Feminist sexual futures

I wrote my revisionist history of the feminist sexuality debates of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s as a ground clearing exercise. Surveying the panic over civil liberties, due process, and normative heterosexual courtship and mating rituals that the #MeToo movement inspired across the ideological spectrum from Margaret Atwood to David French, I began to experience what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls ‘Christmas Effects’. When all the institutions are perfectly aligned and speaking with one voice, as they tend to be during the Christmas season, the queer critic, on Sedgwick’s account, is called to the work of disarticulation and disengagement. My primary goal in Why We Lost the Sex Wars was not so much to get the history of the sex wars right, although I haven’t strayed so far from my training in the Cambridge School approach to intellectual history to repudiate that goal entirely, as it was to explode the reductive and politically debilitating myths behind which so much of that history has been concealed. As I write in the book’s conclusion, ‘the history of the feminist sex wars is brimming with alternatives’ to a thoroughly liberalized feminist sexual politics that reduces sexual freedom to expressive freedom and personal privacy, while framing the carceral state as a potential means to feminist ends (p. 199). My hope was that by bringing some of this history to light, I might disrupt the ‘Christmas Effects’ produced by liberal hegemony and create a space for fresh and historically informed feminist thinking about sexual freedom and sexual justice. This Critical Exchange on feminist sexual futures is a sign that my hope was not in vain.