation and older. If one lived—as I did—in New York City at the time and was an active feminist, the sense of sharply divided party lines was palpable and manifest in ways both physical (which side of the room you sat on during a lecture or debate) and intellectual (what you read, whom you cited). As in many internecine debates, the drawing of battle lines and asserting of oppositional stances left little room for waffling or even benign befuddlement. You were either anti-porn or pro-sex, as if these designations could capture the complex and often contradictory positions of both scholars and activists as they wrestled with each other and with the state, the media, the academy. Too often (then and now) we marked each other as either “with us” or “against us”—and that meant we could not ever think these things together unless we were already on the same side.
We were hoping here to pack up the militaristic language once and for all, to think with the couplet of pleasure and danger but outside the logic of mutually assured destruction. So in imagining this special issue of Signs, we wanted to ponder the status of this pleasure and danger pairing in such new times. The past may not be prologue, but as the late literary critic Raymond Williams reminds us, we quite often see traces of older cultural forms rendered newly askew in the contemporary. Long-standing debates and animosities do, thankfully, get surpassed, and stronger arguments sometimes win out but, just as often, paradigmatic framings recursively reappear.
This seems the case with “pleasure and danger.” One could make an argument that the fault lines between, say, the prostitution abolitionists and the sex worker advocates, or the “yes means yes” anti-sexual-assault activists and their critics, or even trigger warning advocates and opponents show the continuing resonance of the sex wars. There are many reasons for the persistence of the pleasure/danger framework, but frankly the most obvious seem to me the most apt: feminism’s capacity to make real progress depends in large part on how to enable pleasures and disenable dangers. Read this way, then, the sex wars weren’t only a question of sexual pleasure, circulating around a definable set of discrete practices or even identities; they also involved the pleasures of substantive freedom, of equity, of inclusion, of justice. And “danger” signifies the rawest sites of masculinist violence but also the dangers of cultural occlusion, of economic marginalization, of gender norms and normativities. Feminist theory, it seems to me, can’t really do its job if it’s not talking about both. Perhaps the frustration that many feel around feminisms both historical and current is that it is often difficult to do feminist theory and practice in ways that honor and model attentiveness to both aspects of this untidy couplet, just as it is difficult to break up the couplet altogether in thinking in and through pleasures and dangers. In other words, if we have learned anything from the passion of those earlier debates, it is that the feminist future is easier to imagine when we abjure the throwing down of gauntlets and the drawing of lines in the sand. Like sex itself, feminism is messy. And perhaps one lesson of those debates is that we would do well to revel in that messiness rather than to divide ourselves into neat and tidy categories of pro-sex and anti-sex feminists.
My feeling, then, is that it is long past time to move away from war metaphors and, more importantly, from the kind of excessive polarization and “calling out” that seems to characterize too much feminist debate, particularly debate that takes place on the intimate and fraught space of the body, of desire, of pleasure, of violation. We live in a political time already so toxic (I write this in the midst of a presidential election season that has made virulently racist, xenophobic, sexist speech banal and legitimate) and one in which self-righteous anger is made even more instantaneous with the advent of the Twitterati and blogger brigadistas. Debates over the best methods to counter sexual assault, for example, could benefit from assumptions not merely of shared goodwill and intentions but from a nuanced attention to shifting historical exigencies. The young activists demanding changes in universities’ handling of sexual assault are not simply litigious “carceral feminists” parroting the likes of Catharine MacKinnon (indeed, most of them wouldn’t have a clue who she is!) but are often the same folks marching in SlutWalks and pushing for genderqueer freedom and polyamorous perversity. Feminists advocating for the criminalization of pimps and traffickers may have strategies and even underlying ideologies that many (myself included) find problematic, but they may also—simultaneously—have deep and abiding commitments to enabling women and girls to live lives free from violence and coercion. Some of the most instructive interventions in the pleasure/danger pairing have involved weighing, for example, the realities of sexual assault against the potential overreach of legal proceedings. The pairing of “pleasure” with “danger,” then, carries both an instructive and descriptive meaning. Male dominance/patriarchy/whatever you want to call it makes life too dangerous for too many women, inflicts real violence the world over, and is a global (differentiated but still global) phenomenon that we gloss over at our peril. Imagining a different world—a feminist world—can’t happen without enduring attention to the stunning regularity of sexual (and other forms of) violence directed against women’s bodies. But, equally, crafting that future depends on a generous embrace of the varieties of pleasures of the flesh and the recognition that a perfect symmetry between those pleasures and other aspects of self (e.g., political orientation, gender/sexual identity, etc.) is not only impossible but undercuts the emancipatory vision of sexual freedom so crucial to feminism’s future.
Let me be clear: there are real and vital and substantive internal debates within both feminist theory and practice, and I would be the last to attempt to minimize or squelch them. And these debates aren’t only over strategy: they often reflect deeper and different understandings of gender itself and of the ways in which gendered power does—or does not—structure our institutions, our laws, and our everyday sexual lives. The sex debates did in fact shine a new light on desires and practices previously seen—and only dimly—through a narrowed aperture of moralism and censure. But the crux of the sex debates is not only the substance of the issues, although those are certainly significant and have reshaped feminist theory for the better. The real teachable moment (from which, alas, we have not learned as well as we might) has to do with the danger of the battle metaphor itself. The language of war creates enemies rather than interlocutors. Sex (and porn, and sex work, and just about everything) is a feminist issue, but it is not, truly, a battle or war. The only real war is against overweening male dominance. What would feminism look like without the internal battle lines drawn up by the sex wars? Could we think instead of a sort of sex détente, making the diplomatic leap of assuming good will among all the warring factions? Indeed, as Alice Echols (2016) argues in her wonderful retrospective piece on the period, Carole Vance’s original (1984) call was anything but binary and simplistic, instead offering a nuanced and dialectical account of the pleasure/danger couplet.
One of the most gratifying elements of editing this special issue was to see the ways in which feminist scholars are pushing in directions that don’t simply (obsessively) reinscribe these tiresome splits and divisions. For within the academy there is no doubt that the so-called pro-sex position has “won”: original copies of Pleasure and Danger (Vance 1984) and Powers of Desire (Snitow, Stansell, and Thompson 1983) remain coveted books for even the hippest of young scholars and, conversely, groups such as Women Against Pornography and theorists like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon come in for more derision than devotion among both feminist professors and their students. This may all be for the good, an indication that the better argument has triumphed. But the loss here is that in “winning,” warring factions become ossified and more impermeable to the challenges of countervailing arguments.
And are the stakes different now? At the time of the Barnard Conference, they seemed awfully high. The heart and soul of the movement was (apparently) at stake: would censorious antiporn crusaders win the day and attempt to litigate us into a brave new world of an imaginary pure feminist sexuality, or would the archeologists of the polymorphous and perverse uncover the key to the magic kingdom of edgy jouissance? What would the tenor of this still-new movement feel like? Would we be tightly wound or unruly and loose? Prim or perverse? As Echols points out, the sex debates emerged in the context of the less than salubrious advent of the “sixties assault on sexual uptightness” (2016, 13) and of the rise of the moralistic Christian right and an overweening and hegemonic culture war against sexual freedom of any sort—be it abortion rights, gay rights, or even the mere existence of single mothers. Our current social moment, with its own set of political pressures, is certainly trying for sex radicals, yet it is most assuredly not identical to those post-consciousness-raising, pre-gender-queer days.
And yet the issues still resonate. We knew we had touched a nerve when we received 115 submissions. Special issues always garner a lot of attention, but this was a record for the journal! And the submissions came from every discipline and interdiscipline, from junior and senior scholars, from this country and from around the world. Reading the submissions for this special issue brought into fine relief both the resonance of the subject and the excitement of seeing how questions of sexuality, of desire, of violence, of identity are being thought in altered and innovative ways. While many submissions fell into fairly predictable categories (articles on sexual violence, sex work, and pornography led the pack), we also had a surprising number of submissions dealing with the sex wars themselves, both historically and in contemporary iterations, and others that played the couplet in and through artistic and cultural representations. We were particularly pleased to see a number of pieces that explored these issues through film, art, and literature. This seemed particularly apt given the fact that the original sex debates centered so frequently on the question of pornography and sexual representations, although interestingly enough today’s version of these debates seems to have moved to a different terrain (often, although not always, the issue of sexual violence and rape culture) even as they circulate some of the same framing. In this way, these essays exceeded our original expectations to rethink and reframe these debates in ways that build on this signal moment in feminist praxis while simultaneously thinking outside the original battle lines drawn up in those contentious years.
Choosing—with such a bevy of riches—was a difficult process. First and foremost was of course an insistence that articles seriously reckon with at least some of the issues raised in the call for papers and signified broadly by the “pleasure and danger” moniker. But just as important—and this remains a hallmark of the journal and something critical to my own editorial vision—was seeing in each piece a commitment to interdisciplinarity and to attention to pressing feminist theoretical concerns. What was curious, however, given the centrality of lesbians to the sex wars, was the relative paucity of submissions in which queer women took center stage. That’s a discussion for another time, but suffice it to say that this absence does raise interesting questions about the ways in which the subject of today’s most public sex wars (sexual assault and rape culture, sex work and trafficking) often assume an unexamined heterosexuality quite at odds with both reality (lesbians are sexually victimized, lesbians work in the sex industry and are trafficked) and with the bold and brash focus on a multitude of queer women’s desires that marked the earlier iterations.
Nevertheless, the final choices represented here range wide and deep in their engagement with this topic. Some authors directly revisit the Barnard Conference or raise or revisit key questions that emerged from the sex wars, particularly the relationship between “representation” and “reality.” Cultural theorists have batted this one around for some time now, but I’ve always felt that the sex debates were at their weakest on this issue, often degenerating into simplistic models of reflection or direct causality, assuming that cultural representations are a “mirror” of social realities or imagining a sort of one-to-one correspondence between say, a depiction of rape on film and the enactment of actual rapes in the material world. In this view, representations both reflect already existing social realities and inject (patriarchal, violative) ideologies into the blank slate of the viewing public. Alternately, the “pro-sex” version imagines a cordoning off of fantasy and sexual imagery as if representations existed in some ideology-free zone. In a wonderful example of reading against the grain and the kind of quirky work that can emerge if we approach (old) topics from new angles, Leah Allen takes one of the most controversial (and demeaned, and parodied …) feminist figures—the late Andrea Dworkin—and reads her as a literary critic, opening up surprising new angles of vision on Dworkin and her legacy but also reexamining the debates as fundamentally questions of the status of the literary and gendered tropes of culture in relation to this thing we call “real life.” Lorna Bracewell’s article does some similar work of reframing or recasting the sex wars through her richly argued analysis of the relationship between antipornography feminism and liberalism. Moving from key legal and political battles such as the 1970 feminist occupation of Grove Press through to Barnard and beyond, Bracewell takes us on a different sex wars journey that highlights the alliance of antipornogrpahy feminists with liberals such as Cass Sunstein and Elena Kagan—rather than moralistic conservatives. This feminist/liberal alliance, paradoxically, becomes at least one route to carceral feminist frameworks in which harm is coterminous with crime, leading to judicial and governmental interventions and penalties.
The legal arena is without a doubt key here. The sex wars, in our contemporary moment, have often found life in fairly complicated legal debates that go beyond simple questions of banning sexual images or punishing “pornographers,” as Melanie Heath and her coauthors discuss in their examination of some key Canadian cases concerning prostitution and polygamy. In a multilayered analysis that reconfigures antipornography feminism and pro-sex feminism as stances centered around “danger” and “choice,” the authors argue that complicated alliances emerged between feminist organizations, Christian evangelicals, polygamy rights associations, polyamorous groups, and a variety of other social and legal actors—and that these shifting alliances resulted in fundamentally different legal outcomes.
Janet Halley’s commissioned piece—which inaugurates Currents: Feminist Key Concepts and Controversies, a part of our Feminist Public Intellectuals Project—takes on the increasing criminalization of sexuality as manifested in college and university discussions around consent. Here Halley unequivocally comes out against recent activist and legal efforts to fight sexual assault by creating new policies such as “yes means yes” in which consent to sexual activity is understood as actively asserted, not merely assumed or presumed. Halley decries these moves both for the assumptions of predatory male sexuality and (inherently) victimized female sexuality and for the state interventionist and regulatory function they enact in bringing more areas of sexual life under legal purview. An uncompromising broadside in an increasingly heated debate, Halley’s essay provides a critical perspective on the lived ramifications of actually putting affirmative consent into legal play. But I do have some concern that the ghost of the sex debates haunts this piece too deeply. Is “yes means yes” the next iteration in repressive and neo-Victorian imaginings of women’s sexuality? Or could it also be the honest efforts of activists to reconceive sexuality in a context of pervasive violence? And can we know in advance, with such surety, that affirmative consent will actually be a slippery slope, with pernicious effects on both agentic desire and its ambiguous expression?
Another contestation in sex wars discourse returns us to the couplet itself, the tacking between pleasure and danger that has remained so crucial to feminist thinking about a wide range of issues. Pornography, of course, if not the most discussed part of those early debates was certainly the most contentious, straddling as it did reflections on the politics of representation and legal responses. And here is where you see the old debates really shifting ground. No longer does the issue of censorship versus freedom of expression govern the debates; these discussions, on both sides, now recognize that the pornography industry is here to stay. Significantly, these sex wars took place before the development of the Internet and before the widespread use of home computers. With the introduction of the Internet and the ubiquitous nature of pornography—or what some have called the pornification of everyday life—porn as the battlefield has diminished. Its not that these debates about sexual imagery and representation have wholly disappeared. Rather, it is increasingly impossible to imagine a world not saturated with this imagery. Meanwhile, at the same time, legal strategies to curtail it have run aground of both First Amendment advocates and a feminist body politic that sees this as a less pressing problem than, say, sexual violence itself.
For Angela Jones, and for others writing here, while the sex wars opened up feminist theorizing in important ways, the binary framing of empowerment versus exploitation (or pleasure versus danger) puts brakes on the development of more fluid and “both/and” ways of thinking through difficult issues. So Jones analyzes how webcam models who perform sex acts mediated by the physical barriers of the camera, the computer, and the Internet connection negotiate—or emotionally manage—their own pleasures and those of their clients. For both Jones and Kimberly Walters, white American “camgirls” and Indian sex workers reveal that the dividing lines are messy and complex. While neither downplays the dangers and violations of sex work (and Jones points to new dangers in the Internet age), their detailed and nuanced examination of on-the-ground sex work and the (often surprising) sensual and bodily pleasures they (sometimes) forge upend the easy divisions that often accompany examinations of sex work. Walters’ invocation of the sensorial landscape of the sex workers she interviewed—a world marked by fragrant biryanis and pleasurable alcohol—allows a complex picture of sexual subjectivity to emerge without romanticizing the margins. And, importantly, for both authors, economic security is the precondition for the possibility of pleasure and a modicum of sexual agency.
Erinn Cunniff Gilson also takes issue with the binary thinking that poses “vulnerable” (often feminized) victims against agentic actors who are conceived as “together” and therefore somehow impervious to victimization and exploitation. Along with others in this issue, Gilson argues that this divide, perhaps itself a leftover from the either/or thinking that unfortunately characterized too much of the sex debates, needs to be replaced with a more ambiguous (and therefore more nuanced and realistic) understanding of vulnerability, which is after all the shared human condition.
The archival and methodological range of these pieces is enough to warm the heart of this transdisciplinary editor. Not only are a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary locations represented here, but the eclectic archive of sources and methodologies makes for an exceedingly robust commitment to feminist interdisciplinarity. So Jennifer Tyburczy’s fascinating look at young bourgeois heterosexual women in Mexico City draws upon in-depth interviews, participant observation at sex toy parties, and close analysis of a photographic art project that chronicled the life and times of this sector. One of the few pieces to root sexual practices in a political economy of space and place, Tyburczy’s article blends the intimate and convivial with the larger class politics of post-NAFTA Mexico, showing convincingly that the powers of commercialization and heteronormative domesticity can turn what might appear to be sexual liberation into a form of transnational sexual consumerism that ensnares more than it frees.
Other pieces trace the resonances of these debates in social, artistic, and political phenomena. Amber Jamilla Musser’s examination of the reception of Kara Walker’s controversial 2014 installation, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, at the old Brooklyn Domino Sugar factory is as much a commentary on this artist as it is on the erasure of black female sexuality in the aftermath of the sex debates. Cleverly reading the exhibit, commentaries on the experiences of viewers, and Walker’s own capturing of those experiences alongside and against Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, Musser offers a queer reading that—like many other pieces here—pushes against simple renderings of consent and sexual coercion as signified solely by a form of individual liberal subjectivity. Anna Ioanes, focusing on a very different artistic subject, echoes Musser’s concerns with the complications of sexuality in structured conditions of power and inequality. Claiming for both punk feminist and experimental author Kathy Acker and riot grrrl icon Kathleen Hanna an aesthetic that employed shock as a mode of performing sex and violence anew, appropriating pornographic imagery to discomfit readers and club kids alike, Ioanes argues that when consent is upended, it is shown to be a weak framework for examining the pleasures of danger.
One of the things that is most exciting about this issue, then, is to see the ways these authors express such fervent desires to move beyond the war framing and toward a more nuanced and grounded assessment of the negotiations of sexual subjectivity in worlds not conducive to it. If, as Echols so eloquently claims, this “couplet [is] written on each and every one of our bodies” (2016, 19), then it may well be a hieroglyphic of indeterminate meaning, demanding creative skills of feminist interpretation. But the drawing of lines and the taking of sides rarely invigorates discussion. While feminism must always be on the side of pleasure, how we define that is necessarily up for grabs. And danger, too, is often stark in its obviousness but can also be open to a wide range of interpretations and strategies of remediation. The feminist sex debates—for all their fractiousness and tendentiousness—let the sexual genie out of her rose-colored bottle. And then smashed the bottle. The point, then, is to not attempt to get her back in that bottle or build a new one or even to treat this particular genie as a sign of the randy Messiah of the free future, but rather to see where and when she alights on our collective body politic.
Surely, for our young students these debates are ancient history, something taught (sometimes) in feminist theory classes alongside other classic hits of second-wave feminism. But the 1982 conference, The Scholar and the Feminist IX: Towards a Politics of Sexuality, widely known as the Barnard Conference on Sexuality, and its afterlife were justly formative for many in my generation and older. If one lived—as I did—in New York City at the time and was an active feminist, the sense of sharply divided party lines was palpable and manifest in ways both physical (which side of the room you sat on during a lecture or debate) and intellectual (what you read, whom you cited). As in many internecine debates, the drawing of battle lines and asserting of oppositional stances left little room for waffling or even benign befuddlement. You were either anti-porn or pro-sex, as if these designations could capture the complex and often contradictory positions of both scholars and activists as they wrestled with each other and with the state, the media, the academy. Too often (then and now) we marked each other as either “with us” or “against us”—and that meant we could not ever think these things together unless we were already on the same side.
We were hoping here to pack up the militaristic language once and for all, to think with the couplet of pleasure and danger but outside the logic of mutually assured destruction. So in imagining this special issue of Signs, we wanted to ponder the status of this pleasure and danger pairing in such new times. The past may not be prologue, but as the late literary critic Raymond Williams reminds us, we quite often see traces of older cultural forms rendered newly askew in the contemporary. Long-standing debates and animosities do, thankfully, get surpassed, and stronger arguments sometimes win out but, just as often, paradigmatic framings recursively reappear.
This seems the case with “pleasure and danger.” One could make an argument that the fault lines between, say, the prostitution abolitionists and the sex worker advocates, or the “yes means yes” anti-sexual-assault activists and their critics, or even trigger warning advocates and opponents show the continuing resonance of the sex wars. There are many reasons for the persistence of the pleasure/danger framework, but frankly the most obvious seem to me the most apt: feminism’s capacity to make real progress depends in large part on how to enable pleasures and disenable dangers. Read this way, then, the sex wars weren’t only a question of sexual pleasure, circulating around a definable set of discrete practices or even identities; they also involved the pleasures of substantive freedom, of equity, of inclusion, of justice. And “danger” signifies the rawest sites of masculinist violence but also the dangers of cultural occlusion, of economic marginalization, of gender norms and normativities. Feminist theory, it seems to me, can’t really do its job if it’s not talking about both. Perhaps the frustration that many feel around feminisms both historical and current is that it is often difficult to do feminist theory and practice in ways that honor and model attentiveness to both aspects of this untidy couplet, just as it is difficult to break up the couplet altogether in thinking in and through pleasures and dangers. In other words, if we have learned anything from the passion of those earlier debates, it is that the feminist future is easier to imagine when we abjure the throwing down of gauntlets and the drawing of lines in the sand. Like sex itself, feminism is messy. And perhaps one lesson of those debates is that we would do well to revel in that messiness rather than to divide ourselves into neat and tidy categories of pro-sex and anti-sex feminists.
My feeling, then, is that it is long past time to move away from war metaphors and, more importantly, from the kind of excessive polarization and “calling out” that seems to characterize too much feminist debate, particularly debate that takes place on the intimate and fraught space of the body, of desire, of pleasure, of violation. We live in a political time already so toxic (I write this in the midst of a presidential election season that has made virulently racist, xenophobic, sexist speech banal and legitimate) and one in which self-righteous anger is made even more instantaneous with the advent of the Twitterati and blogger brigadistas. Debates over the best methods to counter sexual assault, for example, could benefit from assumptions not merely of shared goodwill and intentions but from a nuanced attention to shifting historical exigencies. The young activists demanding changes in universities’ handling of sexual assault are not simply litigious “carceral feminists” parroting the likes of Catharine MacKinnon (indeed, most of them wouldn’t have a clue who she is!) but are often the same folks marching in SlutWalks and pushing for genderqueer freedom and polyamorous perversity. Feminists advocating for the criminalization of pimps and traffickers may have strategies and even underlying ideologies that many (myself included) find problematic, but they may also—simultaneously—have deep and abiding commitments to enabling women and girls to live lives free from violence and coercion. Some of the most instructive interventions in the pleasure/danger pairing have involved weighing, for example, the realities of sexual assault against the potential overreach of legal proceedings. The pairing of “pleasure” with “danger,” then, carries both an instructive and descriptive meaning. Male dominance/patriarchy/whatever you want to call it makes life too dangerous for too many women, inflicts real violence the world over, and is a global (differentiated but still global) phenomenon that we gloss over at our peril. Imagining a different world—a feminist world—can’t happen without enduring attention to the stunning regularity of sexual (and other forms of) violence directed against women’s bodies. But, equally, crafting that future depends on a generous embrace of the varieties of pleasures of the flesh and the recognition that a perfect symmetry between those pleasures and other aspects of self (e.g., political orientation, gender/sexual identity, etc.) is not only impossible but undercuts the emancipatory vision of sexual freedom so crucial to feminism’s future.
Let me be clear: there are real and vital and substantive internal debates within both feminist theory and practice, and I would be the last to attempt to minimize or squelch them. And these debates aren’t only over strategy: they often reflect deeper and different understandings of gender itself and of the ways in which gendered power does—or does not—structure our institutions, our laws, and our everyday sexual lives. The sex debates did in fact shine a new light on desires and practices previously seen—and only dimly—through a narrowed aperture of moralism and censure. But the crux of the sex debates is not only the substance of the issues, although those are certainly significant and have reshaped feminist theory for the better. The real teachable moment (from which, alas, we have not learned as well as we might) has to do with the danger of the battle metaphor itself. The language of war creates enemies rather than interlocutors. Sex (and porn, and sex work, and just about everything) is a feminist issue, but it is not, truly, a battle or war. The only real war is against overweening male dominance. What would feminism look like without the internal battle lines drawn up by the sex wars? Could we think instead of a sort of sex détente, making the diplomatic leap of assuming good will among all the warring factions? Indeed, as Alice Echols (2016) argues in her wonderful retrospective piece on the period, Carole Vance’s original (1984) call was anything but binary and simplistic, instead offering a nuanced and dialectical account of the pleasure/danger couplet.
One of the most gratifying elements of editing this special issue was to see the ways in which feminist scholars are pushing in directions that don’t simply (obsessively) reinscribe these tiresome splits and divisions. For within the academy there is no doubt that the so-called pro-sex position has “won”: original copies of Pleasure and Danger (Vance 1984) and Powers of Desire (Snitow, Stansell, and Thompson 1983) remain coveted books for even the hippest of young scholars and, conversely, groups such as Women Against Pornography and theorists like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon come in for more derision than devotion among both feminist professors and their students. This may all be for the good, an indication that the better argument has triumphed. But the loss here is that in “winning,” warring factions become ossified and more impermeable to the challenges of countervailing arguments.
And are the stakes different now? At the time of the Barnard Conference, they seemed awfully high. The heart and soul of the movement was (apparently) at stake: would censorious antiporn crusaders win the day and attempt to litigate us into a brave new world of an imaginary pure feminist sexuality, or would the archeologists of the polymorphous and perverse uncover the key to the magic kingdom of edgy jouissance? What would the tenor of this still-new movement feel like? Would we be tightly wound or unruly and loose? Prim or perverse? As Echols points out, the sex debates emerged in the context of the less than salubrious advent of the “sixties assault on sexual uptightness” (2016, 13) and of the rise of the moralistic Christian right and an overweening and hegemonic culture war against sexual freedom of any sort—be it abortion rights, gay rights, or even the mere existence of single mothers. Our current social moment, with its own set of political pressures, is certainly trying for sex radicals, yet it is most assuredly not identical to those post-consciousness-raising, pre-gender-queer days.
And yet the issues still resonate. We knew we had touched a nerve when we received 115 submissions. Special issues always garner a lot of attention, but this was a record for the journal! And the submissions came from every discipline and interdiscipline, from junior and senior scholars, from this country and from around the world. Reading the submissions for this special issue brought into fine relief both the resonance of the subject and the excitement of seeing how questions of sexuality, of desire, of violence, of identity are being thought in altered and innovative ways. While many submissions fell into fairly predictable categories (articles on sexual violence, sex work, and pornography led the pack), we also had a surprising number of submissions dealing with the sex wars themselves, both historically and in contemporary iterations, and others that played the couplet in and through artistic and cultural representations. We were particularly pleased to see a number of pieces that explored these issues through film, art, and literature. This seemed particularly apt given the fact that the original sex debates centered so frequently on the question of pornography and sexual representations, although interestingly enough today’s version of these debates seems to have moved to a different terrain (often, although not always, the issue of sexual violence and rape culture) even as they circulate some of the same framing. In this way, these essays exceeded our original expectations to rethink and reframe these debates in ways that build on this signal moment in feminist praxis while simultaneously thinking outside the original battle lines drawn up in those contentious years.
Choosing—with such a bevy of riches—was a difficult process. First and foremost was of course an insistence that articles seriously reckon with at least some of the issues raised in the call for papers and signified broadly by the “pleasure and danger” moniker. But just as important—and this remains a hallmark of the journal and something critical to my own editorial vision—was seeing in each piece a commitment to interdisciplinarity and to attention to pressing feminist theoretical concerns. What was curious, however, given the centrality of lesbians to the sex wars, was the relative paucity of submissions in which queer women took center stage. That’s a discussion for another time, but suffice it to say that this absence does raise interesting questions about the ways in which the subject of today’s most public sex wars (sexual assault and rape culture, sex work and trafficking) often assume an unexamined heterosexuality quite at odds with both reality (lesbians are sexually victimized, lesbians work in the sex industry and are trafficked) and with the bold and brash focus on a multitude of queer women’s desires that marked the earlier iterations.
Nevertheless, the final choices represented here range wide and deep in their engagement with this topic. Some authors directly revisit the Barnard Conference or raise or revisit key questions that emerged from the sex wars, particularly the relationship between “representation” and “reality.” Cultural theorists have batted this one around for some time now, but I’ve always felt that the sex debates were at their weakest on this issue, often degenerating into simplistic models of reflection or direct causality, assuming that cultural representations are a “mirror” of social realities or imagining a sort of one-to-one correspondence between say, a depiction of rape on film and the enactment of actual rapes in the material world. In this view, representations both reflect already existing social realities and inject (patriarchal, violative) ideologies into the blank slate of the viewing public. Alternately, the “pro-sex” version imagines a cordoning off of fantasy and sexual imagery as if representations existed in some ideology-free zone. In a wonderful example of reading against the grain and the kind of quirky work that can emerge if we approach (old) topics from new angles, Leah Allen takes one of the most controversial (and demeaned, and parodied …) feminist figures—the late Andrea Dworkin—and reads her as a literary critic, opening up surprising new angles of vision on Dworkin and her legacy but also reexamining the debates as fundamentally questions of the status of the literary and gendered tropes of culture in relation to this thing we call “real life.” Lorna Bracewell’s article does some similar work of reframing or recasting the sex wars through her richly argued analysis of the relationship between antipornography feminism and liberalism. Moving from key legal and political battles such as the 1970 feminist occupation of Grove Press through to Barnard and beyond, Bracewell takes us on a different sex wars journey that highlights the alliance of antipornogrpahy feminists with liberals such as Cass Sunstein and Elena Kagan—rather than moralistic conservatives. This feminist/liberal alliance, paradoxically, becomes at least one route to carceral feminist frameworks in which harm is coterminous with crime, leading to judicial and governmental interventions and penalties.
The legal arena is without a doubt key here. The sex wars, in our contemporary moment, have often found life in fairly complicated legal debates that go beyond simple questions of banning sexual images or punishing “pornographers,” as Melanie Heath and her coauthors discuss in their examination of some key Canadian cases concerning prostitution and polygamy. In a multilayered analysis that reconfigures antipornography feminism and pro-sex feminism as stances centered around “danger” and “choice,” the authors argue that complicated alliances emerged between feminist organizations, Christian evangelicals, polygamy rights associations, polyamorous groups, and a variety of other social and legal actors—and that these shifting alliances resulted in fundamentally different legal outcomes.
Janet Halley’s commissioned piece—which inaugurates Currents: Feminist Key Concepts and Controversies, a part of our Feminist Public Intellectuals Project—takes on the increasing criminalization of sexuality as manifested in college and university discussions around consent. Here Halley unequivocally comes out against recent activist and legal efforts to fight sexual assault by creating new policies such as “yes means yes” in which consent to sexual activity is understood as actively asserted, not merely assumed or presumed. Halley decries these moves both for the assumptions of predatory male sexuality and (inherently) victimized female sexuality and for the state interventionist and regulatory function they enact in bringing more areas of sexual life under legal purview. An uncompromising broadside in an increasingly heated debate, Halley’s essay provides a critical perspective on the lived ramifications of actually putting affirmative consent into legal play. But I do have some concern that the ghost of the sex debates haunts this piece too deeply. Is “yes means yes” the next iteration in repressive and neo-Victorian imaginings of women’s sexuality? Or could it also be the honest efforts of activists to reconceive sexuality in a context of pervasive violence? And can we know in advance, with such surety, that affirmative consent will actually be a slippery slope, with pernicious effects on both agentic desire and its ambiguous expression?
Another contestation in sex wars discourse returns us to the couplet itself, the tacking between pleasure and danger that has remained so crucial to feminist thinking about a wide range of issues. Pornography, of course, if not the most discussed part of those early debates was certainly the most contentious, straddling as it did reflections on the politics of representation and legal responses. And here is where you see the old debates really shifting ground. No longer does the issue of censorship versus freedom of expression govern the debates; these discussions, on both sides, now recognize that the pornography industry is here to stay. Significantly, these sex wars took place before the development of the Internet and before the widespread use of home computers. With the introduction of the Internet and the ubiquitous nature of pornography—or what some have called the pornification of everyday life—porn as the battlefield has diminished. Its not that these debates about sexual imagery and representation have wholly disappeared. Rather, it is increasingly impossible to imagine a world not saturated with this imagery. Meanwhile, at the same time, legal strategies to curtail it have run aground of both First Amendment advocates and a feminist body politic that sees this as a less pressing problem than, say, sexual violence itself.
For Angela Jones, and for others writing here, while the sex wars opened up feminist theorizing in important ways, the binary framing of empowerment versus exploitation (or pleasure versus danger) puts brakes on the development of more fluid and “both/and” ways of thinking through difficult issues. So Jones analyzes how webcam models who perform sex acts mediated by the physical barriers of the camera, the computer, and the Internet connection negotiate—or emotionally manage—their own pleasures and those of their clients. For both Jones and Kimberly Walters, white American “camgirls” and Indian sex workers reveal that the dividing lines are messy and complex. While neither downplays the dangers and violations of sex work (and Jones points to new dangers in the Internet age), their detailed and nuanced examination of on-the-ground sex work and the (often surprising) sensual and bodily pleasures they (sometimes) forge upend the easy divisions that often accompany examinations of sex work. Walters’ invocation of the sensorial landscape of the sex workers she interviewed—a world marked by fragrant biryanis and pleasurable alcohol—allows a complex picture of sexual subjectivity to emerge without romanticizing the margins. And, importantly, for both authors, economic security is the precondition for the possibility of pleasure and a modicum of sexual agency.
Erinn Cunniff Gilson also takes issue with the binary thinking that poses “vulnerable” (often feminized) victims against agentic actors who are conceived as “together” and therefore somehow impervious to victimization and exploitation. Along with others in this issue, Gilson argues that this divide, perhaps itself a leftover from the either/or thinking that unfortunately characterized too much of the sex debates, needs to be replaced with a more ambiguous (and therefore more nuanced and realistic) understanding of vulnerability, which is after all the shared human condition.
The archival and methodological range of these pieces is enough to warm the heart of this transdisciplinary editor. Not only are a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary locations represented here, but the eclectic archive of sources and methodologies makes for an exceedingly robust commitment to feminist interdisciplinarity. So Jennifer Tyburczy’s fascinating look at young bourgeois heterosexual women in Mexico City draws upon in-depth interviews, participant observation at sex toy parties, and close analysis of a photographic art project that chronicled the life and times of this sector. One of the few pieces to root sexual practices in a political economy of space and place, Tyburczy’s article blends the intimate and convivial with the larger class politics of post-NAFTA Mexico, showing convincingly that the powers of commercialization and heteronormative domesticity can turn what might appear to be sexual liberation into a form of transnational sexual consumerism that ensnares more than it frees.
Other pieces trace the resonances of these debates in social, artistic, and political phenomena. Amber Jamilla Musser’s examination of the reception of Kara Walker’s controversial 2014 installation, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, at the old Brooklyn Domino Sugar factory is as much a commentary on this artist as it is on the erasure of black female sexuality in the aftermath of the sex debates. Cleverly reading the exhibit, commentaries on the experiences of viewers, and Walker’s own capturing of those experiences alongside and against Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, Musser offers a queer reading that—like many other pieces here—pushes against simple renderings of consent and sexual coercion as signified solely by a form of individual liberal subjectivity. Anna Ioanes, focusing on a very different artistic subject, echoes Musser’s concerns with the complications of sexuality in structured conditions of power and inequality. Claiming for both punk feminist and experimental author Kathy Acker and riot grrrl icon Kathleen Hanna an aesthetic that employed shock as a mode of performing sex and violence anew, appropriating pornographic imagery to discomfit readers and club kids alike, Ioanes argues that when consent is upended, it is shown to be a weak framework for examining the pleasures of danger.
One of the things that is most exciting about this issue, then, is to see the ways these authors express such fervent desires to move beyond the war framing and toward a more nuanced and grounded assessment of the negotiations of sexual subjectivity in worlds not conducive to it. If, as Echols so eloquently claims, this “couplet [is] written on each and every one of our bodies” (2016, 19), then it may well be a hieroglyphic of indeterminate meaning, demanding creative skills of feminist interpretation. But the drawing of lines and the taking of sides rarely invigorates discussion. While feminism must always be on the side of pleasure, how we define that is necessarily up for grabs. And danger, too, is often stark in its obviousness but can also be open to a wide range of interpretations and strategies of remediation. The feminist sex debates—for all their fractiousness and tendentiousness—let the sexual genie out of her rose-colored bottle. And then smashed the bottle. The point, then, is to not attempt to get her back in that bottle or build a new one or even to treat this particular genie as a sign of the randy Messiah of the free future, but rather to see where and when she alights on our collective body politic.
References
Echols, Alice. 2016. “Retrospective: Tangled Up in Pleasure and Danger.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42(1):11–22. Abstract
Snitow, Ann, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds. 1983. Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Vance, Carole, ed. 1984. Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Notes
I’d like to thank all the authors who submitted articles for this special issue and the wonderful staff of Signs, who helped me manage the onslaught with grace and wisdom. I’d particularly like to thank Signs graduate research assistant Lauren Kuryloski for her help in preparing this introduction.
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