Keynote Address
Location
Ponderosa Room E
Presentation Type
Presentation
Start Date
3-3-2023 11:15 AM
Event Sort Order
25
Abstract
Why We Lost the Sex Wars: Sexual Freedom in the #MeToo Era (2021)
University of Minnesota Press
From the mid-1970s through the early 1990s, feminists in the United States were embroiled in a series of debates over matters pertaining to sex and sexuality that have come to be known as “the sex wars.” During the sex wars, feminists staked out a variety of positions on a number of issues, including pornography, prostitution, sadomasochism, heterosexuality, lesbianism, intergenerational sex, butch-fem identifies and practices, the nature and limits of law, the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee, the wisdom and sufficiency of state-centered politics, the boundaries of the category of woman, and the meaning of sexual freedom. Unfortunately, these complex and heterogeneous debates tend to be remembered as a rather straightforward conflict between “antipornography” feminists concerned primarily with sexual “danger” on one side and “sex radical” feminists concerned primarily with sexual “pleasure” on the other.
In Why We Lost the Sex Wars: Sexual Freedom in the #MeToo Era, I challenge this simplistic view. Rather than focusing exclusively on the differences dividing antipornography and sex radical feminists during this period, I highlight significant points of contact and overlap between them, particularly the challenges they posed to the narrow and ambivalent sexual politics of post-war liberalism. I also highlight other conflicts and relationships that, I argue, were central to the sex wars, including a series of improbable alliances that emerged between antipornography feminists, sex radical feminists, and liberals of various stripes in the mid-1980s. Whether it was liberal jurists like Cass Sunstein drawing on antipornography feminist theory to formulate liberal rationales for the regulation of pornography or civil libertarian activists like Nadine Strossen drawing on sex radical feminist theory to bolster the liberal case against state censorship, antipornography feminism, sex radical feminism, and liberalism continued to interact throughout the 1980s and 1990s in ways that have had lasting consequences for feminist sexual politics.
Beyond a work of history and political theory, Why We Lost the Sex Wars is, ultimately, a plea. It urges contemporary feminists who are passionate about sexual freedom to return to the sex wars to (re)consider antipornography feminism and sex radical feminism prior to their attenuation by liberalism. Conventional wisdom aside, the sex wars were not an act of sororicide or a petty and intellectually bankrupt internecine feminist squabble. They were, rather, a spectacularly fecund moment for feminist political thought when both antipornography and sex radical feminists formulated visions of sexual freedom that burst existing liberal strictures asunder and opened up new sexual political vistas and possibilities. That these visions seem scandalous and utopian even today is evidence that they might once again fire feminist imaginations and revivify something of the radical impulses that started the sex wars, but, unfortunately, did not survive them.
Keynote Address
Ponderosa Room E
Why We Lost the Sex Wars: Sexual Freedom in the #MeToo Era (2021)
University of Minnesota Press
From the mid-1970s through the early 1990s, feminists in the United States were embroiled in a series of debates over matters pertaining to sex and sexuality that have come to be known as “the sex wars.” During the sex wars, feminists staked out a variety of positions on a number of issues, including pornography, prostitution, sadomasochism, heterosexuality, lesbianism, intergenerational sex, butch-fem identifies and practices, the nature and limits of law, the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee, the wisdom and sufficiency of state-centered politics, the boundaries of the category of woman, and the meaning of sexual freedom. Unfortunately, these complex and heterogeneous debates tend to be remembered as a rather straightforward conflict between “antipornography” feminists concerned primarily with sexual “danger” on one side and “sex radical” feminists concerned primarily with sexual “pleasure” on the other.
In Why We Lost the Sex Wars: Sexual Freedom in the #MeToo Era, I challenge this simplistic view. Rather than focusing exclusively on the differences dividing antipornography and sex radical feminists during this period, I highlight significant points of contact and overlap between them, particularly the challenges they posed to the narrow and ambivalent sexual politics of post-war liberalism. I also highlight other conflicts and relationships that, I argue, were central to the sex wars, including a series of improbable alliances that emerged between antipornography feminists, sex radical feminists, and liberals of various stripes in the mid-1980s. Whether it was liberal jurists like Cass Sunstein drawing on antipornography feminist theory to formulate liberal rationales for the regulation of pornography or civil libertarian activists like Nadine Strossen drawing on sex radical feminist theory to bolster the liberal case against state censorship, antipornography feminism, sex radical feminism, and liberalism continued to interact throughout the 1980s and 1990s in ways that have had lasting consequences for feminist sexual politics.
Beyond a work of history and political theory, Why We Lost the Sex Wars is, ultimately, a plea. It urges contemporary feminists who are passionate about sexual freedom to return to the sex wars to (re)consider antipornography feminism and sex radical feminism prior to their attenuation by liberalism. Conventional wisdom aside, the sex wars were not an act of sororicide or a petty and intellectually bankrupt internecine feminist squabble. They were, rather, a spectacularly fecund moment for feminist political thought when both antipornography and sex radical feminists formulated visions of sexual freedom that burst existing liberal strictures asunder and opened up new sexual political vistas and possibilities. That these visions seem scandalous and utopian even today is evidence that they might once again fire feminist imaginations and revivify something of the radical impulses that started the sex wars, but, unfortunately, did not survive them.
Presenter Bio
Lorna Bracewell is a political theorist and associate professor of political science at Flagler College. Her scholarship focuses on feminist theory and the history of political thought and has been published in academic journals like Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and popular forums like The Washington Post. Her book, Why We Lost the Sex Wars: Sexual Freedom in the
#MeToo Era (University of Minnesota Press, March 2021), offers a revisionist history of the feminist sexuality debates of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s foregrounding the influence of liberal concepts such as freedom of expression, the public/private divide, and the harm principle.