SPECIAL ISSUE: INTIMACY

Winter 1998
Volume 24, Number 2

A paper titled "Sex in Public" teases with the obscurity of its object and the twisted aim of its narrative. In this paper we will be talking not about the sex people already have clarity about, nor identities and acts, nor a wildness in need of derepression; but rather about sex as it is mediated by publics.1 Some of these publics have an obvious relation to sex: pornographic cinema, phone sex, "adult" markets for print, lap dancing. Others are organized around sex, but not necessarily sex acts in the usual sense: queer zones and other worlds estranged from heterosexual culture, but also more tacit scenes of sexuality like official national culture, which depends on a notion of privacy to cloak its sexualization of national membership.

The aim of this paper is to describe what we want to promote as the radical aspirations of queer culture building: not just a safe zone for queer sex but the changed possibilities of identity, intelligibility, publics, culture, and sex that appear when the heterosexual couple is no longer the referent or the privileged example of sexual culture. Queer social practices like sex and theory try to unsettle the garbled but powerful norms supporting that privilege--including the project of normalization that has made heterosexuality hegemonic--as well as those material practices that, though not explicitly sexual, are implicated in the hierarchies of property and propriety that we will describe as heteronormative.2

The point here is not that queer politics need more free-market ideology, but that heteronormative forms, so central to the accumulation and reproduction of capital, also depend on heavy interventions in the regulation of capital. One of the most disturbing fantasies in the zoning scheme, for example, is the idea that an urban locale is a community of shared interest based on residence and property. The ideology of the neighborhood is politically unchallengeable in the current debate, which is dominated by a fantasy that sexual subjects only reside, that the space relevant to sexual politics is the neighborhood. But a district like Christopher Street is not just a neighborhood affair. The local character of the neighborhood depends on the daily presence of thousands of nonresidents. Those who actually live in the West Village should not forget their debt to these mostly queer pilgrams. And we should not make the mistake of confusing the class of citizens with the class of property owners. Many who hang out on Christopher Street--typically young, queer, and African American--couldn't possibly afford to live there. Urban space is always a host space.

1. On public sex in the standard sense, see Pat Califia, Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex (Pittsburg, 1994). On acts and identities, see Janet E. Halley, "The Status/Conduct Distinction in the 1993 Revisions to Military Antigay Policy: A Legal Archaeology," GLQ 3 (1996): 159-252. The classic political argument for sexual derepression as a condition of freedom is put forth in Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philisophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston, 1966). In contemporary prosex thought inspired by volume 1 of Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality, The denunciation of "erotic injustice and sexual oppression" is situated less in the freedom of individuals than in analyses of the normative and coercive relations between specific "populations" and the institutions created to manage them (Gayle Rubin, "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality," in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance [Boston, 1984], p. 275). See also Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol.1 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1978).

2. By heteronormativity we mean the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexualty seem not only coherent--that is, organized as a sexuality--but also privileged. Its coherence is always provisional, and its privilege can take several (sometimes contradictory) forms; unmarked, as the basic idiom of the personal and the social; or marked as a natural state; or projected as an ideal or moral accomplishment. It consists less of norms that could be summarized as a body of doctrine than of a sense of rightness produced in contradictory manifestations--often unconscious, immanent to practice or to institutions. Contexts that have little visible relation to sex practice, such as life narrative and generational identity, can be heteronormative in this sense, while in other contexts forms of sex between men and women might not be heteronormative. Heteronormativity is thus a concept distinct from heterosexuality. One of the most conspicuous differences is that it has no parallel, unlike heterosexuality, which organizes homosexuality as its opposite. Because homosexuality can never have the invisible, tacit, society-founding rightness that heterosexuality has, it would not be possible to speak of "homonormativity" in the same sense. See Michael Warner, "fear of a Queer Planet," Social Text, no. 29 (1991): 3-17.

Lauren Berlant, a coeditor of Critical Inquiry, teaches English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997) and The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (1991). Michael Warner is professor of English at Rutgers University. He is the author of The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (1990), editor of Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (1993), and has written for, among other publications, Village Voice, The Nation, and The Advocate. He is currently editing a volume to be called American Sermons.