PART I: POLITICAL SCIENCE AND SEXUALITY

Pioneering work by Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Magnus Hirschfeld in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the brave political activism of groups such as the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society in the 1950s helped pave the way for the gay rights movement we know today. But the more influential voices in the study of sexuality were those of Sigmund Freud and Alfred Kinsey—scholars whose work was framed by a heterosexual norm and its gendered implications. Freud devoted considerable attention to a problem suffered by women of his era: hysteria. As Rachel Maines (Reference Maines1999) documents, treatment of hysteria was thought to require “bringing the fluids down” and releasing tension built up in the uterus. Techniques devised for treating the problem included pelvic massage (i.e., being masturbated by male doctors), a practice that was considered too labor-intensive to be conducted single-handedly. Consequently, doctors in the early twentieth century invented devices that could do the job for them and, in some instances, constructed elaborate mechanisms that could “treat” several women at once in operating theaters, thus increasing both efficiency and profit. Doctors reported, with no small degree of surprise, the coarse language women used during treatment, their vocalizations, and their apparent paroxysms. Most also trumpeted the success of such treatments, citing women's statements that they felt much better afterward. That such treatments were perhaps sexual was overlooked. What is instructive about Maines's work is what it reveals about the gap between our understanding of bodies, gender, and sexuality. Freud's theories of sexuality were part of a heterosexual trend that continues to this day, one that pathologizes women's bodies, denies women's capacity for sexuality and sexual agency, and allocates sexual health and freedom to men.

A similar lesson can be found in the public's response to Alfred Kinsey's research. When Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948, his findings attracted considerable media attention largely because the data he reported showed that men have sex younger, outside marriage, more often, and under a wider variety of circumstances—alone, with other men, with prostitutes, and with animals—than anyone had previously documented. His findings were received by the public as titillating and landed him on the cover of Life magazine largely, it seems, because he confirmed what half the population already knew. Moreover, even in the sexually repressive climate of the time, his research on and publication of information about male sexual behavior was socially accepted. Such was not the case when he published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953. That book, which related similar findings about the sexuality of women, was considered shocking by many readers and ultimately foreshadowed the decline and demise of his career as a sex researcher. It was in this same cultural climate that political science germinated and began to flourish.

If there is one lesson we should take from this brief history of sexuality it is this: things are seldom as they are imagined, but scholarship is much more popular when empiricism resonates with the belief systems that uphold a heterosexual norm and all the gendered assumptions that this implies. We have learned a lot in the years since Freud and Kinsey. We have known for some time that genders are not fixed, biological, pre-discursive realities, but are instead memes rendered meaningful through practice (Butler Reference Butler1990; Butler Reference Butler2004; Fausto-Sterling Reference Fausto-Sterling2000; Currah, Juang, and Minter Reference Currah, Juang and Minter2006). We have also recognized the multiplicity of meanings otherwise associated with the body: healthy, ill, or obese; damaged, repaired, or surgically altered; whole or broken down into constitutive parts; genetic, fetal, or pregnant (Hyde Reference Hyde1997; Kirkland Reference Kirkland2008; Moore Reference Moore2008; Pitts-Taylor Reference Pitts-Taylor2003; Pitts-Taylor Reference Pitts-Taylor2007; Pitts-Taylor Reference Pitts-Taylor2008). So, too, we have become aware that sexuality is not merely a static set of behaviors intended only for reproduction (a cultural trend perhaps traceable to Darwin), but is instead a culturally and historically variable system of knowledge through which acts are infused with potent social, cultural, and political meaning (Abelove, Barale, and Halperin Reference Abelove, Barale and Halperin1993; D'Emilio and Freedman Reference D'Emilio and Freedman1998; Foucault Reference Foucault1978; Parker, Barbosa, and Aggleton Reference Parker, Barbosa and Aggleton2000; Parker, Petchesky, and Sember Reference Parker, Petchesky and Sember2007; Sedgwick Reference Sedgwick1990; Warner Reference Warner1993; Warner Reference Warner1999). That sexuality and race or ethnicity are linked is no longer merely a reproductive truism; how we understand either term is intimately bound up with the other (e.g., see Cohen Reference Cohen1999; Rollins Reference Rollins2009).

As D'Emilio and Freedman (Reference D'Emilio and Freedman1998) observed in their study of American history, sexual regulation intensifies when other social, political, and economic structures are in crisis. History is rife with episodes of sexual regulation in response to political crises, real or imagined, as demonstrated by such legal and policy debates as divorce reform, anti-miscegenation laws, child custody, abortion, welfare reform, and health care. The language of debates about gays in the military sounds remarkably familiar when juxtaposed with that of debates about blacks and whites serving together in the U.S. military (Wolinsky and Sherrill Reference Wolinsky and Sherrill1993). Today's arguments about same-sex marriage echo those made during Reconstruction as states considered whether or not newly freed slaves should be allowed to marry—not whites, but one another—and what the extension of that right might mean about the value of the institution itself (Cott Reference Cott2002). The study of issues that have pressing importance for the gay and lesbian community is incomplete, however, if we overlook the central role that sex and sexuality play in everyone's political life, because, at a very basic level, these questions all return to the issue of the ways in which the state regulates the reproductive intermingling of bodies. To borrow from Carole Pateman (Reference Pateman1988), the relationships that lie at the center of all of these issues are grounded in a sexual contract and, until recently, that contract was exclusively heterosexual. This situation, however, is changing.

Conflicts over sexual regulation have continued into the twenty-first century, but considerable progress has been made. Although sexuality remains contentious, gay and lesbian people are now able to marry in some states and may become parents in most others. Whether LGBT people may openly serve in the military remains legally uncertain, but support for integration is now stronger than ever. In many parts of the United States and around the world, gays and lesbians enjoy something close to social and political equality with heterosexuals. As the media's coverage of Mark Foley, Ted Haggard, George Rekers, Larry Craig, and Roy Ashburn indicates, the gay-straight distinction is losing its cultural potency. Although it is always entertaining to see conservative, anti-gay men caught with their pants down in the company of other men in chatrooms and airport bathrooms, or while on vacation with male prostitutes, homosexuality per se is no longer the titillating part of the story: hypocrisy is, and neither gays nor straights have a monopoly on that. It may not be too much of an exaggeration to claim that homosexuality is becoming banal, leading to the question: what form of sexual transgression will now take its place?

Another of Rubin's astute insights was her observation that some sexual acts are perceived as occupying a “charmed inner circle” while others are relegated to the realm of the horrible (Reference Rubin, Abelove, Barale and Halperin1984). In much the same way that speech about the rape of women was silenced until feminist scholars drew attention to the problem, the sexual abuse of children went largely unnoticed until that same generation of feminists gave voice to those who could not speak for themselves. (The rape of men remains a taboo subject and is falsely imagined to exist only in prisons.) But, as Adler (Reference Adler2001a; Reference Adler2001b) shows, child pornography did not even become a distinct target of legal prohibition until the 1980s. In the years since, pedophiles and child pornographers have begun to replace homosexuals as the primary targets of sexual censure, as evinced by the popularity of television shows like To Catch a Predator and websites like “Perverted Justice,” not to mention government-run sites that allow parents to locate and identify people in their neighborhood who have been convicted of sex crimes. At present, the political discourse surrounding child sexuality is so shrill that it has become almost impossible to engage in reasonable discussion about the subject (Casper and Moore Reference Casper and Moore2009). Minors engaged in “sexting”—the practice of taking and sending nude or pornographic images over the Internet or with cellular phones—are being prosecuted for possession and distribution of child pornography, a matter that is now being debated in several state legislatures. Inasmuch as the sexual abuse of children is a very real problem, the current state of hysteria too frequently distracts us from the fact that most child abuse is committed in the home by parents or other relatives. This “stranger danger” narrative eclipses more well-reasoned approaches to the problem and has instead made the Internet and technology central targets of state regulation (Angelides Reference Angelides2004; Wolak, Finkelhor, and Mitchell Reference Wolak, Finkelhor and Mitchell2004). The point is not to suggest that in some freakishly imagined future, pedophiles should march on Washington to claim rights and recognition. Instead, this observation should illustrate that a heinous, non-consensual form of sexual abuse escaped notice for a very long time while homosexuality, consensual and adult, reigned as the primary target of censure. Problems such as sexting, teenage pregnancy, sex education policy, and sexual health in general require us to be capable of sustaining reasoned, frank, and informed discussions about not only sex, but also bodies and the processes of physical maturation. Lest we forget that age and sexuality remain important issues as we near the end of life, it merits mention that with the exploding market of drugs to treat erectile dysfunction, the elderly are becoming infected with HIV and other STDs at alarming rates. The ways that these and other related policy issues are studied by political scientists would be greatly enriched by increased attention to the vast and growing body of scholarship committed to sexuality.