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Title: Anarchism and Sexuality Author: Hiram KĂĽmper Date: 2009 Language: en Topics: sexuality, sex, anarcha-feminism, individualism, queer Source: Retrieved on 22nd November 2021 from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781405198073.wbierp1751 Notes: Published in The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest.
The ways in which questions of sexuality have been taken up by anarchist
thinkers and movements are often close to those of other political
tendencies, including socialism, Marxism, and even bourgeois
libertinism, and many of these different discourses have inspired one
another; hence, it is not always easy to differentiate between them.
Theoretically, anarchists were from the beginning concerned about the
private and domestic sphere in a very specific way, because in their
anti-statism, they could not rely on the statist solutions of Marxists
and others (crèches, public kitchens, and so on). Also, most anarchists
did not believe that consciousness could be transformed by historical
changes such as the mass integration of women into the industrial
workforce, instead conceptualizing human nature as relatively stable.
Therefore, they saw the liberation of sexuality as taking place not
within the totality of society but in small local units such as
families, communes, or partnerships.
Some anarchists practiced alternatives to conventional sexual
institutions, such as Lillian Harman’s (1869–1929) “autonomistic
marriage” in 1886; however, the total refusal of institutionalized
relationships seems to have been the most common answer. In contrast to
the often merely rhetorical permissiveness of the 1960s student revolt
and others, anarchist advocacy of “free love” often did not include the
idea of polygamy or multiple changing sex partners, instead idealizing a
stable, loving relationship based on companionship.
Anarchists’ debates on the social meaning of sexuality are closely
linked to if not even originate from two important and highly affinitive
branches of social movement of the nineteenth century: the labor
movement and the women’s movement. Though there certainly were liberal
and even utopian thoughts on the liberation of sexuality before (amongst
others, Roper 1991), it is not until the early twentieth century that
the discourse intensifies from the political and intellectual margins to
the center of social debate.
Working-class sexuality, in explicit dichotomy to bourgeois discourses
on love, marriage, and sexuality, has been of special interest to social
politics from the late nineteenth century on, and later to early
psychoanalysts (Freud 191617–17) as well as ethnographers (Rühle 1930).
This interest is rooted in a public debate in the aftermath of Thomas
Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future
Improvement of Society (1798), which was itself a conservative rebuttal
of William Godwin’s proto-anarchist tract, the Enquiry Concerning
Political Justice (1793). Malthusianism, which assumed workers to be
more libidinous and less morally reliable, nonetheless came to attract
the interest of labor radicals, including anarchists. Poverty, the
“neo-Malthusians” argued, was to a large part due to the many children
sprung from workers’ uncontrolled sex life; for anarchist
neo-Malthusians such as Paul Robin (1837–1912), this implied the need
for workers to control their sexuality in their own interest, via birth
control and contraception – concerns shared with the women’s movement –
as well as the possibility of eugenics (McLaren 1976: 490–2; also
Cleminson 2000a: 35ff., 159ff.).
While many working-class anarchists did not question hierarchy in the
family or rethink the role of marriage, anarchist feminists such as
Joseph Déjacque (1821–64) did. Research on the impact of early feminism
(and of feminism per se) on anarchism is – with some few exceptions,
such as the Spanish Mujeres Libres – still surprisingly sparse (Gemie
1996). Still, the “sex question” (Goldman 1896: 3) was very important to
the early activists, among whom one of the most famous probably was Emma
Goldman (1869–1940), whose life and works have been subject to countless
biographies and studies within the recent decades. Other important
thinkers of early anarchist feminism were Lucy Parsons (1853–1942) and
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912). In her 1895 lecture, “Sex Slavery,” de
Cleyre – according to Goldman, “the most gifted and brilliant anarchist
woman America ever produced” – encouraged women to alter child
socialization practices in order to create “unnatural” gender roles and
thereby break up traditional gender hierarchies (Brigati 2004).
Although some historians have claimed that commitment to feminism was
intrinsic to anarchism (e.g., Junco 1976: 281–91), many anarchists
especially of the early period, such as Proudhon (1857) or Sorel (1906),
had rigidly fixed, anti-feminist ideas about the role of women and
sexuality (Gemie 1996: 421–8). Sexualities other than the
heteronormative did not enter into debate for most anarchists until the
second half of the twentieth century; influential anarchist writers of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries promoting the
acceptance of homosexuality, such as John Henry MacKay (1864– 1933),
Benedikt Friedländer (1866–1908), or Emma Goldman herself, were in that
respect widely ignored (Fähnders 1995), while others, such as Senna Hoy
(1882–1914), were openly disdained.
Nonetheless, sexuality played an important role in anarchist imagery
during the earlier periods. Lily Litvak (1981), in her exhaustive study
of Spanish anarchist propaganda, has shown that the motif of
working-class girls being raped by bourgeois men was one of the most
popular, as were images of female prostitutes and beggars.
Thinkers of what might be called the bohemian or intellectual-academic
branch of anarchism, who were not actively involved in the labor
movement, often had different concerns about sexuality and its role in
anarchist theory.
Sexuality had barely begun to emerge as a topic in intellectual debates
during the Enlightenment. Still, these were not ideas of liberation or
discourses on power and gender hierarchies (Vila 2002). The rise of
pornography and arty pornographic prose, most popular in the writings of
the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), might be seen as an indication for a
rising intellectuals’ interest in matters of deviant sexuality (see
Cleminson 2000a: 145–52 for an anarchist reading of de Sade by Karen
Goaman and Mo Dodson). But only few, such as early socialist Charles
Fourier (1772–1837), cast such ideas into political programmatic
writings. In his Nouveau monde amoureux (“The New World of Love,”
written ca. 1820, first fully published in 1967), he was one of the
first to depict a society totally free from the bonds of marriage, with
free love as its main impetus. Fourier was rediscovered in the 1960s by
the intellectual anarchists surrounding the “sexual revolution” (Daniel
Guérin wrote the preface to the 1977 edition).
From the turn of the twentieth century through the 1920s, Erich MĂĽhsam
(1878– 1934) and Freud’s renegade disciple Otto Gross (1877–1920) were
most prominent advocates of a libertine claim for “free love.” Gross
idealized the return to a non-hierarchical golden age and, unlike his
teacher, rejected the necessity of psychological repression for
civilization. Both Gross and MĂĽhsam heartily favored polygamy, in
contrast to many contemporary anarchist thinkers, especially those
within the labor movement.
Individualist anarchists such as Gross and MĂĽhsam contributed strongly
to constructing the image of anarchism as “ostentatious promiscuity” (a
term that MĂĽhsam used himself; Linse 1999: 135) in the bourgeois media
and public perception. Still, most active anarchists’ intellectual
movements for the freedom of sexuality were of merely local importance,
such as the “Sydney Push,” a loose group of bohemian intellectuals who
are said to have been an important critical factor in the development of
Australian society, especially in the conservative 1950s, but who had
actually little impact outside the Sydney area and none overseas (Coombs
1996). In general, it seems that in most cases it was not conservative
restriction against libertine dangers that quietened anarchist
intellectuals’ discourses on freedom in sexuality, but rather that most
of these discourses had only a brief life and scarcely infected or
conjoined one another, remaining the delicate utopias of marginalized
thinkers.
This changed when matters of sexuality, its nature and its functioning
in human relationships, namely between the two sexes, gained wider
public attention with the rise of its scientific exploration in the
first half of the twentieth century. In the aftermath of psychoanalysis,
armed with new empirical methods of medical investigation, sexology
emerged as a new science, rooted in the works of Austrian and German
intellectuals such as Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935), who also actively
engaged in the homosexual movement (Fähnders 1995), and Wilhelm Reich
(1897–1957), whose “sexpol” combined Freud with Marx (Johler 2008), and
popularized by American liberals such as Alfred Charles Kinsey
(1894–1956).
Reich was first to use the term “sexual revolution” programmatically, as
the title of the English edition of his Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf
(1936/1945). It reads mostly as a work of social criticism fighting the
double standard of contemporary morals – mainly in the Stalinist Soviet
Union – which, he believed, suppresses the vital sexual energies and
therefore leads to frustration and aggression. Reich remained concerned
about setting rules and environments to frame “free” sexuality.
Therefore Paul Goodman (1911–72) has tried to provide a more radical
anarchist reading in Reich’s footsteps (1977; Stoehr 1994). Though Reich
himself insistently dissociated from anarchist movements, he gained a
wide readership among members of the anarchist movement such as Daniel
Guérin (1904–88), who wrote extensively on matters of sexuality,
especially homosexuality, and its oppression in capitalist societies
(e.g., Guérin 1969) and took part in contemporary sexology debates
(Guérin 1955).
Guérin’s call for “power to the imagination,” referring directly to
Fourier’s ideas, carried over to what is commonly referred to as the
“Sexual Revolution” of the 1960s, when it became a popular saying.
Another thinker of great impact on anarchists’ debates of the 1960s was
Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), who rejected the institutionalized
patriarchal concept of the nuclear family. Social analyses such as Max
Horkheimer’s (1895–1973) and Theodor Adorno’s (1903–69), as well as
Reich’s Massenpsychologie, shaped a new awareness for structures and
their aggressive extrapolation by means of traditional values
(“structural violence”).
During the Sexual Revolution, living together without families or
hierarchies, in egalitarian communes based on mutual consensus, became
increasingly popular among anarchists (as among other leftists). Such
anarchist communities date back well before the 1960s. For instance, the
Home Colony commune formed near Tacoma, Washington (1895–1919), the
Swiss commune at Ascona (1900–20), and the French milieu libre or
anarchist commune of Aiglemont (1903–8), all experimented with practices
of free love and naturisme.
Anarchists participated in developing the popular sexology that played
an important role in the Sexual Revolution. Among the many best-selling
works published these days are the writings of anarchist Alex Comfort
(1920–2000), who wrote several studies and pamphlets on sexuality and
society analysis (e.g., 1948, 1950), but got most popular with his
guidebook The Joy of Sex (1972) and its two sequels.
In the later 1970s, with the quieting of political debate and the
loosening of censorship, the commercialization of sex expanded, drawing
the criticism of the emerging new feminism and feminist studies of the
late 1970s and early 1980s.
DEBATE
Works of “second-wave” feminist theory, from Kate Millett’s Sexual
Politics (1970), a comprehensive critique of western society’s
patriarchy as mirrored in its literature, to Andrea Dworkin’s
Intercourse (1987), which argues that heterosexual intercourse as
depicted and normalized in mainstream culture is consistently thought in
terms of penetration, invasiveness, and – eventually – violence, have
inspired a multitude of anarchist feminists to reconsider sexuality.
Dworkin, a writer who temporarily claimed a certain nearness to
anarchist ideas, argues that male-centric experiences of intercourse as
the penetration and occupation of a woman’s body help to consolidate the
subordination of women in a male-centric, and ultimately sexist,
society.
A third wave in feminist theory, typified by the works of academics such
as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler and drawing heavily on the
ideas of Michel Foucault’s ground-breaking Histoire de la sexualité
(unfinished, 3 vols., 1976–84; English translation, 1978ff.), gave birth
to a new discourse on sexuality, “queer theory,” which has also entered
into anarchist debates. Rooted mainly in the gay and lesbian movement,
and perhaps foreshadowed by Hirschfeld’s much earlier attempts to
overcome the dichotomy of the two sexes, queer theory emphasizes the
blurriness and fluidity of interpretations and identities. Culturally
constructed identities of sexuality, queer theorists argue, keep the
process of exclusion, labeling, and making characters within the
violence of hierarchies and different levels of domination between
people running. In this respect, the affinity of queer theory to
anarchist discourse is evident, since the imposition of paradigms of
“normal” sexuality or the restriction of sexual practices by means of
power stand in opposition not only to queer thinking, but also to
anarchist convictions.
More recently, however, Jamie Heckert (2004, 2005) has criticized the
concept of “queer” identity and its role in identity politics from an
anarchist standpoint, seeking to overcome its still inherent
exclusivity. Sexual orientation identity, he suggests, in terms drawn
from Gilles Deleuze and FĂ©lix Guattari, can be understood in terms of
the “stateform,” in which certain “nomadic” sexualities are
systematically rendered incomprehensible or deviant. Similarly, Daniel
Colson has argued that for anarchism, sexuality is not a “first
principle” but a “resultant,” merely one existential “force” among
others that is subjected to constraint, and that a genuinely radical
anarchism would seek neither to express nor repress this force, but to
“invent new bodies in which the forces constitutive of that which is
conventionally called sexuality would change in meaning and quality ...
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