Lorna Bracewell knows that the stories we feminists tell about our foremothers, our disagreements, our divisions, our failures and missteps, and our successes and victories all shape the future that we can dare to imagine and bring into being. The story Bracewell tells in Why We Lost the Sex Wars is a deepening and reframing—or we might say a “corrective”—of the history of “the feminist sex wars, also known as the lesbian sex wars, the feminist sexuality debates, and most reductively, the porn wars” (p. 5) that occurred primarily in the United States, but more broadly in Anglo countries, from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s. Bracewell expertly debunks what she calls the “catfight narrative” (p. 5) between anti-porn and sex-radical sides to restore not only their ambiguity and reach but also the radicalism of each perspective. She demonstrates how both were appropriated by liberal discourse and laments that, even though each side was far more revolutionary than we seem to remember, neither addressed adequately or fully the criticisms and perspectives of their women of color and third-world feminist counterparts. Had they done so, Bracewell concludes, liberal and libertarian movements and ideologies would have had a more difficult time eclipsing feminist arguments, and calls for carceral solutions to unwanted sex and sexual violence would be less ubiquitous. In the last chapter of the book, tracing what she calls “the liberal roots of carceral feminism” (p. 181), Bracewell shows how the carceral state became the enforcement apparatus for feminist goals, even in the widely celebrated “slut walk” movement that combats slut shaming and rape culture.
One way to appreciate Bracewell’s contribution to feminist theory is to notice that she is doing a version of the work called for by Claire Hemmings in Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (2011). Bracewell would likely agree that feminists should draw on the “continued radical potential of feminist theory” by interrupting what Hemmings calls the “amenability of narratives” that make up dominant Western perspectives (Hemmings, p. 2). Turning to these narratives, Bracewell meticulously describes the complex field of antagonisms, alliances, and shifts in strategy that played out within US political and legal discourse during the unfolding of the sex wars. She takes readers through court cases, texts, and testimony to show how the radicalism of anti-pornography feminism, which condemned the gendered structural inequalities that were mirrored and replicated in pornography, was replaced by the improbable ideological amalgam of anti-pornography liberalism. At the same time, sex-radical feminism, which also was concerned with the ways patriarchal hierarchy shapes and limits sexual desire, was overtaken by an anti-censorship (so-called pro-sex) feminism that was all about liberal articulations of choice and subversion for subversion’s sake.
The complexities of both feminist positions have been concealed by the catfight narrative; in particular, what has been hidden is that both anti-porn and sex-radical feminists were staunch and outspoken critics of liberal ideology. In the case of anti-pornography feminism, Bracewell reminds us that Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon were principled critics of liberalism. But beginning in the mid-1980s influential liberal legal thinkers took up the anti-pornography position and limited the definitional category of pornography to acts that are explicitly violent. This narrowing served to maintain and reinforce the liberal contours of the public–private distinction and obscured MacKinnon’s and Dworkin’s focus on gendered structural inequality at the heart of all pornographic materials, not just violent porn. In the case of sex-radical feminism, the 1980s witnessed sex-radical feminists entering into strategic alliance with civil libertarian liberals to challenge the anti-pornography politics of MacKinnon and Dworkin. This alliance had the unfortunate effect of undermining sex-radical feminism’s broader and deeper efforts to question and subvert all norms that regulate erotic life.
The careful attention that Bracewell pays to the work of these two movements restores the radicalism of their visions, depicts the complex political field in which they were operating, and laments that their profound critiques of both liberalism and patriarchy were ironically but almost entirely overtaken by liberal legal perspectives and priorities, even though both “sides” were also willing to strategically embrace and deploy liberal arguments themselves. The latter was likely a misstep, as was the fact that they were not listening to and engaging with the writings of authors like Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, Cherrie Moraga, Barbara Smith, Cheryl Clarke, Gloria Anzaldúa, and other women of color. Had they done so, the events of the sex wars might have unfolded quite differently. As radical as both the anti-pornography and sex-radical white feminists were, they were blind to the fact that women of color were themselves advancing more sophisticated and pointed critiques of the racist, capitalist, and gendered hierarchies that permeate the erotic lives of all of us. As Bracewell notes, we would now call these critiques intersectional.
Although she does not say it quite this way, what Bracewell wants us to see about sex is something that women of color and third-world feminists have been better able to keep in sight than have white feminists: how race, class, and gender and their absorbed ideologies and their effects on body consciousness and feelings of shame, on learned and habitual practices of touching, on types of sex education, as well as historical moment and cultural norms, each and all profoundly affect an individual’s experience of sexual desire, erotic longing, and expectations about sexual experience. Bracewell does not comment on the fact that contemporary Black queer scholars have taken up these arguments and developed them in powerful ways. We might note here that this is one way in which we have won the sex wars. Sharon Patricia Holland’s work, for example, in The Erotic Life of Racism (2012, p. 50) directly builds on the scholarship of women of color to show that the erotic is always “connected to a matrix of desiring relations that tend to make it difficult to mark where racist [and colonial, gendered, capitalist] practice begins and where our good desire ends.” Holland carves out feminist space that is at once attentive to structural and contextual conditions that shape and create sexual experience while also trying to open up the possibility for better, less normative, more life-affirming sex.
Was it the case that both anti-porn and sex-radical feminists themselves were not attentive enough to material conditions? Tracing the field of rhetoric and ideology, Bracewell herself fails to bring into focus the explicit anticapitalism of women of color and third-world feminism. Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor, in contrast, repeatedly references and then asks the authors of the Combahee River Collective about their anticapitalist politics in her introduction to How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (2017). Although Bracewell observes that Combahee’s lesbian politics have been forgotten, I wish she had also noticed that their anticapitalism has been either conveniently forgotten or deliberately obscured. Had Bracewell paid attention to this aspect of Combahee’s analysis, it could have given her another angle from which to analyze the many usurpations of feminist politics by liberal ideology. Bracewell’s is an excellent book, a necessary book. I would love to read a sequel wherein Bracewell entwines Combahee’s (and others’) anticapitalism with their critiques of patriarchy, racism, and all forms of normative sexuality to map how we feminists can win the sex wars.
