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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
How are we to live with the wide varieties of sexuality and gender found across the rapidly changing global order? Whilst some countries have legislated in favour of same-sex marriage and the United Nations makes declarations about gender and sexual equality, many countries across the world employ punitive responses to such differences. In this compelling and original study, Ken Plummer argues the need for a practical utopian project of hope that he calls ‘cosmopolitan sexualities’. He asks: how can we connect our differences with collective values, our uniqueness with multiple group belonging, our sexual and gendered individualities with a broader common humanity? Showing how a foundation for this new ethics, politics and imagination are evolving across the world, he discusses the many possible pitfalls being encountered. He highlights the complexity of sexual and gender cultures, the ubiquity of human conflict, the difficulties of dialogue and the problems with finding any common ground for our humanity.
Cosmopolitan Sexualities takes a bold critical humanist view and argues the need for positive norms to guide us into the future. Highlighting the vulnerability of the human being, Plummer goes in search of historically grounded and potentially global human values like empathy and sympathy, care and kindness, dignity and rights, human flourishing and social justice. These harbour visions of what is acceptable and unacceptable in the sexual and intimate life. Clearly written, the book speaks to important issues of our time and will interest all those who are struggling to finding ways to live together well in spite of our different genders and sexualities.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Cosmopolitan Sexualities
Hope and the Humanist Imagination
Ken Plummer
polity
Copyright © Ken Plummer 2015
The right of Ken Plummer to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2015 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9231-9
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Plummer, Ken.Cosmopolitan sexualities : hope and the humanist imagination / Ken Plummer.pages cmIncludes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-0-7456-7099-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 0-7456-7099-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-7456-7100-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 0-7456-7100-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Sex--Social aspects. I. Title.HQ21.P564 2015306.7--dc23
2014041486
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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In fond memory of
Stan Cohen (1942–2013)
Mary McIntosh (1936–2013)
Michael Schofield (1919–2014)
Jock Young (1942–2013)
Four inspirations
Hate begets hate, violence engenders violence, hypocrisy is answered by hypocrisy, war generates war, and love creates love.
Pitrim A Sorokin, The Ways and Power of Love (1954, p. xi)
Few things have done more harm than the belief on the part of individuals or groups (or tribes or states or nations or churches) that he or she or they are in sole possession of the truth: especially about how to live, what to be & do – & that those who differ from them are not merely mistaken, but wicked or mad: & need restraining or suppressing. It is a terrible and dangerous arrogance to believe that you alone are right, have a magical eye which sees the truth, & that others cannot be right if they disagree.
Isaiah Berlin, ‘Notes on prejudice’ 1981; in New York Review of Books, 18 October 2001 (Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London on behalf of The Beneficiaries of the Estate of Isaiah Berlin Copyright © Isaiah Berlin 1981)
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Website
Abbreviations
Introduction
A troubled world
A tale to tell
An infinity of lists
Notes
Part One: Humanism and the Making of Cosmopolitan Sexualities
1 Plural Sexualities: Making Valued Human Lives
Plural lives
Our selves, our tribes
Contingency and the varieties of sexual experience
Critical humanism
Humanist troubles
Vulnerability and the dignity of the self
Plural values, valued lives
Search for common humanities
A world ethics for critical humanism?
Valued sexual lives
Notes
2 Transformational Sexualities: Making Twenty-First-Century Sexual Lives
Transformational sexualities
Reproductive sexualities, techno sexualities
Mediated sexualities
Electronic sexualities
Screen Sexualities
Digital sexualities
Familial sexualities
Gendered sexualities
Violent sexualities
Post-honour sexualities
Secular, sacred and fundamentalist sexualities
Commodified sexualities
Urban sexualities and their assemblages
AIDS and sexualities
Divided sexualities, pauperized sexualities
Individualized, reflective sexualities
Migrating, diasporic and hybrid sexualities
Global sexualities/mobile sexualities
Conclusion: making sexual politics
Notes
3 Cosmopolitan Sexualities: Living With Different Lives
On cosmopolitanism
Constructing cosmopolitan sexualities in a global arena
Creating international global movements and counter-movements
Building arenas of transnational governance and global civil culture
Connecting transnational media, digitalization and global networking
Establishing agendas for the international public debate on cosmopolitan sexualities
The creation of global human rights regimes
Developing international law and ‘cosmopolitan’ legal systems
Creating the monitoring and debating apparatus for cosmopolitan sexualities
Mainstreaming the global discourses of a common humanity
Troubles ahead: the contradictions and limits of cosmopolitanism
Troubled global governance
A differentiated universalism
A sceptical universalism
A grounded universalism
A paradoxical tolerance
Pushing the boundaries of cosmopolitan sexualities
The (very) long walk to cosmopolitan sexualities
Notes
Part Two: Inclusive Sexualities: Nudging Towards a Better World
4 Cultural Sexualities: Cultivating Awareness of Complexity
Global sexualities and research
World cultures and macro sexualities
Impure cultures and subterranean sexualities
Local cultures and micro sexualities
Conclusion: complex cultures
Notes
5 Contested Sexualities: Inventing Enemies, Making Boundaries
Scaling the battlegrounds
Divisive sexualities, agonistic politics
Gender schisms
Ethnic schisms
Religious schisms
Colonial schisms
Generational schisms
The fault line of contested sexualities
On boundaries, belonging and the vulnerabilities of normativity
Boundary sexualities
Normative sexualities
Vulnerable sexualities
Looking ahead
Notes
6 Communicative Sexualities: On the Hope and Empathy for a Common Global Humanity
Empathic sexualities
Narrative sexualities
Dialogic sexualities
Ethical sexualities
Caring sexualities: global ‘love’ and violence reduction for all
Global gender and sexual rights: dignity for all
Flourishing sexualities: actualizing ‘good lives’ for all
Just sexualities: gender, sexual and social justice for all
Democratic sexualities
Bleak sexualities
Hopeful sexualities
The little grounded everyday ‘utopian’ processes of global hope
In the end
Notes
Epilogue: Contingent Sexualities – Dancing into the Sexual Labyrinth
Personal tales
Textual tales
Research tales
Troubled tales
Mobile tales
References
Index: 100 Samples of Multiple Sexualities
Index: General
End User License Agreement
Boxes
1.1 Why do we do sex? Sampling a multiplicity of motivations
1.2 How do we talk of sex? Sampling a multiplicity of sexual metaphors
1:3 Ecce homo: Sampling a multiplicity of human beings
1.4 Ethical sexualities: Sampling a multiplicity of better and lesser ‘human’ sexualities
2.1 Modern sexual worlds: Sampling a multiplicity of social worlds
2.2 Selling sex: Sampling a multiplicity of sexual commodification
3.1 Cultures of public sexual problems: Sampling a multiplicity of global debates
3.2 Tracking human sexual rights: The Sexual Rights Initiative (SRI)
4.1 The impurity of cultures: Sampling a multiplicity of contingent and intersecting sexualities
4.2 Learning about sexual life: Sampling a multiplicity of ethnographies of sexualities
4.3 Gender pluralism: Sampling a multiplicity of genders
5.1 Generational sexualities: Sampling a multiplicity of modern Western gay generations
5.2 Sex panics: Sampling a multiplicity of moral purity crusades around sex
5.3 Life is not easy: Sampling a multiplicity of humanity’s perpetual vulnerabilities
6.1 Dialogues: The twelve pillars for dialogic civility over cosmopolitan sexualities
6.2 Cosmopolitan and inclusive sexualities: Monitoring progress on websites
Guide
Cover
Contents
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Website
http://kenplummer.com/cosmosexualities/
You may also be interested to visit this website connected to the book which provides links to a broad range of further resources relevant to Cosmopolitan Sexualities.
Abbreviations
ACHPR
African Charter on Human and People’s Rights
AI
Amnesty International
AIDS
acquired immune deficiency syndrome
APF
Asia Pacific Forum
ARSRC
Africa Regional Sexuality Resource Centre
ART
antiretroviral therapy
ART
assisted reproductive technology
ARV
antiretroviral
ASEAN
Association of Southeast Asian Nations
AU
African Union
AVEN
Asexual Visibility and Education Network
BDSM
bondage, discipline, sadism, masochism
CATW
Coalition Against Trafficking in Women
CBRC
cross-border reproductive care
CEDAW
Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women
CHS
Culture, Health and Sexuality
(journal)
CLAM
Latin America Centre on Sexuality and Human Rights
CMA
critical medical anthropology
CRC
Commission on the Rights of the Child
CRPD
Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
CSA
child sexual abuse
CSO
civil society organization
CSS
critical sexualities studies
ECHR
European Convention of Human Rights
EU
European Union
FGM
female genital mutilation
GAATW
Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women
GCVP
Global Campaign for Violence Prevention
GDI
Gender-Related Development Index
GJM
Global Justice Movement
GIFT
Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking (UN)
GII
Gender Inequality Index
HDI
Human Development Index
HIV
human immunodeficiency virus
HRW
Human Rights Watch
HSI
Human Security Index
IASSCS
International Association for the Study of Sexuality, Culture and Society
ICCPR
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
ICERD
International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination
ICESCR
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
ICTY
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
ICJ
International Court of Justice
IHDI
Inequality-Adjusted Human Development Index
IHEU
International Humanist and Ethical Union
ILGA
International Lesbian and Gay Association
IMF
International Monetary Fund
INGO
international nongovernmental organization
IRRAG
International Reproductive Rights Research Group
IWHC
International Women’s Health Coalition
LGBT
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (other letters can be added as appropriate, e.g., Q for queer; I for intersex)
MDG
Millennium Development Goals
MDMA
ecstasy: empathogenic, phenethylamine and amphetamine drug
MSM
men who have sex with men
MENA
Middle East and North African
NATO
North Atlantic Treaty Alliance
NAMBLA
North American Man Boy Love Association
NGO
nongovernmental organization
OAS
Organization of American States
OHCHR
Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights
OIC
Organization of Islamic Cooperation
PAL
Paedophile Action for Liberation
PIE
Paedophile Information Exchange
SPW
Sexual Policy Watch
SRHR
sexual and reproductive health and rights
SRI
Sexual Rights Initiative
UN
United Nations
UPR
Universal Periodic Review (United Nations)
UDHR
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
UNAIDS
United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS
UNCHR
United Nations Commission on Human Rights
UNFPA
United Nations Population Fund
UNICEF
United Nations Children’s Fund
UNIFEM
United Nations Fund for Women
WCF
World Congress of Families
WHO
World Health Organization
WSF
World Social Forum
WSW
women who have sex with women
Introduction
O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is!
O brave new world, That has such people in it!
Shakespeare: The Tempest, 1610
Endless forms most beautiful and wonderful
Charles Darwin, On the Origins of the Species, 1859
Planet Earth currently houses well over seven billion human beings in some two hundred nations with thousands of ethnic tribes often in conflict, and more than seven thousand languages, each with histories stretching back across the millennia. Imagine, if you dare, the sheer multiplicity of various gendered, sexual and intimate relationships and practices that these little animals, us, have experienced as they have walked the earth through time and space; and the different religions, states and economies that have been brought into existence that have helped shape them. Here is a truly vast labyrinth of desire, gender and reproduction. Think perhaps of the sheer complexities, or not, of your own life; and those of your parents, grandparents and their communities too. Think of all the films you may have seen, the novels you might have read, the television you might have watched, the music you have heard about human relationships and sex. Spend a few minutes searching some of the millions of sex sites on the web. Then massively multiply all this into the global gendered world of human sexual complexity: the human sexual labyrinth.
Now this is indeed a challenge – and it is what this small study is about. I want you to stand with me in amazement at this oh so ‘incorrigibly plural’ world (to quote Louis MacNeice’s poem ‘Snow’), this ‘pluriverse of differences’, and these ‘endless forms most beautiful’. I want you to wonder, along with Shakespeare, how many goodly creatures there are here and, maybe, how beauteous mankind is. Or, just maybe, to ask how many of these creatures are really not so beautiful at all. And with this, to ponder just how it is we can live together with all this difference. In this book, I puzzle about these varieties of embodied, emotional human sexual and gendered experiences, and ask how we humans live, or fail to live, with them. I will not be aiming here to chart a topography of these ‘world varieties of sexual experience’, to document ‘the global history of sex’, to review the multiple forms of the ‘world gender order’, to detail any kind of global scientific truth about diverse and gendered sexualities, or even to provide a manual of titillating sex acts: all this has now been tried in very many places. In this book, my focus lies with the challenge of grasping human vulnerabilities and asking how we can live with the diversities of our genders and sexualities and their tangled, emotional, biographical bodies; how we can build some common cosmopolitan values that will enable us to connect such diversity; how we can appreciate just where boundaries and borders do indeed have to be drawn; and how we can start to build up cosmopolitan institutions that make all these tasks possible.
To help me in this, I draw on the long history of cosmopolitanism, which suggests a form of everyday practical consciousness that recognizes human differences and then struggles to build social structures and cultures that help make diversity a workable feature of the humane, good social life. It is a goal to strive for, it harbours utopian visions and there are a few signs to indicate that we may be a little on our way towards its development. At the same time, the path to its realization is cluttered with major problems and difficulties that need facing head on. My version of cosmopolitanism is a humanist theory; and my stance in this book will be broadly that of critical humanism. This takes seriously the centrality of a contingent human vulnerability, agency and meaning emerging alongside global human values: empathy and dialogue, care and kindness, dignity and rights, actualization and human flourishing, and fairness and justice. Despite a continual attack from many directions on humanism, it provides an imagination of great value.
A troubled world
And yet, everyday, as I have been writing this book, I have been torn with a dark hope. As the daily world news arrives, I am given a repeatedly clear vision of the devaluing of human lives across the world: the damaged and destroyed lives in the wars, violence and terrorist acts in Syria, the Ukraine, Iraq, Palestine, the Congo and elsewhere. We live in a very cruel, nasty world of dehumanization that is destroying lives for generations to come. Money, religion, nation and power (usually linked to gender and masculinity) seem to be the prime motivating forces for much of this misery and conflict. Yet, at the same time, I can also see the flourishing of human lives – in music and art, in education and care, in sport and science, in hundreds of little miracles of everyday human kindness. It is a joyous world of human creativity and caring. And this contrast will be a recurrent theme of this book. The bad news is humanity’s inhumanity to humanity. Often with the help of the state and religion, unbelievable violence and cruelty are heaped on large numbers of people. Systems of ranking, honour and status are used to brutally destroy ‘the other’. Powerful elites get away with murder, and tragic human suffering among the masses is ubiquitous. But the good news is humanity’s evolving compassion, hope and creative activism. People in the world fight back: they do not like the horrors of the world, they create new movements to resist them and they bring dreams of a better world. Cosmopolitan sexualities, and this book, form part of that dream.
Just as embodied human vulnerabilities are displayed everywhere, so too is human resilience. As I write, I hear of Meriam Ibrahim in the Sudan being sentenced to death for marrying a Christian man and committing apostasy from Islam. Following a worldwide response, her sentence was repealed and she was allowed to leave the country. A young student is gang-raped on a bus in Delhi in December 2012 and dies two weeks later; it leads to a public outcry about male violence towards women in India, where a woman is raped every 20 minutes. New social movements are born.1 In Russia, gay men become objects of new regressive discriminatory legislation. A major campaign is organized on the Internet against this move. In the UK, the failure to deal with female genital mutilation (involving thousands of women each year) and child sexual abuse become national scandals, and public concern forces the government to act. And in Chibok, Nigeria, Boko Haram (meaning ‘non-Muslim teaching is forbidden’ and responsible for at least 10,000 deaths) kidnapped more than 250 female students as part of a widespread Islamic insurgency in northern Nigeria, professing their opposition to the education of girls and the Westernization of Nigeria. Many of the girls become so-called ‘sex slaves’. Despite both a world response and a local one (the ‘Bring Our Girls Back’ movement), as I write, this remains a very bleak story.
Only a few incidents like these get reported. They take place against the backdrop of worldwide silenced human sexual suffering, where women are regulated in multiple ways, children are abused routinely, same-sex relations are outlawed, and much more. For example, in more than 70 countries, there are laws that criminalize homosexual relations. In Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Chechnya, gay sex can lead to the death penalty. From Europe to Africa to the Americas to Asia, case after case of torture, ill-treatment, violence and discrimination against lesbians and gay men is documented. There are also very many cases of transgender rights activists – the ultimate gender outlaws – being abused across the world. And so it goes on.
A tale to tell
In this book I puzzle over some of these problems and suggest a few pathways ahead, giving my account in two major connected parts. The first part examines the transformations of our sexualities in the early decades of the twenty-first century, suggests growing variety, and then charts some of the ways we are developing to try to live with this difference. The second part examines some of the problems encountered in doing this, taking the strong stand that if we are ever to advance we have to be clear about the universal values we all need to strive for and incorporate into our everyday lives now. The ‘we’ here is a global one, not a narrow Western one, which seeks progressive change for all and not for just a few.
Chapter 1 sets the scene by locating cosmopolitanism in a humanist tradition, describing it and suggesting the many problems it brings in its wake. My critical humanism is far from being a mainstream stance taken by others who research such matters. Indeed, for some it might seem dangerously old-fashioned. So I have to spend a little time saying what it is and why I use it. Above all, I highlight human actions and positive values. Chapter 2 then suggests that in the modern world the range of global possibilities for human sexual diversity is rapidly accelerating. It outlines some of the key conditions that are bringing about these sexual transformations and claims that as most of these changes are unlikely to go away this century, we had better learn to work with them. The next chapter then proceeds to demonstrate that the notion of cosmopolitan sexualities (or cosmosexualities) is already emerging as a set of developing structures and practical everyday responses to help us handle these problems of modern diversities. But it also claims this brings many problems; so I spend some time building a framework of critical issues that we need to bear in mind all the time when thinking about cosmosexualities. If we let these critical issues fall from view, we will be in trouble.
With these problems firmly in mind, Part Two can then examine some of the grounded utopian processes that might nudge us a little closer towards developing a theory of cosmopolitan sexualities, ultimately cultivating inclusive sexualities. Inclusive sexualities are those that can embrace sexual and gender complexity and variety. Chapter 4 shows the vital need to grasp the complexity of sexual and gender cultures and the importance of bridging cultural wholes with microscopic human actions. Chapter 5 highlights the importance of regulating sexuality, the importance of norms, and the ubiquity and inevitability of conflict. Human sexualities are everywhere embroiled in contested norms, and there are subterranean traditions at work that resist dominant orders (hegemonies) in many ways. Chapter 6 thus turns to the importance of fostering a cosmopolitan imagination through narratives, dialogues, empathy and common norms. It leads to a discussion of the kinds of societies in which all this can be fostered, and I look around the world to see where such ideas are being enabled. Finally, I suggest the importance of examining what I will call grounded everyday utopias, where we can find important human values already in practice in the world now, and suggest how these provide clues for pathways to better worlds and lives for all, not just the elite few. Although it is fraught with inevitable tensions and problems, I claim we have to champion a localism that will, in the future, blend with cosmopolitanism if there is to be any hope for a better world for all people, where human sexual differences will not cause so much pain.
As far back as we can trace, the human world has been a world of sexual difference. This has been well documented, and here I bring some of the key features of this complexity together. I see human beings as irrevocably plural, vulnerable and fragile; human social worlds as intransigently ambivalent, aleatory and agonistic; and human life as obdurately dwelling in perpetual contradiction, contingency and conflict. Six central but well-known ideas shape my thinking; there is nothing particularly fancy or complicated about them.2 They are the ideas of social structure, human action, relations, culture, story and contingencies. I see structures, like gender, nations and inequalities, as the deep forces that underpin human life: they work like tectonic plates and move only slowly. I see human actions, like empathy and care, as the meaningful practices through which we actively make our human worlds and make sense of them. I see relations with others – loving, hating – as the key constituents of making human order. I see cultures, like media and religions, as symbolic meanings and skills we develop to make sense of our everyday problems: they work like toolboxes of human action. Stories of all kinds and shapes are the key to these cultures: we make stories, live our lives through stories, make sense of our lives through them, even as they then exercise ‘hegemonic’ power over us.3 Stories animate human life. We live lives, including sexual lives, through stories. And ultimately, I see contingencies as the chance and drift moments of these social lives as we actively move along continuously and creatively, making life chancy, precarious and risky, but, hopefully, also always worth living.
The book invites reflections on a wide range of complicated and important issues. In it, I seek to review, revise and ultimately challenge both the reader and myself to see the ubiquity of difference, the intransigence of conflict, the inevitability of disappointment and the importance and necessity of hope. It is a small work of synthesis; it stands a little on the shoulders of giants and could not have been written without the cumulative labours and insights of many brilliant scholars, past and present. While I acknowledge many of them in a very long bibliography and endnotes, this is not meant as a work of detailed exegesis or discussion of others’ writings. My task is more formal, abstract and general, even though this does go a little against the grain. I do, however, give a little more background on the website that accompanies this book (see http://kenplummer.com/cosmosexualities). To present a full account of human sexual variety would require an encyclopedic multivolume project, and my challenge is the opposite. I am attempting a succinct and readable overview of key themes and issues. In some ways, the book is a small companion piece to my earlier studies, Telling Sexual Stories and Intimate Citizenship.
No writing is a simple view from nowhere. Approaching the age of 70, I come with a lot of baggage and many people to thank (they know who they are: I do not list them here). I am a white male gay partnered UK citizen – and this has shaped much of my life. I illuminate this in an afterword epilogue where I show how embedded a personal life is in research findings. I would like to give the view from everywhere, but this would after all be nowhere. So, try as I may to be global, I come back to my home and my roots. In truth, it cannot easily be otherwise for any writer.
An infinity of lists
Finally, a brief comment on one unusual feature of this study: the lists. A little before I started writing this book, I stumbled across Umberto Eco’s magnificent The Infinity of Lists (2009), which was inspired by an exhibition he arranged to suggest an imagery and art in awe at the complexity and infinity of all life, especially human life. Here are lists and visions of armies and martyrs, of the garden of earthly delights, of paradise, of fruits, fish and meats, of ships, of angels and demons, of the war dead, of perfumes and things, of places and cities – and on, and on, and on. Here is the ineffability of lists, their inexhaustibility, their infinity. As I delighted in the imagery of this book, I was prompted to add to his listings the infinities of sexualities. I have long sensed a difference between closed sexualities, which bundle our sexualities into a tightly restricted code, and open sexualities, which keep alive a vision of human possibilities. Lists can indicate this openness – a multitude of sexualities both experienced and awaiting experience: past, present and future. To capture a little of this, I turn in this book to the list. The list affords me the chance to briefly demonstrate a very wide range of examples, suggesting too that such examples are merely indicative. Much more could be said. Each item on a list could become its own book; each ending on a list brings its own etc. etc. etc…. The list could be extended with yet more examples, but it has to end somewhere. For a book about multiplicities, it is a good and, I think, effective little tool.
There are now a great many encyclopaedias, dictionaries and handbooks written on the wonders of the human sexual spectrum – whole libraries of millions of books in fact. The modern world brought with it a taxonomic zeal searching for order, and it was not long before this classificatory urge was applied to human sexualities in the controversial pioneering work of the early sexologists such as Krafft-Ebing, Hirschfield, Ellis and Freud at the fin de siècle. The great and persecuted Magnus Hirschfield calculated that there were 43,046,721 possible sexual types, and suggested running a ‘Department Store of Love’, ‘where everyone can purchase their favourite fetish objects and achieve complete satisfaction of their desires’.4 (This was, of course, before his library was closed down, his books burnt and his life destroyed.) Today, though, we can indeed click on any sex website and find that his wildest dreams have (almost) come true.
This book does not aim to get bogged down in all this detail. My challenge is to be crisp and clear, take stock of this diversity, ponder how we can live with it across the world, and look ahead. I will use the pleasure of the list as a tool to help with this and I will succeed in my task if I can demonstrate the ubiquity and global challenge of living with human sexual variety and can lay out a few pathways to move through what is surely a very troublesome sexual labyrinth. We are a long way from a better world for all, but this book hopefully makes one more small contribution to that end.
Notes
1
. The Nirbhaya Trust and Billion Women Rising.There is a fully referenced account of this at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Delhi_gang_rape
.
2
. I started my intellectual life as a symbolic interactionist and I still see this as a valuable tradition (see Plummer, 2000a). But I have moved on a little, seeing myself now as a critical humanist, a position that incorporates pragmatism and interactionism but takes it further (Plummer, 2012b, 2013a). This book builds upon ideas from some of my key earlier works – Plummer, 1975, 1995, 2003a.
3
. The term hegemony is used throughout this book and is drawn roughly from the works of Gramsci, 2000. It conveys the idea of dominance that is informal and invisible and works coercively in subtle ways.
4
. See Clark, 2008: 170.
Part OneHumanism and the Making of Cosmopolitan Sexualities
It takes all kinds of people to make up a world, All kinds of people and things.
They crawl on the earth, they swim in the sea, And they fly through the sky on wings.
And brother, I’ll tell you my hunch:
Whether you like them
Or whether you don’t,
You’re stuck with the whole damn bunch!
Rodgers and Hammerstein, Pipe Dream (Used by permission of Williamson Music, A Division of Rodgers and Hammerskin: An Imagem Company, © Imagem CV)
Cosmopolitan sexualities are those sexualities that live convivially and reciprocally with a variety of the diverse genders and sexualities of others, both within and across cultures. This usually entails an awareness of:
An ontology of a real global humanistic universalism of sexual and gender differences.
A recognition of human sexual differences as being part of what counts as being human.
An imagination of ‘openness’ and ‘tolerance’ towards sexual differences; often accompanied by a playful sense of irony, paradox, and contradiction.
An agon of perpetual conflicts about these sexual differences, the source of much human suffering.
A politics of sexual differences connecting local political struggles with global ones through dialogue and a search for common grounds.
A social structure of social solidarity of reciprocal inter and intra cultural awareness of sexual differences, becoming enshrined in rights, institutions and everyday practices.
A social psychology of tangled emotional and biographical differentiated gendered and sexualized bodies, suggesting the need for self-awareness, empathy and dialogue stretching through a ‘circle of others’ spreading across the globe.
An ethics which fosters a global sense of empathy, care, justice, dignity and a flourishing of different lives living together well.
A legal framework of international laws that provide frameworks for organizing the diverse sexualities in the modern world.
A pragmatic, grounded everyday ‘utopian’ process of people living together and learning from each other’s sexual and gender differences, enabling the making of a better world for all.
1Plural Sexualities: Making Valued Human Lives
A pluralistic universe …
William James, A Pluralistic Universe (1909)
Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958)1
The world in which we live is a ‘pluralistic universe’. And human sexualities, like human life, are born of these pluralities. Even as we live under the dominance of singular coercive states trying to create singular hegemonic orders, we still live plural lives in plural cultures with plural values, religions, politics, identities and affiliations, as well as plural genders and plural sexualities. By plural, I highlight multiplicities, differences and variety. Human beings cannot help this plurality: it is surely one of the things that make us human. Even under totalitarianism, versions of variety survive. Indeed, it could be that a key to the human condition is this very difference between every human being. But plurality in this sense also forms the basis of many of our troubles as well as of politics. The dynamic and ‘ethos’ of pluralization are crucial to understanding social life.2
In this book I pick up this idea and apply it to the varieties of human gender and sexualities. I ask how we can best live with these differences in times ahead. These are political and ethical (normative) questions, for which I make no apology. In line with her statement quoted above, I take Hannah Arendt’s maxim that ‘politics rests on the fact of human plurality’ very seriously and I look to the plural politics and cultures of the future by confronting the problems, politics and practices of what I will call ‘cosmopolitan sexualities’ head on. Drawing from a range of contemporary political and ethical theories, I give them my own pragmatichumanist twist. This is not a fashionable view: so be it. My task is to draw a map of how this can be approached, but it is not meant as an encyclopedia of world details and answers. As if it could be.
Plural lives
My claim is that there exists a real world of global and essential human differences – we are all born and remain uniquely different – and that living with these differences is simultaneously the source of both the greatest joys and the miseries in human life. Exploring the multiplicities of human life can bring great pleasure; but the downside of this is that we have to live with the potential for perpetual conflicts and violence over these differences. The atrocities such conflicts can generate are often the source of horrendous human suffering and, sadly, they are not likely to go away. But these human differences also bring human interest, joy and delight. The challenge is to reduce the conflicts as much as we can (I doubt if we could ever reduce them completely), while encouraging the delights. Human beings with their differences and conflicts have to be treated as a key subject for human studies. And here my concern is with varieties of sexual experience.
Our selves, our tribes
The trouble is that everywhere this variety appears, it is foiled by the problem of our simultaneously limited and narrow views. Even as we have multiple commitments and affiliations bridged by variable and plural identities, we have a tendency towards ethnocentrism. W.G. Sumner’s famous term – ‘in which one’s own group is the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it’ – has quietly become one of the most influential of modern times.3 It grasps an idea so vital in appreciating one of humanity’s key predicaments: that we bond in narrow worlds, forge restricted identities and reduce life to our own limited worlds of self and tribe. We seem to prefer to have one story, with one voice, telling one truth. We prefer our own small monologic world to a global dialogic one. Obscured by the limits of our own small worlds, we find it so very hard to grasp the plural worlds of others; and to recognize that although they are not quite the same as ours, we are surely all bound by a common humanity. We are blinded by the restrictions of our little-minded parochialisms, provincialisms, patriotisms and patriarchalisms. Usually we do not even see this, let alone try to move beyond. And this is one sure pathway to the miseries of human social life: to its perpetual conflicts and, worse, to its human atrocities. We stigmatize, silence and ultimately slaughter those others who, in their millions, are not like us, those others who render vulnerable the safety of our world, those who become our enemies.
We can find this problem everywhere; and critical humanism, the view I take in this book, suggests three key strategies to help understand and maybe partially overcome it. Personally, it means cultivating multiple empathies; interpersonally, it means cultivating plural dialogues; and across cultures and societies, it means cultivating cosmopolitanism. Empathy demands an understanding of the other, especially our enemies. Dialogue demands the recognition of multiple voices not singular ones. And cosmopolitanism demands a search for common grounds that enable us to bring our multiplicities together. Taken together, I will argue that cosmopolitanism requires a cosmopolitan imagination to champion a certain openness of mind, bringing with it an imaginative sensitivity to others and a lightness of perpetual doubt. As cosmopolitanism bridges social institutions, social forms and structures, so societies come to organize the recognition of these differences of others as being crucial to what counts as being human.
Given the problems it raises, cosmopolitanism is something of a utopian idea. I will discuss these problems throughout, and highlight them in particular in Chapter 3. Cosmopolitanism has long had many enemies, moving under many names. Their critical voices can often be heard in religions, politics and even the universities – everywhere, in fact, where there is only one singular voice speaking only one singular truth. For that is the enemy of cosmopolitanism: the closed mind, the monologist, the absolutist. Wherever we fall pray to the unitary doctrine of sameness, the monologic programmes of the ‘one and only way’, cosmopolitanism is in trouble. And worryingly, such positions are everywhere.
Of course, living with too much plurality can push lives into chaos, and guides through this labyrinth are needed. But the recognition of pluralities, along with recognition of their limits, has long seemed to me to be a requirement for living. Human social life (then) is intrinsically about difference, diversity, plurality. We are the relational, dialogic animal who dwells in difference and we should never forget it. At the heart of this book lies the question: how can we come together to live meaningfully, critically, empathically and peacefully with our often radically divergent differences, while setting reasonable boundaries? I choose human sexualities as my example; but what I argue here may, I hope, be applied across the widest reaches of human life.
Contingency and the varieties of sexual experience
The human sexual world is part of this vast landscape of differences, a sexual labyrinth if you like; and this book can be seen as a case study in helping to map out pathways for living with sexual variety.4 The varieties of human sexual experience have by now been very well documented, and it is not my aim to rehearse all this here.5 I simply claim that human sexualities are contingent upon time and place; and that whenever we look closely, we will find differences of desire – of what sexually excites or fails to excite, from same sex to other sex, from self to objects, from passivity to activity. We will find differences of gender – of how we play out the modalities and challenges of varying masculinities and femininities. We will find differences of relationships – of how we connect to each other, coercively or voluntarily, monogamously or polyamorously, lovingly or full of malice. We will find differences of reproduction – of how we give birth to others and the conflicts over abortion and the new reproductive technologies. We will find differences of representation – of how we speak about and present out sexualities to ourselves and across groups. We will find differences of disease – of global pandemics like AIDS and old horrors like syphilis and the ways we can handle them. We will find differences in danger – of violence, coercion, rape, abuse and sexual murder, as well as the many kinds of threats and dehumanizations we experience around our sexualities. And we will find differences in politics – in the ways we practice controls over sexual lives. And so it goes on: differences in actions and practices, differences in sexual and gender identities, differences in vulnerabilities, differences in sexual divisions, differences in motivation – and on and on, so forth and so forth, etc., etc.
Some types of sexual variety may be unacceptable. Quite what these should be is a contested zone, and I will discuss this more in Chapter 5. At this stage, you may like to consider the kinds of sexual variety you find unacceptable. Here is my own listing. I think of these as dehumanized sexualities. The list includes sexual genocide and femicide, sexual murder, honour killings, hate crimes, sexual slavery, and rape in its many forms (from rape in war through prison rape to marital rape); also sexual assaults, genital mutilation, queer and trans battering, coerced marriage, pressured sex, sexual harassment, child sexual abuse and domestic abuse. The list could go on to include a great deal of prostitution and human trafficking where the selling of sex is out of the seller’s own personal control (where there may be pimps and traffickers or women working out of sheer desperation in horrible conditions); and it could include the literatures of sexual violence and degradation, as found in parts of the pornography culture (many feminists would include these); and it could even extend ultimately to the widest of cultural ideologies which promote sexual hatred through misogyny, homophobia, heterosexism, patriarchy: to all propagandists against sexuality and sexual vigilantes who will not tolerate the sexualities of others. As we move through this growing list of negativities, it becomes clear that more and more of these areas are as widely practised as they are contested. In many cultures throughout the world, rape in war is normal; so is forced marriage. Likewise, the pornographic abuse of women and the debate over this issue have raged for over a century in the Western world. These contested sexualities – so deeply linked to ‘patriarchal sexualities’ and ‘hegemonic masculinities’7 – will be my focus in Chapter 5.
1.1Why do we do sex?Sampling a multiplicity of motivations
A good illustration of pluralities can be found in the multiple motives for having sex. Here are some of the reasons people give for having sex: maybe add more of your own:
Anger, addiction, affection, aggression, attraction, babies, bonding, boredom, ‘bug chasing’,6 closeness, commitment, curiosity, depression, duty, exercise, experience seeking, femininity, fidelity, frustration, fun, gratitude, habit, health, jealousy, laziness, love, marital duty, masculinity, mood changing, money, novelty, nurturance, passion, peak experience, play, power, pressure, procreation, rage, relief, reputation, revenge, self-esteem, self-expression, spiritual, status, stress reduction, thrill, ‘to get the day going’, ‘ to send to sleep’, spiritual transcendence, transgression, violence, war … and on
A study by Meston and Buss (2007) reviews sex motivation studies, suggesting some 237 reasons for doing sex and clustering them into physical, goal-based, emotional and insecurity reasons. Perhaps people today offer many more reasons for engaging in sexual activity than in earlier times.
Dehumanized sexualities cover a multiplicity of sins: and they render human sexuality dangerous, defiling and damaging. They are usually compelled by coercion, motivated by hatred and hostility, infused with abuse, dynamited by violence, structured by inequalities and lack any sense of care and fairness. They frequently protect the wounds and self of perpetrators. Dehumanizing and desensitizing, they are profoundly without empathy or compassion for the other. Found globally and across history, they may be seen as the dark side of human sexualities. Primarily, this is men on women; but it can also be women on men, men on men, and women on women. It is also heterosexual on homosexual, conventional on transgender – and the rest. It is a powerful force throughout history. And it is the enemy of humanism.
So I am fully aware of the need for boundaries, as we will see in Chapter 5. We need norms, or, as is often said these days, ‘normativities’. But which norms and whose norms? Since this is a normative study, I will have to take the huge risk of suggesting what these norms might be. I will be aiming not just to look negatively at norms but also to start to suggest the need to look at them positively.
To help with this task, I turn to the ancient idea of cosmopolitanism, sensing its relevance to the modern problem of being able to live with most of our global sexual differences. The notion of cosmopolitan, sexualities suggests a humanistic imagination where minds are open to appreciate human sexual variety; a human social form that fosters cultures that can handle its conflicting sexual groups; and a human politics that champions living with our sexual differences. It acknowledges the ubiquity of human conflict and the need for limits, and it fosters empathy, dialogue and common grounds, while recognizing the need for fluid, mobile and porous boundaries and borders. It is part of a wider programme of intimate citizenship.
And it is humanism writ large. It is to this I now turn.
Critical humanism
In the preface to his classic study of orientalism, Edward Said (1978) writes that ‘humanism is the only – I would go so far as saying the final – resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history’.8 As will become clear, my arguments in this book are based on a humanist position that places the well-being of the historical, embodied human struggling for a better world at the heart of its analysis: it puts our species to the forefront of critical thinking.9 It sees that the world we live in is a human world: it is created through human beings, organized and disorganized by human beings, and ultimately transformed by human beings. It is people doing things together that make states, economies, institutions happen. It is people together who change the world and make it a better or lesser place. It is people that matter. They are most certainly not all that matter; and it may be that we also at times have to remind ourselves of our huge insignificance in the much grander scheme of things. We are indeed only a little animal and a little species with a short time on this planet in a colossal pluriverse. But as a distinctively little animal (born immature, big brained and bipedal), we try to make sense of ourselves. It is indeed partially what makes us human to do so. And humanistic research starts with the people around the world living their daily lives of difference. At the core of our concerns lie the talk, feelings, actions, bodies, vulnerabilities, creativities, moralities, sufferings, joys and passions of people as they share communities and social worlds, create human bonds, and confront the everyday constraints of history and a material world of inequalities and exclusions.
All this brings ideas of the ‘human’, ‘humane’, ‘humanities’, ‘humanitarian’ and ‘humanity’ to the fore. It can indeed even be claimed that although humanism has a long genealogy, the very idea of humanity itself, despite deep tangled roots, is an idea that was constructed and fitted for the twentieth century. Growing out of an awareness of ‘crimes against humanity’ (first in the genocide in Turkey of some million Armenians; later in the slaughters of the Second World War), the very idea of humanity has increasingly seeped into world consciousness during the twentieth century.10And humanism is also always interested in its opposite form: dehumanization – the multiple and major social processes that degrade and rob humans of their humanities: the anti-human.11
Humanism simply suggests a multiplicity of ways of being human. It comes in an endless array of varieties. Almost every belief system can be linked with humanism, from Catholicism to communism, from Buddhism to pragmatism, from Ubuntu in Africa to Ren in Confucianism. Critical humanism embraces this multiplicity, but also puts it under scrutiny. Challenging any simple unitary view, it is critical of all claims that human beings can be understood ‘transcendentally’ and taken out of the contexts of time (history) and space (geography) of which they are always a part. For critical humanists, our ‘human being’ is most emphatically not a free-floating universal individual: rather, ‘it’ is always stuffed full of the culture and the historical moment, always in process and changing. Human beings ‘nest’ themselves in webs of contexts, relationships. To talk otherwise is to engage in the ‘myth of the universal man’.
And of course this is also true of our sexualities. Recent critical sexualities studies have made it very clear that there is really no such thing as a universal fixed sexual or gendered being.12 Sex for human beings is about many things: it is drenched in language, symbols and metaphor, and never mere biology. It can never, should never, be simply reduced to one thing only (as so much contemporary thinking likes to do). Box 1.2 suggests some of the multiple meanings of our sexualities.
Critical humanism has a very strong, pragmatic pedigree, espousing an epistemology of radical empiricism that takes seriously the idea that knowing is always limited and partial and should be grounded in the persistent plurality of obdurate experience. It makes no claims for grand abstractions or ‘final solutions’. It assumes an inherent ambivalence and ambiguity in human life while simultaneously sensing the significance of politics, morality and value in all activities. It looks for practicalities that may help make the world a better place for all.
1.2How do we talk of sex?Sampling a multiplicity of sexual metaphors
The use of language is a distinctively human and social thing and its linkage to sexualities makes our sexualities distinctive too. In the human world, we have to give sexuality meaning and we often come to frame our sexual lives through metaphors. Here are a few.
Sex can be seen as a biological drive, an evolutionary force, a tool of repression, a liberatory act; as joyful lust, romantic longings, violence and hate, natural or unnatural, the machine that pumps, the disease that plagues us, the inner beast or the outer spiritual force. Sex can come to mean a body, a chase, a commodity, a disease, a form of filth, an expression of love, a feeling, a game, a gender, a hormone, an identity, a hobby, a hunt, a medical problem, a microdot, a passion, a pathology, a play, a performance, a perversion, a possession, a script, a scarred experience, a therapy, a trauma, a mode of transgression, a form, of violence, a form of work, a kind of war … and on.
Humanist troubles
Despite my admiration for humanist thinking, there is much critique and rejection of it. It is true that there is a deep seam of humanist thought that can never simply go away; but the intellectual project of ‘humanism’ has for a good while now been in a lot of trouble. It has been decried and dismissed from many directions, but especially by some very serious and high-minded intellectuals. A major influence here has been the tragic work (and nihilism) of Nietzsche, along with the dark critics of the Enlightenment – such as Horkheimer and Adorno in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). More recently, it has been the object of attack from many poststructuralist, postmodernist and posthumanist writers, including Michel Foucault, who sees much humanism as itself constituting a repressive political regime disciplining human life. Contemporary social thought about sexualities has generally followed this path. I cannot examine these arguments closely here; but since I walk a different path, and they have dominated one wing of contemporary academia, I have to respond briefly here to some of the major objections.
First, critics link humanism solely with Renaissance and Enlightenment thinking. This is a truly serious error. There have been so many humanists throughout history and across all cultures and religions that it is simply wrong to identify it solely with the Enlightenment. I am baffled at how so many can make this erroneous claim. It is true that much harm was done in the name of humanism during the Enlightenment period. But to equate humanism solely with the Enlightenment is a dangerously restricting view. Indeed, much of our thinking about what it means to be human might be seen to start with the arrival of what Karl Jaspers (1951/2003: 100) has dubbed the Axial Age, a time where:
Man everywhere became aware of being as a whole, of himself and his limits. He experienced the horror of the world and his own helplessness. He raised radical questions, approached the abyss in his drive for liberation and redemption. And in consciously apprehending his limits he set himself the highest aims. He experienced the absolute in the depth of selfhood and in the clarity of transcendence.13
This is the time, between 800 and 200 BC, that we find Confucius in China, the Buddha in India, Zarathustra in Iran, Isaiah in Palestine, and Homer, Plato and Archimedes in Greece. All can be seen as foundational ‘humanists’, the start, perhaps, of the ‘great thoughts and great thinkers’ about the human condition.
But this aside, even the detailed studies of the complexities of Enlightenment thought (like that found in the work of Jonathan Israel on the Radical Enlightenment14) make it fairly clear that the European Enlightenment was itself in a colossal radical crisis over the nature of what a human being was. Its great thinkers were in persistent disagreement over the nature of humanity and never settled upon one ‘essence’. There was no one agreed-upon universal view on humanity, as is so widely and falsely claimed by critics.
Second, and closely linked to the above, humanists are often charged, mistakenly, of claiming that there is just one true universal
