Sexuality, Gender and Power

Intersectional and Transnational Perspectives

Anna G. Jónasdóttir,Valerie Bryson,Kathleen B. Jones

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136852794
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Gender Studies

Bringing together essays by a distinguished international group of leading and emerging scholars of sexuality and gender, this stimulating and accessible collection explores a range of theoretical and "real world" perspectives current in the field. Treating these approaches as complementary, Sexuality, Gender and Power fosters critical conversations about sexuality across disciplinary, cultural, national and ideological boundaries.Underpinned by a broad editorial commitment to intersectionality, the chapters deploy approaches that range from historical materialism to queer theory, and from contract theory to theories of the gendered sexual self to address recurrent questions around agency, power, identity and self-hood. Theoretical debates inform and are informed by more empirically oriented chapters focusing on topics such as gay identity in contemporary Croatia, sexual politics in the Commonwealth Caribbean, western "tango tourists, " sexual violence in war, prostitution, femme fashion, changing sexual norms in China and Taiwan, and feminist politics in the 2008 US presidential campaign.Each chapter is interesting and important in its own right; taken together, they advance gender theory and research by developing a complex conception of sexuality that explores intersections between and amongst theories, levels of analysis and identities, linking case studies to international trends and theoretical debates to everyday experiences.

Part I
Sexuality, Love and Social Theory

Editors’ Introduction

Sexuality, Love and Social Theory

The key overall aim of this book is to provide a new vantage point from which to build a general theory of sexuality informed by non-hierarchical thinking. As we argued in our Introduction, we believe that such a theory must be multi-leveled and must bridge the apparent gaps between material and discursive approaches. Rather than treating sexuality and love as either social or individual phenomena, we argue that the experiences of individuals are neither more nor less important than wider social structures, and that good theory must be open to empirical concerns.

In this context, the chapters in Section I are in conversation with one another as they seek to explore the multi-faceted processes and interactions that arise when we try to think about self, identity and society and how to theorize and understand sexuality and its relationship to love. Taken together, the chapters show how sexuality and love are bound up with conceptions of the self, and the ways in which the embodied self interacts with both its material and cultural environment. This environment in turn both produces and reflects a complex mesh of pressures and opportunities, as intimate, local, national and global structures and processes intersect, often in contradictory ways. These contradictions mean that although the material and cultural environment shapes individual selfhood and behavior, it cannot determine it in any straightforward way.

The chapters share the understanding that good theory will be informed by micro, meso and macro level research, and that the boundaries between ‘levels’ of theory and research are fluid and permeable. In particular, they see the material-discursive divide that characterizes much recent thought as artificial, and they indicate that if we treat apparently competing approaches as complementary we can generate new forms of knowledge. Thus in Chapter 1, Stevi Jackson argues that if we are to understand what is ‘going on’ in any social situation, we need a multi-dimensional approach that recognizes the interrelationships between and within different dimensions of the social (structures and institutions, meaning, everyday social practices, self and subjectivity). She uses this multi-dimensional approach to explore the complex intersection of global and local, material and cultural processes at play in the creation of sexual selves in eastern and western societies, and to link macro theories and processes to micro level research on the lives of lesbians in Taiwan. Katja Kahlina (Chapter 2) takes a related approach, arguing that we need to supplement recent understandings of the constructed and fluid nature of sexual identities by recognizing the ‘reality’ of such identity categories and their intersection with ethnic identities so as to analyse the processes through which they are created and negotiated. Applying this approach to the construction of ‘ethnosexuality’ in Croatia, she considers the potentially conflicting identities of a Croatian gay man, linking his lived experience and sense of self to global and national economic, political and cultural developments.

While all the chapters endorse the view that sexuality is bound up with both material and discursive circumstances, the focus of Anna G. Jónasdóttir in Chapter 3 is primarily on the former. Similarly, whereas all chapters agree that neither large-scale social processes nor micro-level subjectivies can be understood in isolation, the first two chapters focus on the ways in which the former give rise to the latter, and Chapters 3 to 5 are concerned with how wider structures of power are maintained and/or contested. Thus Jónasdóttir’s chapter (Chapter 3) develops her theory of ‘love power’ as an exploitable and ‘world-creating’ human capacity to link this to the (re) production of gendered societies—in particular, the historically specific maintenance of patriarchy in formally equal western societies. Drawing on—and radically transforming—Marx’s materialist method, Jónasdóttir argues that the practice of sexual love, and the ’inherent dialectic of (its) two elements, care and the erotic or ecstatic element’ must be at the core of feminist social theory and political practice.

In Chapter 4, Eudine Barriteau applies Jónasdóttir’s relatively abstract discussion of ‘love power’ to the concrete socio-sexual experiences of women in the Caribbean. She agrees that the vantage point of ‘love power’ reveals the political nature of sexual relationships between women and men, and explores some of the ways in which women’s pursuit of sexual pleasure is linked to their subordination and to unequal outcomes in the spheres of public policy and political economy. Although Barriteau is able to draw on some existing research, so far little attention has been paid to these connections, and she therefore calls for research that links micro and macro analyses by seeking to ‘work backwards and forwards from the dynamics of that basic union (played out in private, intimate spaces … ), to contemporary manifestations of power negotiations and imbalances in Caribbean political economy.’ In Chapter 5, Valerie Bryson too links intimate experiences to wider structures of power and retains a focus on the ‘real world’ nature of gendered inequality and exploitation. In discussing the material bases of oppression and the social forces shaping and shaped by ‘(re)productive’ (that is, sexual, procreative and caring) practices and interactions, she focuses on the ways in which procreation, sex and care are becoming part of the global market economy, and identifies a series of emerging contradictions between the imperatives of production and (re)production. Although, like Barrieau, she draws on the concept of ‘love power,’ she places more emphasis on the caring than the erotic elements of love.

Chapter 6, by Maria Törnqvist, returns to a focus on intimate individual experiences, but again links these to global structures and processes. Drawing on her original primary research on western women who travel to Buenos Aires to dance tango, Törnqvist teases out the complex ways in which individuals make sense of their own and others’ experience, as pre-existing narratives of selfhood and romance intersect with those of ethnicity and economic power to produce ‘troubling tales’ of difference, desire and romance. In discussing the details of individual encounters between western women and Argentinean men, Törnqvist develops themes touched on in earlier chapters around the construction of the self, the nature of desire and the multi-dimensional nature of the local, national and global processes, practices and discourses that these involve. Her chapter also reveals something of the complex ways in which gendered power relationships can intersect with other social structures. Related questions around the nature of ‘power’ recurred throughout the earlier chapters, and are developed further in Part II.

1
Materialist Feminism, the Self and Global Late Modernity

Some Consequences for Intimacy and Sexuality

Stevi Jackson

In the last two decades there has been an increasing interest in the concept of the ‘self’, inspired in part by Foucault’s analyses of ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault 1988) and in part by theories of late modernity. I am concerned here with the latter, with theorists such as Giddens (1991, 1992) and Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1995, 2002) who argue that contemporary social conditions have given rise to highly individualized forms of self-hood and also to transformations in gender and sexual relations. These writers are currently setting agendas for social theory in much of Europe and beyond—and doing so in relation to issues of central concern to feminists. Many feminists have, in turn, been critical of their preoccupation with individualization, particularly in relation to sexual, familial and personal relationships (e.g. Jamieson 1999; Irwin 2005; Jackson 2008). Fewer, however, have engaged theoretically with the assumptions about the self-underpinning modernity theories or with their ethnocentrism—the issues I address in this chapter. First I draw on the pragmatist thought of George Herbert Mead (1934) to argue for a reconceptualization of the self, one that is sufficiently flexible to attend to culturally, historically and contextually variable forms of reflexive self-hood. I then use this as a springboard for challenging the exclusively western focus of the modernity theorists through considering the gendered and sexual consequences of modernity in East Asia.

This concern with the self might seem a long way from materialist feminism. I have, however, argued that we need a multiplicity of perspectives in order to grasp the complexity of gender, sexuality and social life in general (see Jackson 2006). I suggest that we should consider at least four dimensions of the social: structures and institutions; meaning (encompassing both wider cultural discourses and meanings emergent from everyday interaction); everyday social practices, and finally the self and subjectivity. These dimensions are interrelated and all are part of what is ‘going on’ in any social situation, but we cannot see them all from a single perspective. For example, sexuality is shaped by structural factors, from the institutionalization of heterosexuality to the workings of global capitalism (Hennessy 2000), but is also about meanings, practices and desires that are not reducible to structural effects and cannot be understood with conceptual tools designed to analyze social structures.

Having been warned against stretching ‘the concept of the material to the limits of its elasticity’ (Rahman and Witz 2003: 251), I would not claim that all these dimensions are material but would maintain that taking account of them is consistent with materialism. The wider social structures, relations and practices that shape our lives do have a material reality in that they exist and have effects independent of our understanding of them. Social reality, however, does not reside only in structures, but also in the everyday relations between and actions of human individuals. It is these local and particular practices and the meanings associated with them that constitute our lived reality—which is the space in which selves are constituted. I suggest that insofar as Mead’s conceptualization of the social self embeds subjectivity in the actualities of everyday practices, it fits with a broadly materialist world view, though it cannot enable us to see the structural relations that transcend everyday realities and by which they are bounded.

GENDER, MODERNITY AND THE REFLEXIVE SELF

Theorists of late modernity do address social-structural change and thus seem to offer a means of linking the self back to macro-social structures and processes. Unlike postmodernity theorists, they see recent social transformations as an intensification of processes already evident within modernity, rather than a break from modernity (see Heaphy 2007). Late modernity is, for them, characterized by ‘detraditionalization’ and individualization (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002) and a disembedding of the individual from solidaristic bonds, accompanied by a re-ordering of gender and intimate relations. Thus we are said to living in an era of ‘the normal chaos of love’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995) or ‘liquid love’ (Bauman 2003), witnessing a ‘transformation of intimacy’ (Giddens 1992) or even ‘the end of patriarchalism’ (Castells 2004). While Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002) cast women as less individuated than men, caught between living for others and forging lives of their own, Giddens locates them as agents of change. For Giddens the shift from romantic to ‘co...