Invented Moralities

Sexual Values in an Age of Uncertainty

Jeffrey Weeks

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780745613697
  9780745613680
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745669069
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

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

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 epidemic
Is sweeping the Nation
Acquired 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.
Enormous rooms require enormous fear.

(Lynch 1989, p. 72)

Yet the truth of AIDS is that its impact is not predetermined, but haphazard. There is no straightforward correlation between lifestyle and HIV infection. The virus itself, though potentially potent in its effects, is itself a relatively weak one. People who ‘do risky things’ do not necessarily fall ill. As yet ill-understood co-factors (way of life, general health, incidence of poverty and other diseases) may ease the way; but a high element of chance determines who will get HIV, and then who among these will succumb to opportunistic diseases. ‘Contingency’ is a hallmark of the AIDS crisis.

Chance, accident, contingency: these are more than characteristics of a particular set of diseases. They appear as markers of the present. Things happen to us, without apparent rationale or justification. The hope of modernity – that we could control nature, become the masters of all we survey – may be brought to naught by random happenings in countries of which we know or care little – or by a microscopic organism unknown until the 1980s.

Yet though events may appear accidental and unexpected, the ways in which we respond are not. They have a history – in fact, many histories. AIDS may be a modern phenomenon, the disease of the fin de millennium, but it is a remarkably historicized phenomenon, framed with histories that burden people living with HIV and AIDS with a weight they should not have to bear.

There are histories of previous diseases, and response to diseases, which provided a rich source of comparisons between the impact of syphilis in the nineteenth century, and AIDS today (Fee and Fox 1988, 1992). There are histories of sexuality, especially the unorthodox sexualities, and histories of the ways in which sexuality has been regulated, telling a tale of power, the institutionalization of the heterosexual norm and the marginalization of the perverse (Foucault 1979). There are histories of racial categorization, of development and undevelopment, which have constructed racialized minorities of the poor and disadvantaged, a Third World in the heart of the cities of the First World, as well as a developing world battling against poverty and disease (see West 1993). There are histories of moral panics focusing on the vulnerable, of punitive interventions to contain the infected, of various forms of oppression of those who do not conform to the norms, and of resistance (Weeks 1991). We are overwhelmed with histories, and with the lessons they could, but usually do not, teach us. But they have one thing in common. These histories are histories of difference and diversity.

Despite the common viral and immunological factors, HIV and AIDS are experienced differently by different groups of people. The suffering and loss felt by gay men in the urban communities of large Western cities is neither less nor greater than the suffering or loss of the poor in the black and hispanic communities of New York, or in the cities and villages of Africa, Latin America or South East Asia; but it is different, because the histories of the communities affected are different. As Simon Watney has written (1989, p. 19): ‘Wherever we look in the world, it is invariably the case that people’s experience of HIV infection and disease faithfully duplicates their socio-economic situation before the epidemic began’. We can find here a key to the power of AIDS. It is a syndrome that can threaten catastrophe on an unprecedented scale. But it is experienced, directly or empathetically, as a particular, historically and culturally organized series of diseases. AIDS is both global and local in its impact, and this tells us something vital about the historic present in which we live.

The impact of, and response to, AIDS forcefully reminds us of the complexities and interdependence of the contemporary world. Migrations across countries and continents, from country to town, from ‘traditional’ ways of life to ‘modern’, in flight from persecution, poverty or sexual repression, made the spread of HIV possible. The modern information society, global programmes, international consultations and conferences, makes possible a world-wide response to threatening disaster.

Yet the very scale and speed of this globalization of experience produces, as if by a necessary reflex, a burgeoning of culturally and politically specific responses, as well as new identities, new communities and conflicting demands and obligations. In becoming aware of the global village, we seem to need to affirm and reaffirm our local needs, histories and loyalties. Identity and difference: these provide the site of many of the most acute political, social and cultural debates today.

We can see in the AIDS crisis, and in the response it has engendered, several tendencies which cast a sharp light on wider currents and concerns. First, there is a general sense of crisis, a ‘sense of an ending’, generated by rapid cultural and sexual change, which many have seen AIDS as reinforcing. AIDS did not cause this pervasive mood – on the contrary people with HIV have had to endure the consequences of it – but the epidemic rode in on the overwhelming waves of change, and we have to confront the results. AIDS, it has been argued, demonstrates how we as a culture ‘. . . struggle and negotiate about appropriate processes to deal with social change, especially in its radical form’ (Nelkin et al. 1991, p. 3). And we find that process painfully difficult.

Second, following from that, AIDS reminds us of the complexities of contemporary identities. It was the rise of new sexual identities and communities in the 1960s and 1970s, especially those of lesbians and gay men, which dramatized the fundamental reorientation of sexual ways of being that was taking place. The association of those identities with the threat of disease and death only served to underline the sense of sexual uncertainty that was already manifesting itself in a revival of moral absolutisms and cultural counter-attacks. Uncertainty about who and what we are feeds into wider anxieties and fears.

Third, related to this, AIDS speaks to an ‘unfinished revolution’ in sexual relationships: a collapse of the settled certainties of family life, an explosion of different lifestyles and life experiments, a potent but incomplete democratization of relationships, and an acute tension between individual desires and collective belongings. Not surprisingly, AIDS, as Seidman (1992, p. 146) argues, has become a principal site to struggle over sexual ethics, and to clarify the meaning and morality of sex.

But finally, these very changes, which seem to many to illustrate the final collapse of the enlightened hopes of modernity, have produced new solidarities as people grapple with the challenges of postmodernity in profoundly humane ways. HIV and AIDS mark you. They have also provided the challenge and opportunities for creating new sensibilities, forged in the furnace of suffering, loss and survival. Out of the pain, rage and anger has come care, mutuality and love, a testimony to the possibilities of realizing human bonds across the chasms of an unforgiving culture. Here we see, I believe, the real possibilities of a radical humanism, grounded in people’s struggles, experiences, particular histories and elective traditions.

A SENSE OF AN ENDING?

In an influential book Frank Kermode (1967) wrote of ‘the sense of an ending’ that shadowed western thought and its fictions.

A looming sense of an ending does appear to haunt many of our cultural assumptions as we approach not only the culmination of the century but also the end of the millennium. Old certainties disappear, or lose their meaning; new ones clash as we attempt to reconstruct a sense of what a common value system could be in the face of cultural fragmentation (to put it negatively) and (more positively) the apparent diversity of human goals. Faced by the apparent contingency of values, many seem to want to give up the struggle altogether as they assert the impossibility of agreeing on anything of ultimate significance. Others speak as if we are dancing on the rim of a volcano, with the only hope a firm yanking of the guide ropes, and a tighter disciplining of our unruly desires.

As Susan Sontag has said, in the countdown to the millennium, a rise in apocalyptic thinking may be inevitable (Sontag 1989). But it is not simply the imminence of a symbolic ending that feeds our anxieties. Apocalyptic thinking, Giddens (1991, p. 4) suggests, is a characteristic of the late modern world because it introduces risk which previous generations have not had to face. Faced with the breakdown of old traditions which related trust and values to a strong sense of place and belonging, traditions which securely locked us into the certainties of gender, family, morality and nation, individuals have been thrown back on themselves, which has involved hazards of individual choice and interpretation of meanings. Morality, Bauman argues, has been increasingly privatized and, like everything else that shares such a fate, ‘ethics has become a matter of individual discretion, risk-taking, chronic uncertainty and never-placated qualms’ (1992a. p. xxiii).

In such a world we are vulnerable to waves of anxiety highlighting our contingency. The opposite to trust as a basis for social life, as Giddens (1990, p. 100) points out, is not mistrust but angst and dread. It is not surprising, therefore, that fear looms over our actions. Hutcheon evokes the threat of a ‘recessionary erotic economy’ (1989, p. 141), brought about by a terror of disease and a fetishization of fitness, and others have observed the ways in which fitness and health have become a new focus for a sense of self and a harnessing of the resilience of the body (Coward 1989, p. 126). We live, Linda Singer (1993) has argued, under the ‘hegemony of epidemic’, requiring us to avoid risk, and adopt a ‘new sobriety’ in our personal conduct. This is more than a simple extrapolation from the AIDS epidemic, but a response to a wider sense of crisis, and explanatory modes, shaped by a new language of contagion. We speak of ‘epidemics’ of child sex abuse, teenage pregnancy, pornography .. .

The more culturally conservative, on the left as well as the right, suggest that we are living through a progressive demoralization of society, with every index of social order, from civility to the breakdown of stable family life, streaking off the graph. We seek simple solutions in scapegoats. Unmarried teenage mothers become not only a symptom of sexual change but a cause of social ills, from housing crises to crime (Murray 1994). Faced with a ‘panic-culture’, a sense of living at the ‘edge of the world’, enticed and repelled by the ‘pleasures of catastrophe’ (Kroker and Kroker 1988, pp. 13ff), there is a temptation to seek a total solution. An epidemic of whatever kind, whether of genuine disease or of presumed moral debility, seems to require at the least a managerial response, a mobilization of an effort to control. The new fundamentalisms, whether secular or religious, Christian, Hindu or Islamic, try to move the furniture of our minds into a new shape, where absolute truths are wedded to moralistic proscriptions and prescriptions (Bhatt 1994). Or in the absence of anything obvious we surrender to that ‘modern, wilful’ kind of nostalgia that seeks refuge in myths of stability, harmony and golden ages, somewhere in our childhood or just below the horizon of historic memory (Robertson 1990). Back to basics indeed!

Given the very real uncertainty that swims alongside our every action, and the assertive certainties that seek to cure doubt, how can we measure what is actually happening? Are we really at the end of time?

‘Endings’ are of course largely fictions, attempts by human minds to impose some sort of order (however apocalyptic) on the chaos of events. A century, after all, is only an arbitrary timeframe; it is unlikely that events will so gather as to fall readily within its boundaries. But the imminence of a new period, how ever invented, may dramatize a sense of impending change, and even come to portend disaster. The crises of the fin de siècle, Showalter (1991, p. 2) argues, ‘are more intensely experienced, more emotionally fraught, more weighted with symbolic and historic meaning, because we invest them with the metaphors of death and rebirth that we project onto the final decades and years of a century’. It is, perhaps, no accident then that our contemporary sensibility produces strong sympathies and preoccupations with the political, cultural and philosophical movements of the turn of the last century (Harvey 1989, p. 285).

Myths, metaphors and images of sexual crisis and apocalypse have marked both the nineteenth-century fin de siècle and our own. Just as the decades since the 1960s have been attacked for their endorsement of sexual permissiveness and licence, so the 1880s and 1890s were seen by the novelist George Gissing as decades of ‘sexual anarchy’ (Showalter 1991). In both periods, all the laws governing sexual identity and behaviour seemed to be undergoing rapid transformation, as the boundaries between men and women were challenged and stretched, as family life seemed to be under threat, as sexual dissidence achieved an unparalleled verbosity, as the sexually ‘perverse’ invaded the arts and literature, and as the fear of sexual disease taunted the imaginary of private and public life.

As AIDS opportunely offered a metaphor for twentieth-century lapse, so syphilis and other diseases haunted sex, marriage and the family in the nineteenth century (Mort 1987). The child sex abuse scandals of the 1980s and 1990s immediately evoke memories of the discovery of ‘the maiden tribute of modern Babylon’, child exploitation and prostitution in the 1880s. Divisions in the feminist movement today about pornography echo the late nineteenth-century splits over prostitution and moral purity (Walkowitz 1993).

Inevitably, issues of sex and gender intersect with other social categorizations. Fears of racial diversity today play on themes of racial superiority and racial decline prevalent in the last century (Hall 1992). Anxieties about the sexual habits of the young and the poor (often also the black) and overpopulation in the Third World recirculate anxieties from the last century about the promiscuous sexuality of the newly urbanized masses.

All these anxieties revolve around questions of boundaries, that separate one group of people from another, and identities, that merge them: the boundaries between men and women, the normal and the abnormal, adults and children, the civilized and the uncivilized, the rich and the poor, the enlightened and the masses. In periods of flux and unprecedented change the boundaries begin to dissolve, and identities are undermined and reformed. And in sexuality above all these dissolutions and mergings are most acute, as the great causes célèbres of sexual history reveal. Oscar Wilde, the object lesson in the perils of sexual transgression in the 1890s, not only breached the codes of sexual respectability by leading an increasingly dangerous homosexual life, he also broke the barriers of class by indulging with working-class youths (Dollimore 1991; Sinfield 1994). Sexual abuse of children in the 1980s was more than an imposition of unwelcome adult power over children; it also suggested a fundamental u...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Values, whose Values?
• 1 Living with Uncertainty
• 2 Inventing Moralities
• 3 Necessary Fictions: Sexual Identities and the Politics of Diversity
• 4 The Sphere of the Intimate and the Values of Everyday Life
• 5 Caught between Worlds and Ways of Being
• Bibliography
• Index