Vedanti singhal: week 4

Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality

Gayle Rubin focuses on homosexuals, children, paedophiles, women, transvestitism, voyeurism and sadism. The chapter begins with a claim that the author makes about sexuality being a realm which has  its own internal politics, inequities, and modes of oppression. She makes a strong statement which reads as “Sex is always political”. Rubin talks about various eras during which sex was overly politicised. One such time that she delves into was the late 19th century in England and the US. This particular period, social movements focused on “vices” of all sorts. Moral policing happened extensively and crusaders targeted nude paintings, obscene literature, public dancing, abortion etc. The consolidation of Victorian morality, and its apparatus of social, medical, and legal enforcement, was the outcome of a long period of struggle whose results have been bitterly contested ever since. These standards of morality have left a huge imprint on attitudes about sex, parent anxieties, child rearing, sex law etc which are strongly adhered to even today. During the nineteenth century, it was commonly thought that ‘premature’ interest in sex, sexual excitement, and, above all, sexual release, would impair the health and maturation of a child. Theorists differed on the actual consequences of sexual precocity. However, the notion that sex in itself is harmful to the young has been ingrained in today’s social and legal framework that have been designed in a way to prevent minors from engaging in such activities. 

Towards the end of the chapter she elucidates how similar to the capitalist organization of labour and its distribution of rewards and powers, the modern sexual system has been the object of political struggle from its inception and  evolution ever since. “But if the disputes between labour and capital are mystified, sexual conflicts are completely camouflaged.” Sexuality is organized into systems of power, which reward certain individuals and activities, while punishing and suppressing others. The others here being the ones who are different from the “natural” or “normal” and are hence deviants who need to be punished.