Gender, Sexuality, Political Economy

Roger Lancaster and Micaela di Leonardo have co-edited The Gender/Sexuality Reader (Routledge, forthcoming). di Leonardo teaches anthropology and Women's Studies at Northwestern University. She most recently edited Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era California). Lancaster teaches anthropology and cultural studies at George mason University. His Life Is Hard: Machismo, Danger and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua (California) received two prizes.

THE THREADS OF GENDER AND SEXUALITY run through all contemporary political debates, whether national or international. In the U.S. in particular, living as we do in the midst of a dominant identity politics that stresses immutable gender, sexual preference, and race/ethnic/national identities while eliding class, it is difficult to maintain a long historical vision of the shifting intersections of sex and politics. Many observers have held the identity-based "new social movements" responsible for the decline of organized left politics. This perspective, coupled with media commodifications and other misappropriations of our common history, has made it difficult to see both how integral clear understanding of gender and sexuality are to socialist thought and action -- and how contentious feminist and gay scholarship and politics have been and are. (The importance and contentiousness of race analyses are far more recognized.) In what follows, we contextualize changing scholarly understandings of -- and divisions over -- gender and sexuality since the 1960s within the particularly American political-economic shifts that made those changes possible. We focus here primarily on the rise of the second wave of feminism and of gay liberation. In other, longer work, we include as well the central role of anticolonial and race liberation movements in reshaping our visions of sex.

The Second Wave

THE RENAISSANCE OF FEMINIST THOUGHT AND ACTIVISM, now more than a quarter-century in the making, was spurred by a concatenation of historical political-economic shifts. In the U.S., postwar economic expansion led to greatly increased demands for labor, and thus to women's rising labor force participation rate. The very possibility of supporting themselves without reliance on father or husband allowed many women to challenge male societal dominance, while the low pay, low status, and minimal prospects for advancement that characterized most "women's jobs" in that era stimulated feminist reaction. At the same time, the ongoing war in Vietnam gave rise to a nationwide protest movement, a movement deeply affected by and working in concert with civil rights/black power. The demographic bulge of a 1960s college-age cohort laid a further material basis for youth-based rebellion. Feminists drew both personnel and practices from these other contemporary movements, and the relatively youthful profile of feminist activists enhanced their emphasis on issues of sexuality, body, and reproduction.

Early second wave theorists and activists, following Simone de Beauvoir's postwar "made, not born" promulgation, coined the sex/gender distinction that has since become widespread. Assigning to "sex" the biological realities of differing male/female physiologies, and to "gender," a term theretofore largely used in formal grammar, the layering of enculturated notions of proper sex roles, feminists were thus able to query arguments for the "natural" status of female subjection to male control, confinement in the home, responsibility for housework and childcare, sexual passivity, and automatic heterosexuality.

"The personal is political" is of second-wave coinage, but its very specific meaning has become attenuated and vitiated in recent years. The 19th and early 20th-century woman movement -- as it was then labeled -- largely had not challenged prevalent household divisions of labor and dominant notions of aggressive, sexual males and passive, maternal, nonsexual females, and the scholarly establishment that asserted and rationalized such practices and ideologies. They reserved their fight for the scaling of public sphere walls -- for the vote, for entrance into higher education and the professions, for a voice in the reform of government. Second-wave feminists expanded the definition of the political to "sexual politics": to include the struggle on the domestic front for women's control over their own reproduction, for parity in household labor, for equal involvement of male and female parents in childcare, and for admission of women's equal sexual needs and rights. In this vein, they illuminated the entirely social -- and male-dominant -- ideologies of women's sexual passivity, of "female frigidity," "female neurosis," a variety of mother-blaming psychological constructs, and notions of universally "correct" feminine body types, bodily self-presentation, and body grooming and adornment. They challenged the male bias of the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s; rediscovered Kinsey's work on female sexuality; unearthed early-20th-century feminist work on female sexual response; and engaged in their own survey research on female and male sexuality and sexual relationships. As well, activists revealed the serious consequences of male bias in medical practice and campaigned for reforms, including more and better research on breast cancer, contraceptive methods, the physiology of menopause, and the elimination of unnecessary hysterectomies, cesarean sections, and radical mastectomies.

THE DOMINANT ANALYTIC MODE OF THIS PERIOD, however, both as subject and as rhetoric, was the focus on women's labor. Feminists stripped away the veils of "feminine role" from women's underemunerated and undervalued work, whether unpaid in households or in the paid labor force, whether in Great Neck, Gujarat, Guam, or Soviet Georgia. They expanded the notion of labor, following Marx and Engels, to include the work of reproducing human beings, encompassing both their gestation and their nurturance to adulthood. The labor emphasis allowed feminists to envision women's lives outside the "affective role" assigned to them by Parsonian sociology. (This model defined men's roles as "instrumental," reproducing the dichotomous immanent/transcendent model de Beauvoir had analyzed and protested.) In the process of analyzing women's work activities across time and around the world, feminists newly saw households as sites of labor and consumption practices inflected unequally through gender; perceived the model of sexual services exchanged for financial support implicit in "traditional" heterosexual marriage; and investigated pornography, prostitution, sex tourism, and other forms of sex work as large-scale industries in which women, some younger men, and children provided the exploited labor for high-profiting male (and a very few female) entrepreneurs.

As productive (to pun) as the "laborizing" of feminist theory was in this period, it revealed inherent limits, and these limits showed themselves very clearly in considerations of sexuality and reproduction. The work analogy, derived from orthodox or vulgar Marxism, was fundamentally reductionist -- it reduced all practice, agency, or activity down to "work," narrowly conceived; it defined sexuality and reproduction narrowly as "really" and "only" about economic exchange and exploitation. Just as more ordinarily envisioned labor -- in a factory or office -- can reflect at the same time exploitation, cooperation, and fundamental human satisfaction wrested from constraining circumstances, so can, and often are, women's and men's sexual, household and reproductive experiences. The practices of consciousness-raising groups, powerfully liberating as they were, enhanced the implicit and sometimes explicit model that women's sometimes positive evaluations of men and their "traditional" roles invariably revealed a simple "false consciousness." Thus Shulamith Firestone's aphorism, "Love is the victim's response to the rapist."

The labor mode proved a theoretical weakness in another, more indirect and non-Marxist thread of analysis. A cluster of feminist theorists focused on the notion that because of their reproductive bodies, women necessarily universally care for children and are excluded from the public sphere, leading their lower status lives in the domestic domain. Sherry Ortner elaborated on this frame from a Levi-Straussian structuralist perspective, and alleged that women universally are associated with nature (through childbirth and cooking), men with culture (through the public sphere and politics); and thus, as humans universally identify their project as the transcendence of nature through culture, women are associated with primitiveness, non-humanness, and therefore have lower status than men. Nancy Chodorow's feminist Freudian analysis complemented Ortner's. Chodorow alleged that psychoanalytically speaking, women's universal sole childminder role causes children to devalue women; in order to alter the human psyche and thus women's status, men must engage in childcare. Michelle Rosaldo's feminist Weberian frame contended in the same vein that universally, the less rigid the division between public and domestic sphere and the greater women's presence in public, the higher women's status would be.

All of these schema were based on the notion of a transhistorical and cross-cultural unchanging "women's work" of childbirth, childcare, cooking, and housework, work done in a more or less separate women's domestic sphere. But in fact, the very notion of "woman's sphere" is itself a Western historical construct, an artifact that became hegemonic in the Victorian era. Moreover, women by no means perform the same labors across time and space; even the work of caring for children is not solely women's, and involves very different activities in differing times and places. "Public" and "domestic" are not in any way universal human social divisions. Finally, as Carol MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern's edited 1980 volume, Nature, Culture, Gender, lays out in painstaking detail, human constructions of nature, culture, and gender not only do not universally identify women with nature, men with culture -- many cultures simply do not construe the universe through a "nature/culture" dichotomy at all. "Nature" itself, as we understand it in the contemporary West, is a product of the anticlerical and antimonarchy struggles of the Enlightenment, a category of challenge that also encompassed struggles over the social meanings of gender difference. Thus not only is the "labor" frame incomplete and reductionist as the sole basis for feminist analyses of gender, sexuality, and the body; universalizing schema partially based on the notion of "women's bodies in labor" are empirically flawed. Certainly, women's public political participation and male involvement in the care of children cannot be bad things in any society. But the Western feminist idée fixe of the trapped housewife/mother as universal Woman ill served as a basis for understanding the lives of most of the world's women, present and past.

WHILE FEMINIST SOCIAL SCIENTISTS WERE WORKING THEIR WAYS OUT of early universalizing schema, historians, ironically, were vigorously moving forward through the incorporation of anthropological or ethnographic understandings of the contingency and specificity of social forms. E. P. Thompson's pioneering early-1960s The Making of the English Working Class laid the basis for the growth of cultural history, or the serious consideration of changing mentalités and cultural productions as inherently part of larger economic and political history. This frame allowed the blossoming of histories of gender and sexuality. Work in feminism was stimulated particularly by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's piece, "The Female World of Love and Ritual," published in the premier issue of Signs in 1975. Smith-Rosenberg, in reviewing an archive of 19th-century letters among middle-class and better-off white American female friends and kinswomen, asserted both a 19th-century separate women's sphere and evidence of passionately romantic attachments between women, attachments lasting entire lifetimes and unaffected by heterosexual marriage. Historians' deep immersion in "anthropologizing" the past, in the notion that "the past is another country," allowed the writing of the histories of varieties of gender and sexual arrangements in Western and other histories. It allowed, in particular, the critical explication of changing hegemonic constructions of gendered bodies with the rise of Western science. Anthropologists, building on theoretical frames from symbolic/interpretive anthropology and a variety of Marxist traditions, began, especially with the rise of gay studies, to provide detailed ethnographies and analyses of Western and non-Western gender-sexual-body constructions.

The Problematics of Cultural Feminism

SMITH-ROSENBERG'S LANDMARK PIECE, HOWEVER, NOT ONLY HERALDED a new scholarly sensitivity to widespread homosocial attachments, but also indexed the devolution of American radical feminism into contemporary cultural feminism, a shift that was both influenced by and paralleled the rightward tilt of American, and Western politics generally, since the mid-1970s. Alice Echols, in her documentary history, Daring To Be Bad, has described this historical shift from "a political movement dedicated to eliminating the sex-class system" to "a countercultural movement aimed at reversing the cultural valuation of the male and devaluation of the female." "Valuing women," certainly a component of any feminist program, was transformed in the changing political climate into a celebration of characteristics assumed to be inherent to women's universal nature -- nurturance, altruism, cooperativeness, pacifism, and benevolent or absent sexuality. This insistent portraiture coincided with the related gendered portrait of all men as inherently competitive, violent, and oppressive to women, and thus with a shift away from consideration of variations across time and space in women's and men's status and lives -- away from analysis of the roles of varying, historical contingent institutions and politics in determining relative power and the characteristics of human gender relations. Feminist political activism in this era, particularly in its anti-militarist and environmental wings, increasingly operated with this Manichean symbolism (e.g., "Take the toys away from the boys," "Love your mother"). And much feminist scholarship reflected and further spurred this shift. Psychologist Carol Gilligan, in her best-selling In a Different Voice, asserted that women "not only define themselves in a context of human relationships but also judge themselves in terms of their ability to care." This feminist essentialist stance neatly recuperates the Victorian vision of woman as the "angel on the hearth," the morally superior domestic being whose influence cleanses the father/husband/son returning from the vicious, competitive marketplace. And this vision parallels the Victorian construct in its presumption either of women's inherent passionlessness or of sexual needs that (unlike men's) somehow never involve harm or inconvenience to others. Certainly, in some historical moments, in some places, women have appeared thus to themselves and others; but in many others they have not. Theft, the use of one's sexuality for material gain or to damage others, the abandonment of children, torture, murder, sexual abuse -- all of these activities have been engaged in by at least some women in most past and present societies, and these actions are not necessarily explained away by prevalent male domination. Also, the "nurturant" and "unselfish" activities of caring for home and children often involve a great deal of self-seeking. Children, after all, until very recently in the industrialized West, labored for their parents and as adults owed them -- often especially their mothers -- loyalty, labor, and cash. Cultural feminism thus denies the "sameness" pole of the enduring sameness/difference antinomy in the history of Western feminism, and fuses the construction of women's difference to a morality play in which women act only as heroines and victims. It fails to challenge the gender-functionalist leitmotif in Western political thought; it fits uncommonly well, in fact, with contemporary antifeminist politics, which valorizes women in their "traditional" roles. We shall see, as well, that in asserting a universalist category "woman," cultural feminism simultaneously invites disproof on the grounds of women's diversity, and shapes that disproof to the problematic structures of contemporary identity politics. Most important for our project here, however, is the role of cultural feminism in the "feminist sex wars" of the 1980s.

AS WE HAVE SEEN, BOTH ASSERTING WOMEN'S RIGHT TO SEXUAL PLEASURE and protesting the prevalence of sexual violence against women were high on the agenda of the early feminist second wave. Between 1970 and 1975, for example, best-selling American books included Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970), which detailed contemporary male writers' misogynist, often sexually violent, portraiture; Shulamith Firestone's apocalyptic The Dialectic of Sex (1970), which excoriated the myth of romantic love and suggested a science fiction future of test tube pregnancies; Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch (1970), a gorgeous romp through literary history in the service of upholding a vision of women's randy capacity for pleasure and damning male sexual misogyny; Erica Jong's picaresque, wildly successful, and rather badly written roman á clef Fear of Flying (1973), which contributed the phrase "zipless fuck" to American culture; and finally, Susan Brownmiller's Second Sex-like passionate summary tome on rape, Against Our Will (1975). Activists demanded sexual freedom, lesbian rights, reproductive control, abortion on demand, and freedom from sexual fear. They (we) inaugurated Take Back the Night Marches, campaigned against violent pornographic representations of women in mass media, founded and worked in rape crisis centers and battered women's shelters, lobbied for legislative changes, discussed female sexual desires (including desires for other women), and challenged men -- individually and collectively -- to reform their sexual behavior. By the waning of the decade, though, with the rigidification of cultural feminism, the sexual freedom/freedom from sexual fear unity of second wave feminism began to unravel.

At one end of the new divide, writers like Susan Brownmiller, Catherine MacKinnon, and Andrea Dworkin focused overwhelmingly on violence against women, and in particular on pornography as the key or only feminist issue. MacKinnon, a legal scholar, and other anti-pornography feminists cooperated with the Christian Right in efforts to write and/or influence legislation to outlaw print and video sexual representations in the U.S. and Canada. These feminists, in their obsessions with pornography and red-light districts, have tended ironically to neglect the issues of real-world rape, battery, and sexual abuse, and the concerns of women and men who serve and advocate for victims of these crimes. Nevertheless, their hyperbolic pronouncements have gained them access to mass media, where they often represent "the feminist perspective." Catherine MacKinnon in particular has come to stand for the feminist perspective on sexuality in the contemporary U.S. -- in fact, she lays claim to it in Feminism Unmodified, in which she states, "In my view -- you will notice that I equate in my view' with feminism'." Let us then -- with the aid of Mariana Valverde's 1989 analysis in Feminist Studies -- consider MacKinnon's view of human sexuality.

MacKinnon envisions sexuality alone as the fulcrum of women's oppression, and unequal sexual experience as a transhistorical and cross-cultural constant: "I would argue that sexuality is the set of practices that inscribes gender as unequal in social life." She declares roundly that "what defines woman as such is what turns men on," thus denying, as Valverde notes, "the social and economic roots of women's oppression" -- not to mention erasing all female sexual agency from human history. Inevitably, this essentialist, anti-historical stance leads to a denial as well of any variation in sexual experience across history and by race, class, or nationality -- and, indeed, to a denial of the equal (or even, any) importance of those categories to an analysis of the human condition. In an essay that addresses her critics, MacKinnon evades charges of ignoring class and race, but holds the historians' objection up to ridicule, and ignores, for example, the complicated new scholarship on the political uses of pornography in modernizing Europe:

For such suggestions, feminists have been called antihistorical. Oh, dear. We have disrespected the profundity and fascination of all the different ways in which men fuck us in order to emphasize that however they do it, they do it. And they do it to us. If that hasn't changed all that much, enough to fit their definition of what a history has to look like, I submit to you that that is not our fault.

Unlike many other cultural feminists, who focus on women's heroic resistance, MacKinnon's theoretical frame disallows it, thus denying women, Valverde points out, "any position, however precarious, from which to reclaim or invent nonpatriarchal sexual desires." MacKinnon includes lesbianism in her broad-brush indictment of heterosexual sex, as "so long as gender is a system of power, and it is women who have less power, like any other benefit of abstract equality, it can merely extend this choice to women who can get the power to enforce it." Valverde concludes that

[t]he eventual result is a construction of sexuality as uniformly oppressive, a picture of relentless male violence drawn with the twin brushes of feminist functionalism (all phenomena are explained as serving a purpose for "patriarchy" in general) and philosophical pessimism. Resistance, subversion, and pleasure are written out of the account.

While the anti-pornography group has been relatively uninterested in women's lives as mothers, a great deal of cultural feminist energy in both popular culture and scholarship has gone into the fetishization of motherhood. The presumptions that the acts of giving birth and rearing children are always experienced identically, that males never care for children, and that continuous, attentive, altruistic "maternal thinking," as philosopher Sara Ruddick has labeled it, best describes female consciousness across space and time are widespread in Western popular culture since the Victorian era. Cultural feminists simply tapped into this broad ideological "Madonna and Child" vein, attempting to "spin" it toward a greater valorization of women's lives. Perhaps the best critique of this sentimentalizing and ethnocentric perspective is political essayist Katha Pollitt's piece, "Marooned on Gilligan's Island," which takes on Sara Ruddick, Carol Gilligan, and linguist (You Just Don't Understand) Deborah Tannen:

But the biggest problem with all these accounts of gender is that they credit the differences they find to universal features of male and female development rather than to the economic and social positions men and women hold, or to the actual power differences between individual men and women.

Pollitt points out that the cultural feminist Weltanschauung ill-describes the realities of motherhood even in the contemporary U.S.:

...Ruddick claims to be describing what mothers do, but all too often she is really prescribing what she thinks they ought to do...But mothers feature prominently in local struggles against busing, mergers of rich and poor schools and the opening in their neighborhoods of group homes for foster children, boarder babies and the retarded....The true reasons may be property values and racism, but what these mothers often say is that they are simply protecting their kids.

Cultural feminist pieties give us no tools to comprehend the actions and understandings of mothers living in extreme poverty; nor do they help us engage with the gendered realities of reproduction, global demographic trends, and neo-Malthusian population theories. Cultural feminism capitulates to bad, misogynist science in its insistence on women's utterly different nature. It cannot comprehend the necessity of a carefully historical, sociology of knowledge approach to gender and science. Nor can it at all comprehend the varying realities of sexual violence against women -- and men -- around the globe today. It gives us no purchase whatsoever on the varying and changing ways in which race is inscribed in gendered sexuality. Finally, it is well to remember that many women of all races and nationalities, gay and straight, do pursue and find sexual pleasure. As Cindy Lauper reminded us, Girls just wanna have fun.

AT THE OTHER END OF THE GROWING IDEOLOGICAL ABYSS -- although far less often represented in popular culture -- are most feminist and gay scholars of sexuality and reproduction, as well as free speech advocates. The two American "feminist sex bibles" of the 1980s -- the anthologies Powers of Desire and Pleasure and Danger (1983, 1984) -- brought together many of these researchers across many disciplines. While individuals may have disagreed on a number of issues, they came together in the common projects of open investigation of female sexual desires; in recognition of the ubiquitous (but not necessarily identical or universal) constraints on women; in a commitment to detailed historical and cross-cultural research on the varieties of female and male sexual lives; and finally, in open acknowledgment that gender is by no means the only meaningful human division to be considered in sexual theory and research -- the analytic categories of class, caste, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, reproductive status, religion, and nationality may be as necessary as gender to the understanding of sexuality in particular places and times. In line with the growing divide among feminists, neither volume dealt at length with issues of violence against women -- except as they intersect with American race stratification. Nevertheless, unlike the cultural feminists and MacKinnon, these scholars, who sometimes took on the label "pro-sex feminists," recognized and deplored the newly-dominant notion that feminists must choose to identify sex only with pleasure or with terror. "We oscillate between two perspectives," warned the Powers of Desire editors, "on the one hand, a self righteous feminine censoriousness; on the other, a somewhat cavalier libertinism, which deals but minimally with vulnerability." Pleasure and Danger editor Carole Vance underlined the realities of extraordinary variation in women's -- even in any one woman's -- sexual experience:

For some, the dangers of sexuality -- violence, brutality, and coercion, in the form of rape, forcible incest, and exploitation, as well as everyday cruelty and humiliation -- make the pleasures pale by comparison. For others, the positive possibilities of sexuality -- explorations of the body, curiosity, intimacy, sensuality, adventure, excitement, human connection, basking in the infantile and non-rational -- are not only worthwhile but provide sustaining energy. Nor are these positions fixed, since a woman might choose one perspective or the other at different points in her life in response to external and internal events.

Finally, the commitment to history not only kept these scholars more intellectually honest than the cultural feminists; it revealed to them the embeddedness of Western sexual ideologies in the stream of time, and thus the value of considering ourselves in the context of a century of Western feminist history. Ellen Carol DuBois and Linda Gordon's insightful 1984 piece, "Seeking Ecstasy on the Battlefield," laid out the extraordinary parallels between the late-19th century social purity movement, which focused on prostitution and fostered the notion of women's innate passionlessness, and contemporary cultural feminism, which focuses on pornography and is silent on the issue of female sexual pleasure:

[S]ocial purity politics, although an understandable reaction to women's 19th-century experience, was a limited and limiting vision for women...Today, there seems to be a revival of social purity politics within feminism...a feminist attack on pornography and sexual "perversion" in our time, which fails to distinguish its politics from a conservative and antifeminist version of social purity, the Moral Majority and "family protection movement." The increasing tendency to focus almost exclusively on sex as the primary arena of women's exploitation, and to attribute women's sexual victimization to some violent essence labeled "male sexuality" is even more conservative today because our situation as women has changed so radically.

Many other scholars have investigated the connections among American and European women's sexual radicalism or resistance, class divisions, political organization, and evolving sexual moralities over the past two centuries; and yet others have begun to investigate the interpenetrating realms of sexuality and politics in the states we used to label the Third World. Alice Echols' summary commentary on the feminist political present draws from this historical depth:

The cultural feminists...appeal to women's sense of sexual vulnerability and the resilience of gender stereotypes in their struggle to organize all women into a grand and virtuous sisterhood to combat male lasciviousness...[T]he antipornography crusade functions as the feminist equivalent of the anti-abortion movement -- reinforcing and validating women's traditional sexual conservatism and manipulating women's sense of themselves as culture's victims and its moral guardians.

The issue of lesbianism, as well, has been central to the "feminist sex wars," but in order to understand its ramifications, we must first engage with the rise of gay rights and gay studies.

Gay Revolution and the Queering of Theory

As human beings we are unique among animals in having a largely unspecified potential. Besides the basic biological needs for food, water and rest, we have needs which are specifically human and subject to conscious development: the need for relationship, the need to create and build. We are all erotic beings. We experience our lives as a striving for satisfaction. We experience our lives sexually, as enlivened by beauty and feeling. At base we have a need for active involvement and creation, the need to give form and meaning to our environment and ourselves.

-- Red Butterfly, Gay Liberation

LIKE FEMINISM, THE MODERN MOVEMENT FOR GAY/LESBIAN EMANCIPATION draws on a long, rich history. It comes after centuries of dissident sexual subcultures and cunning resistance to various gender hegemonies. It absorbs lessons from a counter-canon of "underground" or "coded" literary, artistic, and social expression -- a presence which occasionally broke into the open as a love which dared speak its name. And it builds on many-stranded traditions of sexological, liberal, left, and social democratic campaigns for homosexual rights and social tolerance, beginning most visibly with such early figures as Magnus Hirschfeld, Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, Edward Westermark, and Karl Ulrichs.

Gay history, however, is hardly continuous. Certainly, the mid-20th century represents an abrupt pause in the visibility of this political tradition. Stalinism in the USSR and Eastern Europe, Nazism in Germany and Central Europe, and McCarthyism in the U.S. all vigorously repressed homosexual speech, politics, representation -- and activity. Each drew on pseudo-scientific theories to prove that homosexuality was a grave moral, medical, or psychological threat to national stability and social well-being. Each dispatched state powers to the ends of homosexual detection, persecution, imprisonment, brainwashing, physical maiming -- and in some cases, execution. During that long interregnum that commences before World War II and begins to dissipate in the late 1960s, queer bodies, bent desires, were very much the objects of legal regulation, social supervision, political surveillance, scientific curiosity, and "medical" or psychiatric invasion. In the U.S., as late as the 1960s, lesbians and gay men were subjected to hormonal "therapies," electroshock treatment, and even frontal lobotomies.

Even at its most tolerant, the (Cold) War Family of the 1950s scarcely provided a fertile ground for openly homosexual politics. Although small clusters of brave and dedicated people like the Mattachine Society endured state surveillance and political repression, the open expression of gay/lesbian politics on a substantial scale awaited the opportunity of a political opening. But whatever else gay history shows, it is that things are not always what they seem. Although the period from 1945 to 1969 was one of unprecedented, national-level persecutions, it was also preceded by the large-scale mobilizations of the Federal Works Projects -- and, of course, by the military draft of World War II. As Allan Bérubé has shown, these mobilizations drew young adults out of small-town isolation and provincialism, giving many their first taste of relative freedom. The expansive same-sex environments thus created, afforded many the opportunity for sexual experimentation -- and for new modes of self-fashioning.

The collective experience of World War II had many unanticipated effects. War production by "Rosie-the-Riveters" is now widely understood as an early (though halted) stimulus to feminist thinking. Black Americans, mobilized in the fight against fascism, returned home to face Jim Crow segregation -- a collective experience of disjuncture which strengthened pre-existing demands for civil rights. And in bringing together lesbians and gay men of all classes and regions, these vast military mobilizations also presaged and encouraged the first wave of gay migration to environments of greater personal freedom and individual autonomy -- the big cities -- a trend that ran directly counter to the pervasive suburbanization of the American landscape in the post-war years. It was this pattern of urban concentration which eventually made possible the organization of gays and lesbians as a coherent political bloc. In unprecedented numbers, gays and lesbians settled in liberal, tolerant, and "Bohemian" neighborhoods, and their concentration in cities like San Francisco and New York allowed the accumulation of a new scale of community resources: in informal networks, in gay neighborhoods, and in social institutions like gay bars and meeting places.

The newly-emergent gay liberation movement drew on a subculture which had been expanding, in spite of social censure and police harassment, since the end of World War II. (Not by accident, the routine police harassment of patrons at a gay bar -- the Stonewall Inn -- provided the push that set the movement in motion.) And it capitalized on the life cycle of that demographic bulge, the Baby Boom, whose masses simultaneously began entering young adulthood and seeking exit from the enclosures of sexual and political McCarthyism. Taking cues from the civil rights movement, from feminism, and from the militant anti-war movement, the Gay Liberation Front creatively confronted a repressive psychoanalytic establishment, attacked sodomy laws (with limited although by no means complete success), challenged the most visible forms of discrimination, forged tentative alliances with other political movements, and urged gay men and lesbians to collective self-disclosure -- in the process, converting a covert practice into the basis for a radical politics, and capturing the imagination of millions with slogans like "Out of the closets and into the streets."

In those heady days, the Gay Liberation Front and other groups made no apologies about the scope of gay revolution. One slogan urged: "Two, four, six, eight; Smash the family, church, and state." Since the gay movement is so often invoked as the example par excellence of a "new social movement" -- a genre of mobilization tied to fragmentary identities and supposedly seeking small-scale, personalistic, everyday changes as opposed to totalizing, systemic, macro-political transformations -- it is good to remember that gay liberation in fact expressed a totalizing, global perspective, and that it analytically linked oppression in the sphere of sexuality with oppression in other arenas, most notably gender, but also race and class. The perspective of gay liberation was anything but "narrow" -- its vision was, in the words of one activist, a revolution more total than feminism and more terrifying than death itself. Echoing Marx's and Engels' vision of a stateless, classless society, some militants and theorists envisioned a long-term revolution that would change personal life and social institutions so thoroughly that even the very categories of struggle and mobilization, "heterosexual" and "homosexual," would come to an end. The subsequent turn to a gradualist, rights-oriented approach, the quasi-ethnic focus on identity and the florescence of a gay consumer sub-economy, even the more recent celebrations of resistant marginality over politicized identity, can each be viewed in various ways, depending on one's perspective: as political retreats in the face of a less-than-revolutionary situation; as necessary developments in a process of maturation; as cooptations by a repressively-tolerant consumer society; or as extremes in a necessary and dialectical tacking back and forth between utopian dreams and pragmatic advances. Whatever the case, the gay movement was launched and nurtured by anything but a "micropolitical" vision.

AS WAS THE CASE WITH FEMINISM, political practice implied a social theory. And like second-wave feminism, the early models of gay/lesbian studies represented a turning of the tables on conventional theory. If various disciplines had obsessed for decades over the "causes" of and "cures" for homosexuality, new and empowering scholarship inquired instead into the causes and structures of homosexual oppression, and explored scenarios for gay liberation. If previous theory had always assumed, not just a heterosexual perspective, but a hetero-normalizing perspective, then just seeing matters from a gay or lesbian point of view constituted a radical break with previous hegemonizing models. In thus exposing the coercive dynamics of heterosexual normativity -- in institutions such as the family, religion, psychology, and medicine -- gay/lesbian studies opened new possibilities for the critical study, not simply of gay and lesbian sexualities, but also of sexualities in general.

Like early second-wave feminism, early versions of gay theory tended toward expansive universalism and open generalization. It was assumed that homosexuality, like womanhood, was a readily-demarcated and already-known thing -- an identity subject to historical and cultural variations, surely, but singular, unequivocal, and stable at the core. In some of these models, a homosexual or lesbian identity is seen, explicitly or implicitly, as "essential" or "given" -- that is, as a tendency either universally given in all people, or present among a minority in all societies. In other paradigms, heterosexism serves as a universal framework of culture: a system of oppression intricately articulated with other systems of power, and as enduring as its nearest relative, sexism. Gayle Rubin's 1975 "The Traffic in Women," for example, a tour de force of Marxism, structuralism, and Freudo-Lacanian theory, draws on analogies with political economy to hypothesize a universal "sex-gender system." Rubin associates the universal presence of gender asymmetry with a system of compulsory heterosexuality. The one implies and mandates the other: the taboo on same-sex behavior both bars women from phallic power and mandates heterosexual alliance -- the traffic in women. At the same time, the system of gender inequality requires an enforced and coercive production of dichotomous gender differences -- an equilibrium that can only be enforced by a strict taboo on homologous couplings. Although overstated in their universalist scope, such arguments were mainstays of lesbian feminism, and signaled early on the possibilities of collaboration between feminism and gay/lesbian studies.

In the 1970s and 1980s, an expanding literature treated the forms and functions of homosexual stigma -- in history, in society. Clearly, the denigration of homosexuality regulates and reinforces gender norms -- just as gender norms regulate and reinforce homosexual stigma. But although a taboo on homosexual activity is old, nothing seems implicit, necessary, or universal about it. As Weeks, Goodich, Boswell, Greenberg, and others have shown, homosexual oppression has a history. It comes into existence under certain circumstances; its force waxes and wanes over long periods of time; its definitions and configurations shift; it is both produced within and productive of certain kinds of struggles and projects. It is uniquely tied to the history of the West as "the West" -- indeed, to its very designation apart from "the rest" -- and, once established, provides a resource perpetually available to the authoritarian projects of institutions.

IN EUROPE, THE PERSECUTION OF SODOMY INTENSIFIED during the 12th and 13th centuries: first among the clergy themselves, and then on a larger social scale, as the church extended its influence over the laity. The ensuing anti-sodomy campaigns of church and secular authorities have been analyzed in various regards. Most obviously, they participated in the increasing regulation of sexual activity and family life. But these campaigns, which shaped important elements of Western culture, were also dynamically connected with broad political and economic developments. Portrayals of sexually dissolute lives were commonly invoked in political discourse; such representations mobilized popular resentments against the privileged aristocracy to the advantage of the rising burghers. Harnessed to class conflict, hostility to sodomy thus played a role in the decline of feudalism and in the rise of the bourgeois class.

The menace of sodomy was also a leitmotif of Christian campaigns against both Islam and heresy. European languages still carry traces of this history. Thus the term "bugger" was derived from "Bulgar" (Bulgarian) as an index of heresy, an implication of Islam, and an uneasy marking of the frontier of the Christian West. Similarly, for a long time the ambiguous term "sodomy" was synonymous with religious heresy (the Other within) and evocative of paganism or Islam (the alien without). The absolute and unconditional prohibition of homosexual acts -- and the perceived encirclement of Europe by sodomitical cultures -- was both unique to the West, and defined a distinctive and self-conscious masculinity of imperialism. In short, the taboo on homosexual intercourse played a variegated role in the rise of capitalism, in the self-definition of the West, in the cultivation of religious and political intolerance, in the emergence of the modern nation-state, in the discourses and the forms of colonialism, and in authoritarianism of all kinds.

Parallel to a stream of feminist writing, one tendency of the gay studies literature is recuperative, even celebratory. An enduring task of gay history and ethnography is to discover hidden lives and to reclaim forgotten voices. The practices of "reclamation" and "uncloseting," however, raise questions when they are applied to histories very remote or cultures very different from the contemporary Western setting that gave rise to this imperative.

In the footsteps of anthropologist Ruth Benedict, a certain style of study looks for homosexuals and lesbians in other cultures and historical periods. These studies usually take one of two narrative forms. In one variant, gays and lesbians live happily because their society is more tolerant and enlightened than our own -- and thus provides a model to be emulated. Alternatively, other gays and lesbians in other cultures persevere in the face of social intolerance and circumstantial adversity -- and thus are themselves good role models. Obviously, in either case, the cultural self is being written into history or ethnography. The writer, the readers, project themselves into other cultures and periods, exploring the possibilities of another life there -- a leap of identification.

Such leaps are perhaps necessary, but they are not quite adequate conditions for serious study. Historical studies of oppression and empirical studies of sexuality soon encountered an enormous range of historical difference and cross-cultural diversity. For if the homosexual taboo is not universally or invariably present, then what of the identity it both prohibits and necessarily implies? And even where taboos are present, if they are cast in terms different from modern Western homophobia, then is the object of prohibition necessarily the same as our own? Such questions of designation posed serious problems -- and generated exciting innovations -- in a field which had once assumed that a rose is a rose is a rose,' and that homosexuality could be understood as an undifferentiated, uniform, and universal tendency.

What to make, for instance, of the pre-modern Sodomite, whose labeling bears some affinity to that of the modern homosexual, but whose identity scarcely revolves around the same sun of sexual object choice? Although both Sodomite and homosexual are clearly stigmatized on the basis of some sexual activity, the former is a "sinner" (as all men are sinners!), whereas the latter is medically and psychologically defined as either "degenerate" or as "different." (It is not even clear that Sodomites were consistently labeled in terms of same-sex intercourse, and much of the confusion over the definition of "sodomy," even in legal circles today, participates in this ambiguity.) And what to make of man-boy love in classical antiquity? Clearly, Greek pederasty involved two males. But whereas Greeks approved, even endorsed, sexual relations between adult men and rank inferiors -- women, slaves, adolescent boys -- sexual intimacy between two adult free men (the very definition of male homosexuality today) was considered repugnant. How to understand the various practices reported in parts of Melanesia? There, semen is understood as a substance that is acquired, not produced; thus, older, affinal youths or young men inseminate younger boys in order to "grow" them into men. In these societies, semen is properly, necessarily, transacted between males. What would be improper there would be the flow of semen in the wrong generational direction. And what to make of the Native North American berdache and similar trans-gendered statuses? Although once glossed as Native American homosexuals, Whitehead has argued that the berdache status is better understood as an intermediary gender (which sometimes implies bi-or homo-sexual patterns) than as a "homosexual niche."

As the gay studies literature developed and expanded, its object of inquiry tended either to slip away or to transmute into hitherto unimagined identities and unposed questions. By the 1980s, then, it had become increasingly apparent that it made little sense to speak of homosexuality -- and heterosexuality -- as "universal" forms with minor, superficial variations. What sophisticated scholarship discovered was not cultural and historical variations on a theme, but rather, deep thematic variation. In that sense, the "end of the homosexual" (and of the correlative heterosexual, too) thus came about in theory before it came about in practice.

At the same time, a parallel approach to identity emerged in the field of gender. Citing Simone de Beauvoir and renouncing all the romantic and essentialist themes that had accrued as "cultural feminism," Monique Wittig's manifesto of lesbian materialist feminism threw down the gauntlet: "One is not born a woman" -- and one should not aspire to be one, either. Soon, authors began putting not just "Woman" but also "women" and even "sex" in quotation marks to signify the arbitrariness of their invention as cultural categories. In an interdisciplinary crucible of politics and scholarship, and in a shared space between feminist theory and gay/lesbian studies, a new approach emerged. The more social specificities and cultural differences come to the fore of investigation, the more problematic become such already-given and already-understood rubrics such as "men," "women," "gay," "straight." The "Cyborg" literature -- which exploits the myth of a being who blurs the distinctions between humans, animals, and machines (see especially Donna Haraway ) -- and the recent wave of Queer Theory -- which likewise throws all boundaries into question -- both gather in and extend these tropes of feminist and gay/lesbian scholarship, further problematizing the notion of stable core identities, and urging caution toward categorical traps.

The debates over "lesbian sexuality" in the 1980s bore on these new insights. A group of lesbian scholars and activists, with Gayle Rubin in a leadership role, argued strongly against the then-dominant vision of women's/lesbians' sexual feelings and actions as profoundly different from (gay or straight) men's -- as innately cooperative, benevolent -- "vanilla" in their parlance. These theorists objected to the counterempirical claim that some women did not also have violent, overwhelming sexual feelings and desires to engage in extreme behavior, including (mutually agreed-upon) lesbian sado-masochism. These claims whipped (as it were) the antipornography feminists into a frenzy, culminating in their disruption of the 1982 Barnard College Scholar and the Feminist Conference because of the published views of some of the participants. Once again, the Moral Mother's dead hand weighed like a nightmare upon the living, demanding, in the name of feminism, that women repress sexual feelings; even, in the name of a putative core female identity, that women repress their own discussions of variations in female sexuality.

WE HAVE FOCUSED HERE ON THE DEVELOPMENT of essentializing identity-politics strands in feminist and gay theory and practice, the tendencies most dominant and harmful in the contemporary public political realm. Since the 1980s, however, the academic world has been overwhelmed by poststructuralist/postmodern interpretations. The domain of gender/sexuality in particular has been swamped by work extending the denial of stable core sexual identities to the denial of any identities at all, and of the reality of the material world to boot. Within this frame, the intelligent insight that gender and sexuality are socially constructed tips over into a rudderless idealism that denies our human embodiment in ongoing political economy. While MacKinnon's gender-Manicheanism, for example, may have easy access to the New York Times and certain precincts of law, inside the ivy walls, purely discursive analyses of gender and sexuality rule the academic roost for all the world as if discourse were not embodied in, produced by, and affecting the lives of real, material human animals. Historian Lisa Duggan has gently guyed this state of affairs in her Social Text essay "Queering the State," which hilariously imagines various postmodern academic stars attempting to communicate to the public on "Oprah."

In between the ahistorical and ethnocentric essentialisms of identity politics and the necessary-but-insufficient idealist work of the "turn to language" lies evolving left scholarship and politics on sexuality -- the tradition we have traced in these pages. Historical political-economic work and associated activism may not at the moment be winning the megaphone war in either forum of the public sphere. But the gender/sexuality domain they illuminate is for that reason no less crucial to a larger political vision. We on the left should not leave home -- or go home -- without it.

Contents of No. 21