Cosmopolitan Sexualities

Hope and the Humanist Imagination

Ken Plummer

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780745671000, 9780745670997
• eBook ISBN: 9780745692319
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Part One
Humanism 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:

1. An ontology of a real global humanistic universalism of sexual and gender differences.
2. A recognition of human sexual differences as being part of what counts as being human.
3. An imagination of ‘openness’ and ‘tolerance’ towards sexual differences; often accompanied by a playful sense of irony, paradox, and contradiction.
4. An agon of perpetual conflicts about these sexual differences, the source of much human suffering.
5. A politics of sexual differences connecting local political struggles with global ones through dialogue and a search for common grounds.
6. A social structure of social solidarity of reciprocal inter and intra cultural awareness of sexual differences, becoming enshrined in rights, institutions and everyday practices.
7. 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.
8. An ethics which fosters a global sense of empathy, care, justice, dignity and a flourishing of different lives living together well.
9. A legal framework of international laws that provide frameworks for organizing the diverse sexualities in the modern world.
10. 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.

1
Plural 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 d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Website
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part One: Humanism and the Making of Cosmopolitan Sexualities
• Part Two: Inclusive Sexualities: Nudging Towards a Better World
• Epilogue: Contingent Sexualities – Dancing into the Sexual Labyrinth
• References
• Index: 100 Samples of Multiple Sexualities
• Index: General
• End User License Agreement