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Title: Twenty-first Century Sex
Author: Judy Greenway
Date: 1997
Language: en
Topics: anarcha-feminism, direct action, materialism, materialist feminism, postmodernism, prefiguration, queer, sex, spectacle, technology, women
Source: Chapter in *Twenty-first Century Anarchism: Unorthodox Ideas for a New Millennium.* Retrieved on 2020-11-24 from http://www.judygreenway.org.uk/wp/twenty-first-century-sex/
Notes: This is an unedited version of a chapter in ‘Twenty-first Century Anarchism: Unorthodox Ideas for a New Millennium’, 1997, edited by Jon Purkis and James Bowen, Cassell: London, pp.170–180. [Cassell has now become Continuum: http://www.continuumbooks.com]

Judy Greenway

Twenty-first Century Sex

Introduction

What is sexual freedom? If anarchism has anything to offer for the

twenty-first century, it has to begin rethinking this question. New ways

of thinking about sexuality in recent years have emerged not so much

from anarchist theorists, many of whom are stuck in the sixties as far

as thinking (or fantasizing) about sex goes, as from the women’s and gay

and lesbian liberation movements, and their successor issue-based

campaigns. Today, new sexual and social movements proliferate. The

direct action and spectacular demonstrations of AIDS activists, Lesbian

Avengers, Outrage, feminists for and against pornography, catch the

headlines, while postmodern feminists and Queer theorists join science

fiction authors and songwriters in speculation about the transcending of

gender and sexual categories. Developments in biotechnology and virtual

reality pose difficult questions about how we understand the boundaries

and limitations of our bodies.

In this article I will look at some underlying implications of different

approaches to sex and the body, and question whether new theories and

new technologies pose a real challenge to existing power relationships.

Will twenty-first century sex really be different?

True Natures

One night at a party in the nineteen-sixties, I was trapped against a

wall by a drunken member of my local anarchist group. As I pushed him

off me, he said bitterly, ‘Call yourself an anarchist?’ This attitude

that sexual freedom meant women on demand was one of the factors

propelling many of us a few years later into the first Women’s

Liberation groups, where we were able to begin formulating demands on

our own terms. There is a long history of association between anarchism

and sexual freedom, but sexual freedom means different things to

different people at different times, and has complex connections to

ideas about nature, bodies, gender, power, and social organisation. The

concept of freedom, though it can seem like an absolute, is shaped by

specific social experiences of constraint.

Although many anarchists have led entirely conventional sexual lives, a

theory which rejects authority implies at the least a rejection of

formal marriage, seen as State/religious interference in human

relationships. Critics of anarchism have always claimed it would mean

sexual licence, the absence of restraint, shameless women and

irresponsible men indulging every passing lust. In such images, which

mingle fascination and disgust, sexual order and political order are

tied (or handcuffed) together. Some anarchists, particularly women and

gay men, have also linked sexual and political order, using the language

of equality, reciprocity, autonomy and democracy to develop a critique

of power relationships between men and women and to try and work out a

practice of everyday anarchism.

For well over a century, such anarchists have been criticizing marriage

and experimenting with alternatives. They have focused on economic,

household and childrearing arrangements — how best to structure personal

relationships.[1] Underlying much of the discussion, however, is a model

of an instinctive self, repressed by social convention. Love, passion,

and sexuality are understood as natural feelings which should ideally be

unconstrained. Our natural selves are repressed and distorted by social

restrictions, both external and internalized, so sexual freedom is not

just freedom from church or state intervention, but is about self

expression, liberating our true natures. Such ideas have led some

anarchists to be among the pioneers for sexual education, for birth

control and for the acceptance of sexual diversity, including

homosexuality.[2]

In the years since World War Two, these things, though still

controversial, have become part of the mainstream of most Western

cultures. Sex, love, and childbearing — never as securely tied to

marriage as they were meant to be — have become increasingly

deinstitutionalised. Serial monogamy is commonplace. Sexual pleasure as

a basic human need is taken for granted, and every woman’s magazine

gives advice on how to achieve it. Postwar contraceptive technologies,

particularly the Pill, are claimed to have separated sex from

reproduction, making sexual liberation possible for heterosexual women.

Although the rhetoric of sexual libertarianism is no longer as popular

as it was, the imagery of sexual transgression has become a marketing

cliché. The explanation for these changes may lie in demographic and

economic shifts and complex social developments, but the way in which

they are widely understood and debated is still in terms of natural

sexualities.

Leaving the Twentieth Century: Sexual Anarchies

… we have decided to take up the struggle against capitalist oppression

where it is most deeply rooted — in the quick of our body. It is the

space of the body, with all the desires that it produces, that we want

to liberate from the occupying forces ... ‘Revolutionary consciousness’

is a mystification so long as it doesn’t pass through the revolutionary

body, the body which produces the conditions of its own liberation. It’s

women in revolt against male power — implanted for centuries in their

own bodies; homosexuals in revolt against terroristic normality; the

young in revolt against the pathological authority of adults.

— Wicked Messengers

In the new social and sexual movements of the late twentieth century,

with their creative confusion of debate and activity, sexual politics

and sex-as-politics are taken for granted; the meanings of sex and

politics are not. I want to argue that strategies of visibility,

transgression, prefiguration and transformation are key, but

problematic, aspects of both theory and practice around sexuality and

the politics of the body.

Visibility

A politics of visibility raises questions about what is taken for

granted and what is missing from the social picture, and about how that

picture is constructed. In 1969, the Miss World competition in London

was disrupted by Mis-Conception, Mis-Placed and Mis-Fit women.[3] For a

while the term ‘sex object’ became part of everyday language, and the

organisers of beauty contests went on the defensive. In smudgily

duplicated pamphlets, French Situationist theories — or at least slogans

— were recycled in debates about women both as consumers of the

spectacle and as spectacular consumables.

‘We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re not going shopping’ went the chant

on one of the earliest British Gay Liberation marches down London’s

Oxford Street in the late 1970s. A small contingent of drag queens

teetered into Selfridges, to shock not to shop. (Now to be queer is to

go shopping, if the rise of gay consumer culture is anything to go by).

Some fifteen years later, gay activist group Outrage was disrupting

church services to denounce religious hypocrisy. In the USA, fire-eating

Lesbian Avengers rode into town on motorbikes, while their tamer British

counterparts made themselves noticed by riding around on top of a bus

with balloons. In such actions, visibility is in itself political,

asserting the presence of what has usually been rendered invisible,

disrupting the spectacle of normality. Today, when every soap opera has

its lesbian or gay characters, it seems that after decades of activism,

lesbians and gays have succeeded in making themselves visible within the

mainstream (however temporarily). The debate now is about the range of

representations and how these have been shaped for a (presumed)

heterosexual audience. When a tiny segment of urban lesbian and gays are

cast by advertising executives as style leaders, their images used to

sell ballgowns and spirits, jeans and perfume, they are not disrupting

the spectacle but becoming one.[4]

Making a spectacle of themselves has been on the agenda as a means of

empowerment for successive generations of young women, too. Material

Girl Madonna may just be playing with conventionally pornographic images

of the sexual woman, but from Seventies Punk to the Riot Grrls, in

music, comics, and the informal theatre of the streets and clubs,

traditional notions of femininity and female sexuality have been

challenged and rejected. Not just attitude, but Bad Attitude;[5] being

good or nice is now the fate worse than death. Often moralistic

feminists are cast along with straight society as the enemies of sexual

self expression, while feminists against censorship represent themselves

as a sexual vanguard, and pornography as a site to be reclaimed by

women. The full debate about what constitutes pornography and its

effects is too complex to enter into here. But feminist critiques of

sexual libertarianism are not necessarily anti-sexual or pro-censorship;

they can be about trying to transform the power relationships involved,

making those visible. Anarchist feminist activists, like USA’s Nikki

Craft and the Outlaws for Social Responsibility, argue:

Sex is not obscene. The real obscenity is the marketing of women as

products ... We are in favour of nudity and sensuality … There is a

difference between a genuine love, acceptance and empowerment of the

body, and the marketing of women and exploitation of women that is the

trademark of pornography … We advocate and commit civil disobedience

…[6]

Silence = Death

Dissent from mainstream representations of the body, sexuality and

gender, through direct action and the creation of alternative

representations, has also been an important part of AIDS activism, which

particularly in the USA has emphasised the importance of visibility and

participation for those affected by AIDS and HIV. As well as challenges

to the medical and scientific research establishments, health education

work by activist groups has given a new urgency to debates about sexual

identities and definitions.

With each daily restraint and frustration, capitalism imposes its norms

… it thrusts its roots into our bowels … confiscating our organs,

diverting our vital functions, maiming our pleasures …

— Wicked Messengers

But what is it, exactly, that has been invisible, Mis-Represented,

silenced? When the Situationists painted ‘Speak your desires’ on Paris

walls, when the women’s health movement brought out ‘Our Bodies,

Ourselves’,[7] when gays and lesbians chanted, ‘2-4-6-8, Is your

girlfriend really straight?’, the implication was that there are genuine

desires, natural bodies, true sexualities, to be revealed and asserted

against the repression, misconceptions and misconstructions of an

oppressive society. When lesbians abseiled into the House of Lords, or

people with AIDS invaded medical conferences and demanded to speak from

the platform, they may have been, as Simon Watney says, constructing ‘an

effective theatre of images … seducing the voyeuristic mass media,

invading “public” space’;[8] they were also publicly claiming an

identity.

For all the intensive debates among feminists and Queer theorists about

the shortcomings of identity politics, and the discussions in academic

circles about Foucault’s argument that there is no inner sexuality or

true self to be discovered, the old ideas persist. Can there be a vision

of liberation if there is nothing there to be liberated?

Transgression

Transgression, the deliberate and visible breaking of social rules, also

raises difficult questions for a politics of sexuality. The boundary

between public and private, constantly being renegotiated, and central

to liberal sex reforms, seems to be under attack from the new generation

of ‘in your face’ sexual libertarians claiming the right to do what they

want where they want. At its simplest, transgressive sexual behaviour or

appearance is seen as important for its shock value — the old game of

scandalising the bourgeoisie. But shock can become its own value,

requiring a constant supply of shockees. If one thing becomes

acceptable, then a new unacceptability has to be found. This use of

transgression depends on its opposition to existing values, so cannot be

about broad social change, even though it may result in changing the

boundaries of permissibility (e.g. the mainstreaming of images formerly

confined to top-shelf pornography). Transgression in this sense is about

the pleasure of self-expression — a self which is defined by its

differentiation from a dominant other. For instance in a recent

interview, lesbian photographer Della Grace talks about how her images

explore our fear of otherness (who is the ‘our’ here?), then goes on to

tell of an encounter with a hostile neighbour who was:

… very upset that I was in the garden photographing three naked,

scarred, bald tattooed and pierced dykes … Afterwards I was, like, shave

me. I needed to have my head completely bald. I didn’t want to be

associated with her brand of normalcy.[9]

Even when sexual transgression seems to be about creating new versions

of sexuality, the language of the true inner self recurs. Speaking our

desires is seen as revealing an inner truth, with assertions that take

the form: this is who I really am, and this is how I will live it out.

Sometimes, for instance in the debates around the limits of consensual

sado-masochism, its defenders use the traditional rhetoric of civil

liberties, maintaining the public/private distinction. Other groups and

individuals reject the notion of tolerance, and demand more (for

instance the right to public sex, or self-mutilation): see me; accept

me; make it possible for me to live out my desires; realise your own.

It is the space of the body that we want to liberate from the occupying

forces. It is in this way that we want to work for the liberation of

social space: there is no frontier between the two.

— Wicked Messengers

Transgression can work in a more complex way, using disruption, a

version of the Situationist détournement , with the aim of rendering

visible to both participants and observers power relations which are

normally hidden. When Nikki Craft was arrested in 1981 for exposing her

breasts on a beach, and supporters demonstrated topless outside the

courtroom, she argued:

We’re living in a society that sells women’s breasts in topless bars, in

advertising and pornography, and then attempts at the same time to deny

them rights over their own bodies. I wish women would demand control at

every level.[10]

In England in the mid 1990s a woman who tries to breast feed her baby in

public can still be abused on buses or asked to leave a restaurant.

Where does this fit on the spectrum of normality and transgression?

Prefiguration

Prefiguration, the demonstration or rehearsal or sample of how life

could be in a better world is usually but not always transgressive.

Often it is about experimenting with different ways of living, from the

anarchist colonies of the late nineteenth century and the communes of

the nineteen-sixties and seventies, to the New Age travelers of the

nineteen-nineties. Attempts are made, with varying degrees of success,

to challenge dominant forms of sexual relationship. Non-monogamy, serial

monogamy, anonymous sex, celibacy, polymorphous perversity have all at

some point been argued for as ways of breaking down internalised

oppression and relating to one another in a non-capitalist and/or

non-patriarchal manner. The importance of friendship has been asserted

over the isolation of coupledom, and the chosen family replaces blood

ties. The stereotypical lone mothers and lonely homosexuals who serve as

warnings to those who live outside conventional family structures may

have support networks unimaginable to those who have not had to create

their own communities.[11]

Whether sexuality can be the basis for rather than an aspect of

community has been a central debate for lesbian and gay activists. Most

recently, originating in the USA and drawing on rhetoric from Third

World nationalism, the concept of a Queer Nation has been used in

attempts to draw together groups of sexual outsiders, men and women,

black and white, gay and non-gay (but definitely not straight), in an

inclusive movement. The language of nationalism is one most anarchists

would reject as rooted in a history of definition through exclusion and

domination. However, the idea of an imagined community based less on

shared identity than on shared oppression, or sexual otherness, has more

to offer.[12] In particular, it makes possible the move from

organisation based on affinity groups, to the development of coalitions,

working with difference rather than by separation.[13] How far this is

really prefigurative is questionable however: a community based on

shared oppression may come to need oppression in order to maintain its

identity. An emphasis on difference and diversity may end up fossilising

the sexual/social categories of a particular moment in time, (see some

equal opportunities checklists for examples). And the celebration of

difference can obscure inequalities in power, which is a major reason

why it is so hard for groups like Queer Nation to sustain themselves

over time. What can be prefigurative, however, is not the specific

composition of particular communities or organisations, but the creative

attempt to live and work in new ways; the process rather than the

result. (Seeing it like this can also undercut the pessimism that often

follows painful failures).

Transformation

Prefiguration is about more than making a safe space for yourself

(important though that is). Both the disruptions of transgression and

the experimentation of prefiguration can be part of an attempt to

transform a whole society. Whether or not sexuality and sexual

relationships are seen as central to social change, they must be part of

it. It is easy to see (after many illustrative failures of attempts to

live a new life) how both external factors such as economic insecurity

and internal ones such as emotional insecurity help to reinforce the

sexual status quo. Rather than leading to pessimism, these connections

can inspire attempts to rethink the ways in which change is possible.

Although single issue campaigns focusing on legislation around the body

and sexual behaviour are to that extent reformist, they generate new

constituencies, and enable new and more radical questions to be raised

about sex, society, and the state. The conflicts and contradictions of

campaigns aimed at a broader notion of sexual liberation allow difficult

questions to be asked about the shaping of our desires and fantasies,

and the extent to which they can be separated from the society which

produces them.

Imagining the Twenty-first Century

Chaos: the order of the day

Postmodernist theory, making its breakthrough from academic subculture

to style magazines, claims to challenge the idea of authoritative forms

of knowledge, and rejects traditional ways of understanding and

explaining the world, or even the possibility of doing so. Although it

puts anarchism as a world view in the dustbin of history along with

every other ism (except postmodern/ism — perhaps best seen as itself the

dustbin), the rejection of hierarchy and authority, the emphasis on

diversity can be seen as anarchism under an alias: theoretical outlawry.

The association between anarchism and chaos, which has so often been a

source of irritation and disavowal for anarchists, becomes a virtue when

chaos theory is proposed on T-shirts and greeting cards as a paradigm of

post-modern life. If anarchism can after all be thought of as an

approach, a critique, a set of questions to be asked about power

relations, rather than a theory or set of answers, then perhaps it can

escape the fate of yesterday’s discarded ideologies.[14]

Postmodern Bodies and Sexualities

In postmodernist rhetoric, fixed identities become fluid, boundaries

dissolve, fragmentation replaces illusions of wholeness, nothing is

natural and everything is constructed. If ideas about human nature no

longer seem an adequate basis for discussing sexual and social

possibilities, the approach of the twenty-first century has seen

dramatic changes in ways of understanding the body. If the Pill made sex

possible without reproduction, new reproductive technologies are making

reproduction possible without sex.[15] If woman’s body has been

conceptualised by traditionalists and by many feminist theorists as

reproductive body, what happens when that link is broken? Will there be

‘women’ in the twenty-first century? Or ‘men’? (Are men conceptualised

in bodily terms in the same way as women?) Medical technologies seem to

promise the deconstruction and reconstruction of bodies , genders,

sexualities, which appear at the same time utterly interwoven and yet

capable of separation. In terms of bodily transformation, sex-change

surgery was only a start; now the taking of hormones to produce what

some proponents describe as a third sex, or the use of plastic surgery

as a radical aesthetic statement suggest the limitless possibilities of

high technology. Orlan, the French performance artist who broadcasts the

surgical transformation of her body on live video link says:

The body itself is an object for redesign. It is redundant, failing to

meet the demands of the modern world My work raises questions about its

status in our society and the future for coming generations.[16]

The body is conceptualised as matter, as personal property to be

remodeled. Not just by medical professionals — there is a thriving

do-it-yourself and artisanal culture as well, of bodybuilding, tattooing

and piercing, while therapists provide the interior redesign.

Recent developments in genetics and biotechnology, not just the crossing

of species to create new kinds of animals, or the exchange of human with

non-human genes, but the very idea of biological engineering and genetic

recombination pose new challenges to the boundaries between humans and

other animals.[17] Meanwhile, cyborg theorists claim that the

human/machine distinction is finally on its way out with the latest

developments in information technology.

Why should our bodies start or end at the skin? On a computer network

there is no ultimate distinction between the human and mechanical

components. The Cartesian mind/body, machine/organism,

male/female/life/death distinctions are meaningless … in cyberspace. We

are all hybrids, mosaics, chimaeras.[18]

In this scenario, your grandmother’s pacemaker or hearing aid makes her

a cyborg without knowing it, using technology to overcome bodily

limitations. Her grandchildren are already beginning to be conscious

cyborgs, welcoming the dissolution of boundaries in a world without

limits. And sex? In Sadie Plant’s story ‘Cybersex’ she writes:

… the telecom’s revolution is accompanied by a sexual revolution that is

making old style masculinity increasingly obsolete. To be sure, this is

a quieter change than the great ‘liberation’ of the 1960s, but only

because it is more widespread, diffuser, diverse, and so difficult to

name and define. ‘Queer’ is one way of putting it, but even this has

limits when dealing with 1990’s galaxy of explorations of sexuality and

experiments with — and beyond sex. Dance and drugs began to rival the

sexual experience altogether, and there were years of lesbian chic,

fashionable S&M and a widespread interest in piercing and tattooing all

of which contributed to a new willingness to experiment with the human

organism and what it can do and feel. Normality became obsolete.[19]

And if normality is obsolete, transgression becomes the new normality.

Does this kind of theorising challenge or transform existing power

relations, or does it mask them with yet another fantasy of power and

control?

Postfeminism and Postanarchism?

Fantasy and Cyberspace

What is missing from visions like these is any sense of history or

social or economic context. Experiments ‘with — and beyond — sex’ are

not new. Their fashion and visibility in the 1990s are shaped by factors

such as responses to the threat of AIDS, commercial imperatives, and

socio-economic developments which make possible the places and spaces

where such changes can happen for small numbers of people.

Experimentation with ‘the human organism and what it can do and feel’

has a long and terrible history, which has marked the very fantasies

which are claimed as liberatory. For chains and black leather to have

their power as sexual fetishes, they have to have been used in

non-fantasised, non-consenting situations. Subversion? Or is that claim

itself a fantasy of power and control, of imaginary freedoms unaffected

by social constraints?

Technological developments are accorded enormous power:

Virtual reality is a space that is neither real in the old sense nor is

it nothing nor is it fantasy…That alone is devastating to the whole

philosophical world view and undermines all the gender and power

relations.[20]

In cyberspace, you can represent yourself as whatever gender, race, or

bodily conformation you choose, and engage in virtual encounters with

others who may be playing the same games. Sexualised interactions have

become common, and the first allegations of virtual adultery are about

to hit the divorce courts in the USA. Is this the imagination in power?

Yes, the internet can provide a space where people can experiment with

identities, fantasise other worlds and perhaps thereby change their own.

So can the printed word or traditional storytelling.[21] Women, people

with disabilities, and black people using the internet have been

subjected to abuse and harassment. The fact that they could disguise

themselves, or that their abusers can, seems to miss the point, which is

that it is the imagined reality of the body which invites the

replication of off-line power relations. Whatever identity we construct

for ourselves on the net is rooted in what we understand ourselves and

others to be in the bodies hunched over the keyboard.

Liberatory Technologies?

The idea of the integrity of the human body, problematic though it is,

has been useful as a way of arguing against medical approaches which

treat the body as a collection of parts. Theories about the dissolution

of bodily boundaries look rather different from the perspective of

Indian peasants forced by poverty to sell their kidneys, working class

women in the United States acting as surrogate mothers for the rich, or

middle-aged women having unnecessary hysterectomies. Virtual reality is

hardly accessible to those whose labour in the other kind of reality

produces the raw material for the computers and the food for their

operators. No theory of the liberatory powers of technology can afford

to overlook or downplay the conditions of its production and

consumption.

This is more than a question of asking who gets left out or made

invisible in these imaginings of the future. There is also the point

that technology embodies social relations and would itself need to be

transformed as part of a wider process of social transformation.[22] Too

often, new forms of technological and biological determinism are

masquerading as fluidity. If biology is not destiny, why do we need to

change our bodies with drugs or surgery, or pretend we have a different

one in cyberspace in order to challenge existing notions of sex and

gender? The idea that technology will do away with the social relations

which produce it is to look for a technological fix for problems which

need to be addressed in far more complex ways. The issue is not

technology on the one hand versus nature on the other. Where does the

technology come from? How are our understandings of it produced? Who

designed it, who made it, who uses it, what and who is excluded by it?

Fantasising about the future is itself an important kind of

prefiguration. If we want actively to transform the world, imagination

is crucial. But fantasies that deny the limitations of our bodies are

not transcending the Cartesian split between mind and body, they are

reinforcing it. Undermining existing power and gender relations needs an

understanding of the way they, too, are embedded in a material reality

which is all too resistant to our attempts to change it. What will

twenty-first century sex be like? I don’t know. The question is not

whether there is a true inner sexuality to be liberated, but which ways

of understanding ourselves make it possible to act with some chance of

bringing about positive changes. The dreams of the future are embedded

in the power relations of the present. A materialist, embodied anarchism

will try to encompass both.

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[1] Greenway, Judy, (1993).

[2] Haaland, Bonnie, (1993) illustrates these themes in her study of

Emma Goldman.

[3] O’Sullivan, Sue, (1988).

[4] I am not suggesting that it is a negative development to have such

images in the mainstream — far from it — simply that it raises

contradictions around the notion of disrupting the normal.

[5] ‘Bad Attitude’ is a ‘radical women’s newspaper’ with a strong

anarchist feminist input, published irregularly in London since 1992.

[6] quoted in lootens, tricia and henry, alice, (1985), p.7.

[7] Boston Women’s Health Collective, (1978).

[8] Watney , Simon, in Carter, Erica and Watney, Simon, (1989), quoted

in Boffin, Tessa, and Gupta, Sunil, (1990), p.164.

[9] quoted in Gray, Louise, (1996).

[10] lootens, patrica, and henry, alice, (1985), p.7.

[11] Weeks, J., Donovan, C., and Heaphy, B., (1995 and 1996).

[12] The idea of imagined community is taken from Benedict Anderson, who

uses it as a way of understanding how nationalism gets constructed.

Anderson, Benedict, (1991).

[13] Reagon, (1983).

[14] To argue for anarchism as an approach, though, is to assert a value

for it which has no place in a fully fledged postmodernist perspective.

But then neither does postmodernism.

[15] See, e.g., Spallone, Patricia, (1989), and Van Dyck, José, (1995).

Thanks to the students in my class on Women Health and Reproduction who

have helped me to formulate these issues.

[16] quoted in Armstrong, Rachel, (1996), p.90.

[17] Spallone, (1989).

[18] Armstrong, Rachel, (1996), p. 90

[19] Plant, Sadie, (1994/5), p.92.

[20] Plant, Sadie, quoted in Grant, Linda, (1994).

[21] Piercy, Marge, (1993), is an inspiring science-fiction exploration

of the potential of biological and computer technologies.

[22] Albury, David, and Schwartz, Joseph, (1982).