Sex Panic Rhetorics, Queer Interventions

By Ian Barnard

Winner of the 2021 Conference on College Composition and Communication Lavender Rhetorics Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship

Analyzes the rhetoric of contemporary sex panics to expose how homophobia, heterosexism, and transphobia define public, political, and scholarly preoccupations with sexuality and gender
 
In Sex Panic Rhetorics, Queer Interventions, Ian Barnard makes the counter-intuitive argument that contemporary “sex panics” are undergirded by queerphobia, even when the panics in question don’t appear to have much to do with queerness. Barnard presents six case studies that treat a wide range of sex panic rhetorics around child molesters, sex trafficking, transgenderism, incest, queer kids, and pedagogy to demonstrate this argument. By using examples from academic scholarship, political discourse, and popular culture, including the Kevin Spacey scandal and the award-winning film Moonlight, Barnard shows how homophobia and transphobia continue to pervade contemporary Western culture.
 
Barnard is concerned not so much with looking at the overt homophobia and transphobia that are the more obvious objects of antihomophobic and antitransphobic critique. The author’s focus, rather, is on excavating the significant traces of these panics in a neoliberal culture that has supposedly demonstrated its civility by its embrace of diversity, renunciation of its homophobic past, and attentiveness to the transgender revolution that has swept popular media and political culture in the United States and elsewhere. During a time of increasing conservative backlashes against advancing LGBTQ rights and human rights discourses in general, this book shows why it is important to attend to the liberal covers for sex panics that are not too far removed from their rhetorically conservative cousins.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Apr 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9780817392918

Book preview

SEX PANIC RHETORICS, QUEER INTERVENTIONS

RHETORIC, CULTURE, AND SOCIAL CRITIQUE

SERIES EDITOR

John Louis Lucaites

EDITORIAL BOARD

Jeffrey A. Bennett

Carole Blair

Joshua Gunn

Robert Hariman

Debra Hawhee

Claire Sisco King

Steven Mailloux

Raymie E. McKerrow

Toby Miller

Phaedra C. Pezzullo

Austin Sarat

Janet Staiger

Barbie Zelizer

SEX PANIC RHETORICS QUEER INTERVENTIONS

IAN BARNARD

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

TUSCALOOSA

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2020 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Scala Pro, TW Cen MT

Cover image: Painting by Aneil Rallin

Cover design: David Nees

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-2056-0

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9291-8

For my Millennial and Generation Z students at Chapman University

—the best generations

Joe: Everything I say to you is made to mean something else . . . Oh, let’s get out of here as fast as we can.

Karen: [as though she is finishing the sentence for him]: And every word will have a new meaning. You think we’ll be able to run away from that? Woman, child, love, lawyer—no words that we can use in safety any more. [Laughs bitterly.]

From Lillian Hellman’s 1934 play The Children’s Hour

Joe: Everything I say is made to mean something else

Karen: Yes, every word has a new meaning . . . child . . . love . . . friend . . . woman . . . there aren’t many safe words any more . . . even marriage doesn’t have the same meaning any more.

From the 1961 film The Children’s Hour

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

1.

Introduction (Arriving at the Here and Now)

2.

Child Molester Panics

3.

Sex-Trafficking Panics

4.

Transgender Panics

5.

Incest Panics

6.

Queer Kids

7.

Pedagogy Panics

8.

Conclusion (Toward a Queer Goodbye)

Notes

References

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am very grateful to my editor, Dan Waterman, and the anonymous reviewers for the University of Alabama Press for their enthusiastic response to my manuscript and for their helpful feedback, much of which has been incorporated into the book you have before you. I also owe a great debt to the following friends, colleagues, students, ex-students, editors, and University of Alabama Press staff who have (sometimes without realizing it) referred me to sources and resources that enabled me to get where I needed to go with this book, encouraged me when I doubted myself, given me generous feedback on the manuscript in part or whole and who did the work of getting the book into print: Norma Aceves, Jonathan Alexander, Kent Baxter, Jon Berry, K. J. Cerankowski, Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli, Petra Dierkes-Thrun, Elise Dixon, Jenifer Fennell, Kelli Fuery, Patrick Fuery, Brian Glaser, Phil Grant, Emmett Griffith, Jeanne Gunner, Susan Harris, Susan Jarratt, Trevor Jones, Naz Keynejad, Claire Sisco King, Christina Kowalski, Alicia Kozameh, Kristen Laakso, Joanna Levin, Skye Maule-O’Brien, Jan Osborn, Jada Augustine Patchigondla, Morgan Read-Davidson, Blanche Sarratt, Ryley Schlachter, Daniele Struppa, Mónica Szurmuk, Joseph Thomas, Radley Turner, George Uba, Alison Williams, Kristi Wilson, Patricia Zline, and my brilliant graduate assistants, Sam Risak and Natalia Sanchez.

I presented material from some of these chapters at Chapman University in 2013, at the Feminisms and Rhetorics conference in 2013 and 2017, at the Western States Rhetoric and Literacy conference in 2016, and at the Rhetoric Society of America 2018 conference—I appreciate the productive questions and comments offered by my interlocutors at these presentations.

Thanks also to Chapman University for a sabbatical leave that enabled me to complete work on this book and to the interlibrary loan staff at Chapman University’s Leatherby Libraries for their conscientious assistance in locating sources for this research. I am grateful, too, for the outstanding collection at the beautiful downtown branch of the Los Angeles Public Library and for the assistance of the knowledgeable and professional LAPL librarians in helping me to locate sources.

An earlier version of part of chapter 2 was published in Rhetoric Society Quarterly 47.1. An earlier version of a different portion of chapter 2 originally appeared in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking vol. 5, iss. 2 (2018): 105–11. Part of chapter 3 is republished with permission of Taylor and Francis Group LLC Books, from Sexual Rhetorics: Methods, Identities, Publics, edited by Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes (2016); permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. A brief excerpt from chapter 4 was published in the Writing Instructor, March 2015. An earlier version of chapter 5 previously appeared in the Lexington Books anthology, Imagined Borders/Lived Ambiguity: Intersections of Repression and Resistance, edited by B. Garrick Harden. My thanks to the editors and anonymous reviewers of those pieces for shaping my thinking and writing and to the publishers for allowing me to reprint material from those earlier publications here.

Aneil Rallin advised and sustained me from beginning to end of my five plus years of work on this project—offering a multitude of queer interventions along the way.

1

Introduction (Arriving at the Here and Now)

The time has come to think about sex. To some, sexuality may seem to be an unimportant topic, a frivolous distraction from the more critical problems of poverty, war, disease, racism, famine, or nuclear annihilation. But it is precisely at times such as these, when we live with the possibility of unthinkable destruction, that people are likely to become dangerously crazy about sexuality.

—Gayle Rubin, Thinking Sex

I. COVERS

I was hoping for easy access and a quick getaway that afternoon in the downtown branch of the Los Angeles Public Library but no such luck. Or, perhaps, a different kind of luck that gave me fodder to digest and a push to contemplate the banalities of panics, as well as the wide swathes of cultural significance and human impact—both petty and devastating—that they inhabit and activate.

That day, I had a long list of queer children and young adult books to check out as part of my research for the Queer Kids chapter of this book. From the safety of the online library catalog, I discovered with dread that I would have to venture into the special Teenscape room of the library to find a number of the books I needed. To make matters worse, when I reached said Teenscape space, I found that some of the books were not on the designated shelves. I had to ask a librarian where they were and to wait in the Teenscape while she retrieved them from storage. I was extremely uncomfortable.

The point of this story is not that any of the adults or kids in the Teenscape looked at me disapprovingly or that the librarian hesitated when I made my request. Indeed, as far as I could tell, no such thing happened (this was LA, after all). But my own panic, my own fear about the perceptions others in the Teenscape might have of what looked like a shaved-headed lone gay white man of a certain age asking for books about queer kids, even in this very secure, low-stakes, and highly privileged setting, was a powerful reminder of how the kinds of sex panics I discuss in this book get internalized, even by their loudest critics and critical analysts, indeed, of how sex panics so effortlessly and efficiently perform their policing and disciplining functions so that their objects are most vigilantly policing themselves: Foucault redux.

Of course, these panics have histories with material effects, so their internalization is not necessarily unwarranted. On that day in the library, I am sure that lurking in the back of my mind were the abuse Gayle Rubin faced (documented in Rubin 2011) for her pioneering work on sex and sexuality, including her insistence in 1984’s Thinking Sex that children’s sexuality be acknowledged and that all sexual mores are socially/politically/historically contingent, and the British government’s campaign against James Kincaid’s 1992 book, Child-Loving, along with other related witch hunts (Bruhm and Hurley 2004a, xxxiii). Not to mention the continuing public cultural conflagrations around children and sexuality, nonacademic spaces that any queer-themed scholarly book (especially one treating children) necessarily steps into, given the crossover interest of texts with queer subject matter. While I did not flatter myself that my modest and much later contribution to these conversations would garner the high-profile attention that assailed Rubin or Kincaid, I have, after all, been asked by disparate reviewers, editors, and other stakeholders of my work on this topic in its various current and previous incarnations to clarify that I do not support child abuse and sex trafficking. Then I am faced with the dilemma of articulating such a denial without reproducing the very sex panic that I am calling out, without speaking in what Roger Lancaster calls the uneven, sometimes shaky, voice of the writer who fears beginning to sound unsympathetic to those who really have suffered awful abuse (2011, 17). In 2016, Joseph Fischel continued the ritual exculpatory incantation at the beginning of his Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent: Since child sexual abuse and sexual predators are perhaps the only topics as politically volatile as terrorism, certain caveats seem appropriate (25). Now, a few years later, under the specter of Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, et al., where accusations of sex panics have taken on a decidedly regressive tint, similar to earlier (and ongoing) denunciations of political correctness by conservative cultural critics and now right-wing Internet trolls, the territory of this book seems ever more politically fraught, and my need to distance myself from unwelcome bedfellows even more urgent. I will address those bedfellows/interlopers more directly in the last two chapters of this book, but for now, in order not to succumb to panic, I must press on, must insist on the Child (and the child).

Child molester panic, which I discuss at length in the following chapter but which also runs as an undercurrent throughout this book, is so endemic to contemporary US culture that many people do not find it odd or remarkable or problematic that single men in parks near children (or even not near children) should routinely be regarded with suspicion, that parents pull their children closer when single men sit next to said children on the subway train, or that single men themselves avoid sitting next to children on the subway in order not to induce the panic (and a corresponding degree of self-shame and -embarrassment) in the first place. Certainly, this panic, in its popular manifestations, is particularly gendered: a strange woman greeting a child on a subway is unlikely to generate the same panicked response from the child’s parents as a man offering a similar greeting. Of course, this is also about parents’ perceptions of and constructions of who is a man and who is a woman, and degrees of womanliness and manliness will inflect responses accordingly; transgender panics shape their own particularly phobic rhetorics and actions around perceptions or realities of gender instability and gender unreadability, a topic I treat in chapter 4. These (sex) panics are also shaped by hegemonic discourses of family (a lone man poses the most danger; nuclear families are seen as most comforting) and inflected by class distinctions and affiliations and by racial panics inasmuch as men’s racializations will often produce different degrees of panic depending on the panickers’ level of identification or disidentification with what they discern as a particular man’s racial and/or ethnic identity and the level of threat they associate with that racial/ethnic identity. All of these scenes of panic, of course, pivot on the self-identifications of the observer, since a trans subway passenger may well find a trans stranger more comforting than a cis stranger, and so on, though subaltern subjects are seldom considered when dominant discourses produce their phobic narratives of danger.

But these scenes of panic do not overtly seem to be about the perceived sexual orientation or (cis)gender status of the object of panic. After all, aren’t straight men perceived as much of a menace as men of other sexual orientations? Don’t lone straight men have to face children being snatched away from their vicinity on the subway by panicky parents as much as (or perhaps more than?) lone men of other sexual orientations? My answer is no, though it is a complicated no, because sexual orientation and constructions of sexual orientation and queerphobic cultural dispositions make the lone straight man somewhat of a mirage to the extent that he might be interpellated into queerness. My answer shapes the argument of this book: sex panics are, by and large, queerphobic panics, with important disclaimers in chapters 4 (Transgender Panics) and 5 (Incest Panics). But what is this queerness and what are queer interventions (or how does one intervene queerly)? I consider the meanings that I attach to the evocative and contested term queer, whose contemporary grounds are rapidly shifting, in section II below and in the chapters that follow.

II. MORPHINGS/RHETORICS

In the opening lines to Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick proposes that many of the major nodes of thought and knowledge in twentieth-century Western culture as a whole are structured—indeed, fractured—by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male. . . . An understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition (1990, 1). Sedgwick brilliantly lays out a set of oppositions that seem to have nothing necessarily to do with homosexuality but that, in fact, intrinsically structure and are formatively shaped by the homosexual/heterosexual divide—for instance, active/passive, utopia/apocalypse, and innocence/initiation (11). In short, Sedgwick offers what Benjamin Kahan calls a world-systems analysis in his 2017 updating of Sedgwick’s taxonomy. Sedgwick’s deconstructive and psychoanalytic epistemologies and methodologies help us to identify and think through homophobic and queerphobic ripples, reverberations, and displacements. Using Sedgwick’s insights and methodologies as a theoretical/inspirational frame, I suggest in this book that contemporary sex panics and their rhetorical constructions (not necessarily two different things) offer sites where we might trace these phobic ripples, reverberations, and displacements.

What do I mean by sex panics, and how and to what extent are they rhetorical? Are sex panics different from sex panic rhetorics and, if so, how? Sex panics are rhetorical, political, social, economic, and cultural crises (both material and psychical) that result from and/or are activated and/or manufactured by, around, and from sex (a term that will itself come under increasing crisis in this book, especially in chapter 4), sexual transgressions, and sexual assaults of various types, supposedly, since my excavations find sex itself receding, or at least morphing, as other signifieds take its place (or always already did) in these rhetorical spaces of panic. You can see the slippery slopes here, which are partly the point of this book. Which is not to say that sex panics is a one-note wonder. Both sex and panics multiply and unravel their significations in the course of the book, a multiplication and unraveling that took me by surprise. But I do not want to give everything away now and will reflect on these complications as they gain momentum in the following chapters.

But what of the rhetorics in Sex Panic Rhetorics, Queer Interventions? If the belief that rhetoric is epistemic enables us to understand the ways in which not only sex panics but also the objects themselves of sex panics are discursive productions, or at least rhetorical effects inasmuch as we cannot access them outside of these constructions, then attention to the rhetorics of sex panics offers an urgent route to discerning how these panics are constructed and the chains of linkages that enable and activate their ultimate material consequences. Because sex panics are by definition phantom callings, and given my training and work as a rhetorician and before that as a literary scholar and critical theorist, I look closely at their discursive embodiments. These are not removed from or merely mediations of the real thing since the real thing is itself a rhetorical product(ion) in the sense that it is identified, defined, described, and circumscribed by its rhetorical embodiment. Panics are necessarily rhetorical.

The contemporary popularization of the notion of rhetoric as epistemic is widely attributed to R. L. Scott’s 1967 essay On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic. Scott contests dominant (and, in his view, impoverished) views of rhetoric as merely descriptive of reality, arguing instead for rhetoric’s constitutive role: Thus rhetoric may be viewed not as a matter of giving effectiveness to truth but of creating truth (13).¹ In Reality Bites, a 2018 book attempting to stem the recourse to facts in the wake of Trump’s election, Dana Cloud offers a more cautious take on Scott: He was not arguing that rhetoric was the source and site of all truths, but rather the domain of justifying and spreading them. The idea that rhetoric shapes and circulates public knowledge is core to the rhetorical tradition (22). In either reading of Scott (mine or Cloud’s), knowledge is rhetorical to the extent that it is shaped by the discourses that construct, represent, and mediate it. Insofar as rhetoric circulates public knowledge, and given that knowledge itself is a product of belief systems (however contingent), rhetoric disseminates worldviews and, as a side-effect, the knowledges that these worldviews are built on and produce in the future.

But there is a whole world out there/here that is not the subject of panic (and probably should be), and there is a whole world out here/there that only peripherally crosses the panic that purports to represent it. I am a rhetorician (and a poststructuralist and a postmodernist), not a social scientist or social anthropologist, so, despite my caveat above, I direct my energies toward the rhetorical panics (which, as you might expect, I do not see as trivial) rather than the subjects themselves of child molestation, sex trafficking, and so on. The texts that tell us a lot about sex panics range in this book across popular culture (one of my favorite television shows, Law and Order: SVU, makes a major appearance in chapters 2 and 3), film, mass media, pornography, new media, political rhetoric, court cases, and academic discourse. The range of textual production is itself testament to my argument about the resilience, reach, and consistency of queerphobic sex panics, while my treatment of these and other texts shows, I hope, why an understanding of the rhetoricity of sex panics is crucial to unraveling their protocols and even dismantling their apparatuses.

In the case studies that populate the following chapters, I am concerned not so much with looking at the overt homophobia and transphobia that are perhaps the more obvious objects of antihomophobic and antitransphobic analysis (though, certainly, these dispositions and their often violent cultural and political manifestations are now less easily dismissible as I write these words in the third year of Trump’s presidency, a caveat to which I return in the conclusion of this book) as in excavating their not insignificant traces in a neoliberal culture that has supposedly demonstrated its civility by its embrace of diversity, renunciation of its homophobic past (vide the expansion of marriage equity across the globe), and attentiveness to the transgender revolution that is sweeping popular media and political culture in the United States and elsewhere. In a caveat regarding advances in gay rights, and writing before Trump, Leo Bersani cautions, We should not however, exaggerate the degree of acceptance (Bersani and Phillips 2008, 32). In the memoir Apples and Oranges: My Journey through Sexual Identity, Jan Clausen, writing in the wake of Trump’s election, gives a sense of the complications that accompany degrees (or not) of acceptance: The more things change, the deeper cruel old power digs in, morphing but ever-hardy (2017, xv).

Liberal nods to gay inclusion that is nonthreatening, that demands sameness, that cannot imagine or stomach radical alterity, gay characters on TV who never have sex, the desexualized specter of monogamous same-sex marriages: all of these rhetorics contain/constrain radical queer potential. David Halperin (2012) and Kenji Yoshino (2006) have chronicled other ways in which queer people are policed, assimilated, normalized, and censored, including and especially cultural and individual self-censorship and internalized phobia in response to economic, political, social, and psychic assimilationist imperatives. And Sedgwick reminds us that rhetorical silences around gay or proto-gay children continue to inform cultures of heteronormative violences and gay suicides (1990, 42–43; 1993, 2–3). These are some of the many fissures in the triumphalist narrative of gay civil rights.

The more things change, the deeper cruel old power digs in, morphing but ever-hardy. The morphing is what makes cruel old power resilient but also difficult to locate and trace: each of the following chapters attends to one such morphing typology, showing how a particular kind of sex panic is manifested and/or how it occludes queerphobia through a variety of covers and ruses. The sex panic rhetorics I adumbrate in this book work mainly deviously. In fact, my point is exactly that queerphobia resides where it seems least apparent. Thus, the chapters that follow chronicle a remarkable range of sex panic tropes and methodologies. But a pattern of displacement still emerges: a panic (though not so presented) about one thing turns out to be about something else. These baits and switches are not necessarily intentional—indeed, my provocation is precisely to show that well-meaning (liberal) rhetors are caught up in queerphobic panics despite themselves. The book’s trajectory, though, moves from examining subtextual queerphobia in sex panics to unpacking the mechanisms and consequences of explicit queerphobia, as if to draw out, as it were, the displacements of the opening chapters into their rightful places. I am doing a different kind of work, then, in looking at subtext versus analyzing explicit text: charting switches versus documenting what is consequential about the already-but-not-quite-consequentialized there.

Bait and switch tactics and effects infiltrate the fabric of sex panics in the sense that specific fears and prejudices activate or are used, whether consciously or unconsciously, to condemn or demonize by association institutions, identities, and practices that may not on their own be able to carry the weight of popular condemnation. Discourses that ridicule sex work and sex workers, for instance, or that demonize sex trafficking or particular sexual practices and identities often use broad brushstrokes that cover a wide range of individuals and practices in order to evoke public panic, outrage, condemnation, fear, and prejudice. In a 1984 rumination on the beleaguered Barnard Sex Conference of 1982 at which Rubin first presented her ideas for Thinking Sex, Carole Vance notes how the conference detractors’ reduction of considerable diversity of thought and experience to pornography, S/M, and butch/femme—the anti-pornographers’ counterpart to the New Right’s unholy trinity of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll was an example of the effective use of symbols to instigate a sex panic (1984a, 434). False, reductive, and irrational denotative and connotative associative connections can create tainting linkages while also serving to foreclose critique: rhetorical commonsensicalness (who would not be against child molestation or sex trafficking, for instance?) serves to suture together some quite divergent panics at the same time that it silences critical interrogation around questions of careful representation.

Of course, covers and displacements slide in multiple directions, the directionality often dictated by history and place. As I have already suggested, despite my no in answer to the question of whether a lone straight man can be stigmatized nonqueerphobically, I do not claim that queerphobia is the only or bottom line or all-encompassing panic mechanism, that everything inevitably boils down to homophobic or transphobic panic. In the introduction to the edited collection, The War on Sex, David Halperin, glossing the contribution to the volume by Alexis Agathocleous, points out that a Crime Against Nature law in Louisiana, which was passed as a homophobic deterrent in the 1980s, has been used in the twenty-first century to persecute African American women (2017, 13). In Sex Panic and the Punitive State, Lancaster reviews how racism was manifested as sex panic in the United States in the 1960s. Here, we see displacement working in different directions from the case studies I explicate in this book—in the instance cited by Halperin, homophobia serves as a cover for racism, even if that switch was not the intent of the original (homophobic) legislation, showing intersectionality’s inevitability. Indeed, as each of the following chapters makes apparent, the contours of race, class, gender, and gender identifications shape the ways in which particular sexualities, sexualizations, and sex panics are manifested and have power: for instance, anti-sex-trafficking rhetorics find traction precisely to the degree that Third World women can be enjoined to embrace heteropatriarchal morality, transgender panics increase exponentially in relation to the degree that transgender identities escape gender binaries, and kids of color can be queer precisely in order to preserve the putative heterosexual innocence of white childhood. Furthermore, all of these intrications and the rhetorics that articulate them are necessarily informed by and/or in reaction to the politics of gender and a history of feminist theory, scholarship, and activism that has shaped (and continues to shape—vide the Me Too movement) the available discourses around sex, sexuality, and sexual violence. One of my first scholarly publications almost thirty years ago used a queer epistemology to address the fraught relationship between gay men and (lesbian) feminism (Barnard 1993); discussion of the conflicts between feminism and queer theory has not let up in the past four decades, ranging from Rubin’s 1984 Thinking Sex essay to Eve Sedgwick’s 1990 Axiom that antihomophobic inquiry is not coextensive with feminist inquiry (27) to the 1994 special issue of differences on More Gender Trouble: Feminism Meets Queer Theory (Schor and Weed 1994) to Clare Hemmings’s 2016 differences article Is Gender Studies Singular? Stories of Queer/Feminist Difference and Displacement, to name just a few signposts along the way (some of which predated the official advent of queer theory). All of the following chapters in this book walk that precarious line of allegiance, difference, and displacement, taking issue with some strands of feminism but nevertheless making arguments with avowedly feminist affiliations and always in the shadow of an internalized sex panic that fears feminist backlash. In 1993, I wrote of the then-current fad of men in feminism: In many ways, these ‘men in feminism’ are replicating the patriarchal penetrations and erasures of women that characterize(d) ‘pre-feminist’ or anti-feminist men (263). The more nuanced gender identifications available to us now in the wake of the transgender revolution, together