Invented Moralities E-Book

Jeffrey Weeks

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 374

Beschreibung

This is an important intervention in debates on the family and sexuality, exploring clashes over sexual values and contemporary sexual dilemmas such as AIDS.

Leseprobe

Invented Moralities

Sexual Values in an Age of Uncertainty

JEFFREY WEEKS

Polity Press

Copyright ©Jeffrey Weeks 1995

The right of Jeffrey Weeks to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1995 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Reprinted 2005, 2007

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For Mark McNestrywith love and gratitudeandIn loving memory of Angus Suttie(1946–1993)

Even the death of friends will inspire us as much as their lives . . . Their memories will be encrusted over with sublime and pleasing thoughts, as monuments of other men are overgrown with moss; for our friends have no place in the graveyard.

Henry David Thareau

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements

Introduction: Values, whose Values?

A changing sexual landscape

Thinking the erotic

Whose values?

1  Living with Uncertainty

Living with AIDS

A sense of an ending?

The self and identity

Sexuality, relationships and the democratic imagination

Towards a radical humanism

2  Inventing Moralities

The contingencies of the erotic

The paths of invention

Diversity and choice

Autonomy and authenticity

Toleration and solidarity

3  Necessary Fictions: Sexual Identities and the Politics of Diversity

Identity trouble

The paradoxes of identity

Causing trouble: transgression and sexual citizenship

4  The Sphere of the Intimate and the Values of Everyday Life

Shifting boundaries

Locating the private

The rights of everyday life

5  Caught between Worlds and Ways of Being

Prologue

Matters of life and death

A love ethic

Epilogue: being alive

Bibliography

Index

Preface and Acknowledgements

When I began working on this book, far too long ago now, my friends were sceptical. The question of values, they tended to mutter, was the prerogative of the Moral Right, a code for the attempted reestablishment of what goes by the label of ‘traditionar ways of life: a reaffirmation of ‘family values’, hostility towards the advances made by women during the past generation, fear and loathing of homosexuality, and a deep anxiety caused by the growing diversity both of public life and our private arrangements.

Today, as I at last complete the book, values have shot to the top of the political agenda on both left and right. As traditional ways of life fragment under the revolutionary changes of our times, as social identities are reshaped and remade, as well-established political alignments collapse and new alliances are painfully constructed, as the public sphere is redefined, and the boundaries between public and private shift, as epidemic disease returns to haunt the imagination of the postmodern world, and as the flame of love flickers in the cold draught of various forms of hate, debates over values encapsulate our uncertainties about how we should live.

My concern in this book is with value debates as they inform the debates about sexuality, and with debates about sexuality as they help us to understand the significance of questions of value. For sexuality is at the heart of contemporary anguish about values: to that extent my sceptical friends were right. Where they were wrong was in thinking that the value-laden discourse of the morally conservative did not deserve a considered response from liberals and radicals, because such ideas were self-evidently ill-intentioned. I believe, on the contrary, that the failure of progressive thought to counter effectively the values of the right has left a vacuum which stymies effective defence of what I believe in, the values of sexual diversity and freedom of choice.

As this suggests, I do not attempt in this book an ‘objective’ exploration of either the question of value in general, or of sexual values in particular. Value debates are about taking sides, about placing yourself in a tradition or traditions of arguments extending through time which necessarily conflict at many points with other traditions, other values. We can rightly require that the debates are conducted dialogically and democratically -that seems to me an absolute prerequisite of argument in a pluralist world. But I do not expect, or even hope, that the positions I have adopted will evoke universal agreement.

On the contrary, I hope my arguments will arouse debate and controversy, even among my friends, for that is the only way we can advance towards the radical humanism that this book attempts to advocate, a humanism which values individual freedom and celebrates the rich diversity of human goals, and therefore must expect disagreement as the price we pay for autonomy and choice.

How to live with diversity is the main theme of the book. The reader will not, therefore, find prescriptions here about how to live; it is precisely that form of the value debate which I am hoping to combat. I do attempt, however, to offer a framework for thinking about the issues that need to be confronted in asking that question, how shall I live? My argument, in brief, is that many forms of life can be ‘moral’ or ethically valid, especially with regard to the erotic. It is not so much what you do, but how you do it that should matter: less a morality of acts, more an ethics of relationships. Concepts such as care, responsibility, respect and love have become the currency of recent debates around personal behaviour. I argue that these are important virtues, but they cannot, and should not, be identified with any particular form of domestic arrangement or sexual activity. They embody values that inform a variety of lifestyles and ‘experiments in living’. Their meaning needs to be struggled for, not assumed.

For whatever the fantasies of particular traditions, the legitimacy of any set of values cannot in the end depend on the claim that Truth, Revelation, Science or History are on their side. Values are human inventions, products of complex histories and the intermingling of many individual and collective aspirations and anxieties. Values depend on us, what we want or desire. At the moment there appears to be a high degree of uncertainty about values, leading among many to a search for new absolutes. I, however, see uncertainty as a challenge: to find ways of living, and loving, together, in a world without intrinsic meaning or foundational givens, which are securely rooted in our common humanity and our care and responsibility for others. This book is a contribution to that aim.

The book has taken considerably longer to complete than I originally intended, and in that time I have incurred many material, intellectual and emotional debts. I have to thank the University of Manchester for electing me to a Simon Senior Fellowship during 1989–90, which gave me the space to begin work on the book. I am grateful to the University of Michigan where I was welcomed as a visiting fellow at its Institute for the Humanities in 1991, a visit that provided a stimulus for writing first drafts of some of these chapters. The Humanities Research Group at the University of Windsor, Ontario, similarly provided intellectual encouragement and the spur to writing during my visit in early 1993.

During most of the time I worked on the book I was gainfully employed in the Faculty of Economics and Social Science at the University of the West of England, Bristol. I am very grateful to the Dean, Peter Glasner, for his constant support, and to his colleagues for their stimulating company, and occasional distraction. I must particularly thank Jem Thomas, Simon Thompson and Ian Welsh for their comments and intellectual encouragement, and Helen Robbins and Lesley Gander for their practical backing. I finished the book soon after I moved to South Bank University, and I am grateful for the welcome my new colleagues gave me, and their forbearance as I met my deadlines.

This book is partly about friendship, and my friends have been all I could have asked for. I want particularly to thank Lisa Adkins, Bob Cant, Emmanuel Cooper, Barry Davis, Liz Fidlon, Sue Golding, Jill Grinstead, Janet Holland, Ken Plummer, Kevin Porter, Alex Potts, Martha Vicinus and Simon Watney for their sustenance, material and intellectual, at various times. David Clark and Chetan Bhatt read parts or all of the book in draft, and I am grateful for their illuminating comments and support. I am also grateful to Chetan Bhatt for the many conversations I have had with him over the years which have never failed to stimulate me, and which have informed some of the arguments here (though he is not to blame for any recalcitrant conclusions I may have reached!).

Some of the arguments set out in the book have been rehearsed in my classes, in numerous seminar and conference papers, and in several articles, though in substantially different, earlier forms: The Sphere of the Intimate, Manchester Sociology Occasional Papers 29, University of Manchester 1991; Invented Moralities1, History Workshop Journal 32, Autumn 1991; ‘Values in an Age of Uncertainty’, in Stanton 1992; ‘Living with Uncertainty’ and ‘Necessary Fictions’ in Jacqueline Murray (ed.) Constructing Sexualities, Windsor, Humanities Research Group, University of Windsor, Ontario; and ‘Rethinking Private Life’ in Clark 1994. I am grateful to all who invited me to give papers, to students and seminar and conference participants who engaged with my views, and to the various editors concerned for their comments and support at the time. I have seized the licence of the author to modify or revise my earlier views where appropriate.

For permission to publish from copyright material, I am grateful to the following: to Bloodaxe Books for the quotation from Jackie Kay’s poem ‘Close Shave’, in The Adoption Papers, Bloodaxe Books 1991; to Faber and Faber Ltd, and Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc. for the quotation from Thom Gunn’s poem ‘In Time of Plague’, in The Man with Night Sweats.

Finally, I owe an overwhelming debt to three people. Micky Burbidge has been a constant and sturdy friend through thick and thin for many years. I can simply thank him.

I met my partner Mark McNestry as I began work on this book. He has lived with its various vicissitudes, been patient with my anxieties, sustained me through doubt, and given me all the love and support I could have wished for. The dedication is a small token of my deepest thanks.

My friend Angus Suttie died before I could complete the book. His bravery in the face of mortal illness, and the courage with which he faced his premature death, gave me unforgettable insights into the importance of living life well. Those final months with Angus also taught me something new about friendship, love and intimacy, and the value of the human bond. I have tried to convey some of what I learnt through this book.

INTRODUCTIONValues, whose Values?

. . . a tour of perplexities, not a guide for the perplexed.

Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices

All the symbols of the carnival idiom are filled with this sense of pathos and change, with the sense of the gay relativity of prevailing truths and authorities.

M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World

A CHANGING SEXUAL LANDSCAPE

There’s an oil painting in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, by the Chilean-born artist, Matta (Sebastian Antonio Matta Echaurren). As you first look at it, the overwhelming impression is of darkness and formlessness, a dark night of the soul. Gradually you notice that the black wash is less uniform than it first appears. It has been partially rubbed away to reveal gradations in the blackness, and this in turn highlights the apparently randomly distributed, indefinable and mysterious shapes which seem to float or explode in the shade, entwined in spirals and webs of white lines.

Matta’s painting is entitled The Vertigo of Eros, and the canvas is ineffably but unmistakably sexual. As you continue to stare at it, what you see is less the initial cosmic darkness and more the imagery of fire, roots and sexual organs floating dreamlike and evocatively in the void, until the imagery becomes the totality of what you see: an almost mystical world of sexual flux. Matta is quoted as saying that the title of his work derived from a reading of Freud: the life force, Eros, is constantly challenged by the death drive, Thanatos, which produces in most people a state of vertigo that must be constantly combated in order to achieve a sense of equilibrium and stability (Franc 1992, p. 128). Sexuality, it seems, is a field of infinite possibilities, shadowed by dissolution and death.

We can read too much into a single painting, or the life of a single artist, but there is something emblematic about Matta’s painting, and career, which speaks to my concerns, and to the purposes of this book. Matta originally studied architecture in the Paris office of the arch-priest of modernism, Le Corbusier, famous, even infamous today, as the progenitor of machines for living stretching heavenwards into the pure air. The artist later, however, gravitated towards the Surrealists, whose group he joined finally in 1937. The Vertigo of Eros was painted after his absorption of surrealism, in 1944. A journey beginning in the idealistic yet disciplinary purity of modernist hubris, gave rise to a striking and disturbing but also highly charged landscape of chaos and disorder, and sexual excitement. Order and entropy, threat and opportunity, fear and attraction: these seem to me to sum up the confused trajectory of sexuality amidst what Nietzsche called the ‘tropical tempo’ of modernity.

The idea of ‘sexual flux’ is a characteristically postmodern trope, but it is integral to the whole modern discourse of sexuality, what I have called elsewhere the ‘sexual tradition’ (Weeks 1985). We can see this if we cast our minds towards the major codifications of sexuality during the twentieth century, the sexological texts which have helped shape the ways in which we think the erotic (see Bullough 1994). The rise of a science of desire, from the late nineteenth century, was in large part a response to a perception of the duality of the sexual: simultaneously, but contradictorily, a boundless sea of highly differentiated and excessive desires, and a massive continent of sexual and gender patterning and symmetry. Sexologists attempted to recognize the first by cataloguing and categorizing the varieties of sexual experience, while at the same time affirming the second, the majestic norms of heterosexual life which marginalized, devalued and often execrated the deviant, the perverse. Part of the enduring, if ambivalent, attraction of the greatest of these pioneers, Freud, is that he both recognized the contingency and flux of sexuality (‘polymorphous perversity’), and of gender and object choice (‘bisexuality’), and immediately sought to harness them to the complex cultural necessities of ‘normality’ (Coward 1983). But in this he was only a more subtle and profound representative of a major intellectual endeavour, which in turn responded to, and shaped, an opening up of sexual possibilities and a crisis of sexual certainty which continues to this day.

The impact of sexology is not my concern here (see Bullough 1994); rather I want to underline what the codifications embodied in sexology tell us about sexual change, or rather the way sexual change is perceived. In retrospect, the sexual tradition, as a set of concepts and intellectual interventions, laws and social practices, marital and family organization, and diverse patterns of life, can be seen as a sustained effort to channel and discipline the imagined powers of sexuality. Great efforts have been made by the architects and mechanics of the sexual tradition to order and regulate the swampy sexual landscape. It has been well tilled and carefully cultivated by expert hands. Barriers have been put up against the chaos, disorder and disease of the city. Brave and well-intentioned settlements have been constructed to embody a new pattern of sexual and family life. Dams have been built here, rivers canalized there, to reshape ‘the forces of nature’. But in vain. What we call ‘nature’ cannot be so easily appeased. Now the dams are full to overflowing; the rivers are bursting their banks (I make no apology for the male sexual imagery, which seems to me to be central to the sexual imaginary I am describing). Parts of the flood plain have already been overwhelmed. The landscape is being transformed, as familiar buildings go under, or the waters lap their historic foundations. New features appear: an island where once there was a crossroads, a shelter near where children once played. A flood threatens all we can see. There is a certain mood of tired fractiousness in the air, even a hint of civil war, in some areas. An anxiety about contagion is abroad. Where once there seemed order, there is now a pervasive fear, not so much of disorder as of formlessness: an amorphous vista of murky and uncertain waters and a reshaped landscape which we must learn to navigate without reliable maps. This is the metaphorical landscape on which the struggle over values is being fought.

We live in a world of uncertainty, where good guides and firm guarantees that we can reach any particular destination are in short supply, and where the goals themselves are cloudy and indeterminate. Nowhere is this uncertainty more acute than in the domain of sexuality, which has been the subject in the recent past of apparently endless panics, controversies, anguished moralizings, and the rebirth of the value issue. It seems a long time since a British Prime Minister (Harold Macmillan, in the early 1960s) could say with insouciance that morals and values were best left to the bishops. Today, the question of values has reached the centre of the political and cultural agenda, with sexuality as the magnetic core. Illegitimacy and the future of the family; surrogate parenthood and embryological research; teenage pregnancy and the ‘age of consent’; divorce and the fate of marriage; violence and explicit sexual imagery; sex education and child sex abuse; sexual diversity and sexual identity; the changing claims of women and the ‘crisis of masculinity’; the balance between individual freedom and collective obligations; disease and sexual health; these and other topics have become the focus of public agonizing and personal anguish, the major theme of social policy debates, and the lodestars of drifting politicians in search of a coherent but eternally elusive ‘big idea’.

It is not that sexuality has ever been absent from social, cultural and political debate. On the contrary, it is perfectly accurate to say that anxiety about the sexual has, like mysterious creatures scuttling under the floorboards, implicitly shaped many of our public debates for a long time, from the fear of national or imperial decline at the end of the nineteenth century to the structuring of welfare provision from the 1940s to the present (see Mort 1987; Weeks 1981/1989). What is new, however, is the way in which worries about changing sexual behaviour and gender and sexual identities have become the explicit focus for debates about the current shape and desirable future of society. And if, as I believe, we can no longer rely on pre-existing narratives to shape our hopes for the future, if above or beneath the social and the historical there is nothing, then what we believe to be desirable counts. ‘An existence without a script written in advance’, suggests Zygmunt Bauman (1992b, p. 94), ‘is a contingent existence’. The debate around sexual values is a response to a growing sense of our contingency, where nothing but uncertainty and death is certain.

THINKING THE EROTIC

If sexuality is, as I believe, about choice rather than destiny, then the issue of what we choose and how and why we do so becomes central to the debate. In the current ethical fog, choice has become a lodestar, but there are as many choices as there are human subjects. My own choices demand a few comments before I launch into the argument proper. So a touch of intellectual autobiography might be useful here, to outline why I have become centrally concerned with questions of values.

My own research and writing about sexuality have been shaped by a rejection of what have come to be known as essentialist arguments, and an attempt to elaborate what has generally, though inadequately, been called ‘social constructionism’, and which I prefer to call a historical approach to the erotic (see Weeks 1991). The basic assumption has been that it is deeply problematic to think of sexuality as a purely natural phenomenon, outside the boundaries of society and culture. We have all too readily believed that sexuality is the most natural thing about us, that our drives are fixed and inherent, that our identities are dictated by that nature and those drives, and that a history of sexuality must therefore be no more than an account of reactions to those basic biological givens.

Over the past twenty years most of the assumptions behind those positions have been profoundly challenged, building on a century of challenges to essentialist modes of thought (Weeks 1985). Through anthropology and social analysis we have strengthened our awareness of the relativity of sexual norms. From Freud we can derive (though sadly most interpreters have not) insights into the tentative and always provisional nature of gender and sexual identities. From the new social history we have become aware of the multiple narratives of sexual life. After feminism, lesbian and gay politics and the theoretical challenges of Michel Foucault (1979) we are increasingly sensitive to the subtle forms of power that invest the body, and make us simultaneously subjected to and subjects of sex. All these influences in turn feed into the deconstructionist project and the postmodernist critiques which question the fixities and certainties of post-Enlightenment humanism, rationalism and progressivism (Lyotard 1984). With the philosophers of deconstruction we have become alive to the contingency of human arrangements, the finity and delicacy of our placing in a world without intrinsic meaning but clamorous with multiple and conflicting meanings (Rorty 1989). With the theorists of postmodernity we have become more aware of the pain and challenge of moral choice (Squires 1993; Bauman 1993).

As a result we increasingly recognize that sexuality can be understood only in its specific historical and cultural context. There cannot be an all-embracing history of sexuality. There can only be local histories, contextual meanings, specific analyses. Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick has usefully suggested that rather than speak any longer about essentialism versus constructionism, which has led to a tired and repetitive (and perhaps incomprehensible) internal debate among students of sexuality, we should think in terms of universalistic and particularist positions (Sedgwick 1990). Universalistic arguments assume a common experience throughout time and history. Particularist arguments on the contrary want to understand the specifics of any sexual phenomenon: the histories and narratives which organize it, the power structures which shape it, the struggles which attempt to define it (see Plummer 1995). That is fundamentally my position.

Much recent writing on sexuality has been concerned with three interlocked issues. First, there has been a new sensitivity to the sexual identities that we take for granted as given and fixed, but which any careful historical reading show to be culturally specific. Lesbian and gay identities are the classic examples of this: these are widely seen now as products of a specific, if complex history (see Stein 1990; Vance 1989). This in turn has produced a sharper, though still grossly inadequate, interest in the historical evolution of the dominant form of sexual organization, heterosexuality (Sedgwick 1990; Katz 1995). Second, there has been a concern to examine the social regulation of sexuality: the forms of control, the patterns of domination, subordination and resistance which shape the sexual (Foucault 1979). Finally, scholars have explored the sexual discourses which organize meanings, and especially the discourse of sexology which has been crucial, if not alone, in proclaiming the ‘truth’ of sex (see Weeks 1985).

The core of the historical argument has been that we can understand sexuality only through understanding the cultural meanings and the power relations which construct it (see Foucault 1979 as the locus classicus). This does not mean that biology is irrelevant, nor that the body has no role (Giddens 1992). Nor does it mean that individuals are blank pieces of paper on which society writes its preferred meanings. Take, for example, homosexuality, the subject of many of my previous writings. To say that lesbian and gay identities have a history, have not always existed and may not always exist, does not mean that they are not important. Nor should it necessarily be taken to imply that homosexual proclivities are not deeply rooted. That question is in any case irrelevant to the argument. The real problem does not lie in whether homosexuality is inborn or learnt. It lies instead in the question: what are the meanings that this particular culture gives to homosexual behaviour, however it may be caused, and what are the effects of those meanings on the ways in which individuals organize their sexual lives. That is a historical question. It is also a question which is highly political: it forces us to analyse the power relations which determine why this set of meanings, rather than that, are hegemonic; and poses the further question of how those meanings can be changed.

Many contemporary writers on sexuality have been concerned, therefore, with tracing the genealogy of our present sexual arrangements and identities, seeking the elements of confusion and opportunity that order our current discontents and political aspirations, surveying the sexual battlefields which make the current situation so morally and politically fraught.

There are, however, difficulties with this theoretical approach. Many people seem to need a sense of belonging which they conceive as rooted in the imperatives of nature or of all time. They fear that if identities and the values associated with them are conceived of as historically contingent then they will lose all solidity and meaning. When the British gay film maker Derek Jarman was asked in a radio broadcast whether his homosexuality was learnt or inborn, he replied that it was inborn – and then added that at least he hoped so, because otherwise he would have no basis with which to challenge moral conservatism. This position has underscored recent efforts to discover a ‘gay brain’ or a ‘gay gene’ (LeVay 1991; Hamer et al. 1993). Better to fall back on the truths of science than to confront the challenge of clarifying why we value what we do.

This points to a real problem, which goes far beyond questions of identity, and embraces all aspects of sexual ethics. Social constructionism has no political belonging. It does not carry with it any obvious programme. On the contrary, it can be, and has been, used recently as much by sexual conservatives as by sexual progressives. In the attempt to ban the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality by local authorities in Britain in 1987-88, culminating in the passing into law of the notorious Clause 28 of the Local Government Act, the bill’s proponents explicitly argued that homosexuality could be promoted and learnt – hence the bill’s justification (Smith 1990). Of course, the logical corollary of this is that heterosexuality could equally well be learnt, and is in fact promoted all the time by the institutions of our culture. But as Carole Vance (1989) has pointed out, by and large heterosexuality has not been subjected to the same vigorous enquiry as homosexuality. Very few people are interested in tracing its social construction. It is still regarded as the natural norm from which all else is an unfortunate perversion.

Against the uncertainties of constructionism, then, many seek the certainty of nature or of received tradition. Might it not be better, the argument seems to go, to assert that lesbians and gays are a permanent and fixed minority of the population, like a racial minority, and to claim a place in the sun as a legitimate minority on that basis? Or, for those of a more conservative disposition, the argument appears to be: is it not preferable to base values on some objective or universal standpoint to counter the vagaries of ‘subjectivism’ and the terror of relativism (see Scruton 1986)?

These positions are tempting because they offer certainty instead of doubt, fixity rather than the anguish of personal decision, but they are, I believe, fundamentally wrong, because they rely on absolutist positions that cannot begin to deal with the complexities of value choices. In the case of Clause 28, and similar moral and political flurries, the arguments of one side cannot be bested by mirror-image arguments from the other: this is natural/this is unnatural; this is good/this is evil. What is at stake in such positions cannot be resolved by appeals to reason, science, truth or tradition precisely because all these terms are contested. What is actually happening is that different moral and ethical positions are being staked out, and in a moral civil war theoretical viewpoints alone cannot promote a particular outcome. They have meaning only within specific contexts, in particular power relations, and in the arguments over time embodied in ethical traditions. So their effectiveness in the end is not dictated by their truth but by the meanings they glue together. Sexual values are important not because they are either rooted in the ‘natural’ or some revealed truth or foundational given, but because they provide the basis of social and cultural identification which makes possible a meaningful individual and social life, and, where appropriate, moral-political struggles.

That puts squarely on the agenda the question of values (see essays in Squires 1993, including Weeks 1993a). What the historical approach to sexuality has achieved is to make us more aware of the complexity of forces that shape the social, and to sensitize us to the power relations that organize the meanings by which we live. This historical process is generally concealed behind the veil of ideology which works precisely by making us believe that what is socially created, and therefore subjected to change, is really natural, and therefore immutable. But why should we believe that of all social phenomena, sexuality is the least changeable? On the contrary, it is probably the most sensitive to social influence, a conductor of the subtlest of changes in social mores and power relations. If that is the case, then we need to be clearer than ever before of the values that motivate us, and the choices we have to make. Sexuality, as Foucault (1984a, p. 129) put it, is not a fatality. It is a possibility for creative life. And in creating that life, we need above all to be able to affirm and validate our values.

WHOSE VALUES?

Speaking of values is a way of describing the sort of life we want to lead, or think we should lead. In a world without a given or necessary meaning, where the foundations of many, if not all, of the legitimizing discourses which separate truth and falsity, good and evil have been shaken or have collapsed, then how we want to live requires a clarification of what is at stake. Values provide a series of principles from which we can try to deduce goals, and then develop ways of life and appropriate political responses. Values help us to clarify what we believe to be right or wrong, permissible or impermissible. They should also, I believe, enable us, in a complex and pluralistic world, to ensure that what we think is right is not necessarily what other people think is right, and to find ways of living with difference in a tolerant and democratic fashion.

That is not, unfortunately, quite how the debate about sexual values has gone. In the recent past we have been besieged by value-laden arguments – largely from the political and moral right, but also from popes and preachers, ayatollahs, religious revivalists and fundamentalists of various hues – which instruct us how to live and whose moral entrepreneurs do their best to make us conform to their values. Phrases such as ‘family values’, generally encoding a series of hostile responses to changes in family life and sexual behaviour, the impact of feminism and the insurgency of positive lesbian and gay communities and identities, have tended to hegemonize the debate, usually throwing the liberal and radical left on to the defensive. The traditional left, fearful of confusing morality with the excesses of moralism, have often nervously evacuated the field. When they have not, as in recent recuperations of communitarian traditions, they have tended to move towards a moral conservatism which prioritizes ‘rebuilding the family’ and traditional neighbourhoods as an antidote to social collapse (for example, Etzioni 1993). The debate on Values’ all too often has a dangerously reactionary ring.

Yet despite the ‘murderous certainties’ (Bhatt 1994) of many of these Messianic prophets of purity and moral renaissance, the overwhelming feeling in our culture is of moral confusion rather than of moral certainty. The ‘fashionable madmen’, as W. H. Auden called them in his love poem ‘Lullaby’, parade their fantasies of a final reconciliation between our desires and their will, yet we actually live with a confusing plurality of values and choices, some particular to specific groups or communities, some aspiring to universality, but each rooted in different traditions, histories, theoretical and political trajectories, an apparent cacophony of competing and contradictory hopes and dreams, and ways of life. The oceans and continents of value, as Fekete (1988, p. 1) says, though much travelled ‘remain almost uncharted in any way suitable for the navigational contingencies of postmodern itineraries’.

Is it possible, then, without surrendering to fundamentalisms of one sort or another, to find democratic principles and values which can help us to navigate the swampy landscape around us, to develop a set of minimum common standards by which we can evaluate and measure legitimately different ways of being? I believe the answer is yes, but only if we start rethinking values by exploring in a positive manner the sexual and moral diversity that causes so much dread, and by finding within them certain common elements. I am with Foucault (1989, p. 330) in believing that the search for a form of morality that would be acceptable to everyone, in the sense that everyone must bend a knee to it, would be ‘catastrophic’. Rather than imposing an artificial order on moral confusion, we have to learn to negotiate the hazards of social complexity, moral pluralism and sexual diversity; to establish key principles or guidelines to measure difference; and to learn how to live with the challenge of uncertainty.

This book is an attempt to explore that challenge. I do not claim that it covers all the ground that could or should be covered. I do not, for example, attempt to explore the complexities of parenting, or the challenge of ageing or disability, or the whole array of possible variables which affect day-to-day existence. My purpose is more modest: to establish a framework within which we can think through the challenges of everyday life. The erotic, and the relationships which focus on it, offers a glittering mirror which can reflect back to us the dilemmas of individual choice in an age of uncertainty.

With this in mind, the first chapter, ‘Living with Uncertainty’, surveys the shifting sexual terrain, the opportunities and threats which shape our sexual lives. The AIDS epidemic has become for many emblematic of the threats, the fearful harbinger of disaster, the poisoned fruits of a ‘permissiveness’ run riot. I prefer to see it, on the contrary, as a natural disaster, which nevertheless casts a sharp spotlight on many other changes which are sweeping the sexual landscape: changes in patterns of sexual identity, and an ‘unfinished’ revolution in sexual mores and the arrangements of intimate life. In the response to AIDS we can also see the promise held out by the transformations of intimate life (Giddens 1992) for what I call a ‘radical humanism’ which respects and validates different ways of life, different choices, alternative forms of responsibility and love. In the second chapter, ‘Inventing Moralities’, I set out some of the principles of this position: the challenge of sexual pluralism, what this implies for the meanings of ‘care’ and ‘responsibility’, autonomy and authenticity, and the implications of radical toleration and solidarity for exploring and sustaining rather than fearing sexual diversity. The third chapter, ‘Necessary Fictions’, looks again at the politics of sexual diversity. Dissident sexual identities, in particular, I suggest, are troubling. They also ‘cause trouble’ for the would-be certainties of sexual life. Yet in the two key elements of radical sexual politics, what I describe as ‘the moment of transgression’ and the ‘moment of citizenship’, we see something more than the special pleading of ‘sexual minorities’. There are possibilities here, I argue, for rethinking radical and pluralistic politics, which is why, despite the trouble, a politics of collective identity appears necessary.

Chapter 4 moves from the public arena of politics to the private arena of ‘The Sphere of the Intimate’. Where should the boundaries between the public and private be drawn?; what are the main components of private life?; and what rights of everyday life can we distinguish to protect the intimate from the encroachments of an imperialistic public? This is, indeed, a ‘tour of perplexities’, because sexual desire, and the erotic economy it produces, can never entirely be a private matter, which is a major reason why the intimate sphere may always be a battlefield of sorts. Yet it is also the site for the most precious of human qualities, those concerned with love, care and responsibility for life in its finitude. The last chapter, ‘Caught between Worlds and Ways of Being’, takes up the themes of love and death to tease out the new possibilities of human relationships in the shifting landscape of sexuality.

Several themes recur in these chapters. One I have already referred to, the impact of the AIDS crisis. This is not a book about AIDS, but it would be impossible for me to escape its threatening presence, both because as an individual I have experienced its devastating effects on friends and on the communities to which I feel closest; and as a social scientist because I recognize its twin impact as a symbolic focus of sexual anxiety and as a material factor in the redefining of sexual values and personal relationships. I see in the AIDS crisis a redefiner of the social, a whirlwind which devours, but also a storm which illuminates and reshapes.

If AIDS is the challenge, the hope of the new lies in the everyday experiments in sexual life which are transforming personal life. These are often muddled and confusing, marked by the uncertainty which governs public and private life today. But they also contain within them evidence of care, mutuality, responsibility and love which make it possible to be hopeful about our human future. The essential point I want to insist on is that these virtues are not the prerogative of any particular type of relationship, least of all a mythical and heavily mythologized traditional family. They exist in many forms of life, many ways of being, that need to be nurtured and valued for what they are, not feared for what they are not.

The third theme, which in a sense underlies the whole texture of the arguments of this book, is democracy, a difficult word to apply to the sexual sphere, perhaps, but a vital one if we are to achieve a revaluation of erotic life. If the book does nothing else, it will I hope indicate the importance of valuing the sexual under the light of a new democratic imaginary, where choice and diversity become the benchmarks not of a consumerist paradise but of a mature radical and pluralist democracy.

1

Living with Uncertainty

MARTYN:    One of the problems of AIDS is its unpredictability. It is like going on a journey without a map.

TONY:          The unpredictability is stressful. Ours is a life of uncertainty.

From an interview with Martyn, a person living with AIDS, and his partner Tony.

Uncertainty rocks the cradle of morality, fragility haunts it through life.

Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics

LIVING WITH AIDS

‘To speak of sexuality and the body, and not also speak of AIDS’, B. Ruby Rich has written, ‘would be, well, obscene’ (quoted in Crimp 1987, p. 14). I can only concur. Since the early 1980s AIDS, HIV disease, has haunted the sexual imaginary, embodying the danger and fear that trails in the wake of the body and its pleasures. Even as the epidemic becomes ‘normalized’ in large parts of the world, it becomes endemic in others, casting a shadow over the changes that are transforming the sexual world.

I am fully in agreement with those people who refuse to see ‘AIDS’ as a metaphor for anything (Sontag 1989). It is, as AIDS activists have long put it, ‘a natural disaster’, though one helped along by prejudice, discrimination and less than benign neglect. It is not a judgement from God, not ‘nature’s revenge’ on any group of people, not a symbol of a culture gone wrong. HIV disease is an illness, or set of illnesses, like any other, and in a caring and rational world it would be confronted with all the compassion, empathy and resources that other major health crises demand.

But that is not, of course, how it has always been seen. As the baroque language and the proliferation of metaphors surrounding it suggest, HIV was not responded to like any other virus. The fact that the epidemic was first identified in the early 1980s in the gay male communities of North America, a population that was already subject to marginalization and political and cultural attack, not despite but because of the vibrant growth of those communities in the previous decades, radically shaped the initial response.

The identification of such a health crisis coincided dreadfully with the growth of a moral climate which sought a return to ‘traditional values’, while attempts were simultaneously being made to transform economic and social policies in the direction of a new individualism and against welfare traditions. This meant that few resources outside those available in the communities at risk were directed at the crisis until the epidemic was almost out of control. As the epidemic spread to other marginal communities and groups, especially the poor, the black and drug users, and barely seemed to touch the ‘normal’, heterosexual population in most Western countries, even as it was beginning to devastate the poorer countries of the globe, the association of AIDS with the perverse, the marginal, the Other, the disease of the already diseased, gave a colour and stigma to those affected which has persisted, even as community-based organizations, governments, with varying degrees of energy and enthusiasm, and international agencies struggled to contain the spread of infection. Enduring efforts to separate the ‘implicated’ from the ‘immune’ (Goldstein 1991), the ‘guilty’ from the ‘innocent’, spoke to a culture which feared the impact of sexual change, social complexity and moral diversity. During its first decade AIDS did, therefore, become a symbol: of a culture at odds with itself, of a global issue that evoked a multitude of local passions, moralities and prejudices, the epitome of a civilization whose values were uncertain, where pleasure marched with disease and death. As John Greyson put it in his music-video parody of ‘Death in Venice’ (quoted in Crimp 1987, p. 268):

The ADS epidemicIs sweeping the NationAcquired dread of sex

Fear and panic

In the whole population

Acquired dread of sex.

The person with HIV or AIDS must live with the resulting uncertainty all the time: the uncertainty of diagnosis, of prognosis, of reactions of friends, families, loved ones, of anonymous and fearful or hate-filled others. Everyone else must live with the uncertainty too: the uncertainty bred of risk, of possible infection, of not knowing, of loss.

Uncertainty breeds anxiety and fear: about the past, and for the present and future.

Uncap the rads and fill the room with fear.