10 minute read
Zora Simic
of curiosity and imagination in the face of bureaucratic brutality and systematic murder. Empathy and intuition failed her as a means of accessing such past experiences. To find a way forward, she introduced the legend of the Gorgon.
A Gorgon was a terrible creature of ancient Greek mythology whose glance turned everything to stone. Perseus was able to slay the Gorgon Medusa by holding her reflection in his polished shield and cutting off her head. Clendinnen believed, ‘If we are to see the Gorgon sufficiently steadily to destroy it, we cannot afford to be blinded by reverence or abashed into silence or deflected into a search for reassuring myths.’ So the question she posed was this: what kind of steady, systematic scrutiny, what kind of moral intelligence, might enable us to hold this terrible thing in our contemplation? Her answer was the craft of history.
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Has anyone celebrated the historical method so well? Through powerful storytelling, forensic analysis of episodes, and her lovable companionship in ‘the secret society of readers’, Clendinnen inducts us in the wonders of historical thinking. She reveres historians as ‘magicians’, and tutors our sense of awe at the ‘secular resurrections’ they can conjure. She invokes a past that is powerful and ever-present: ‘its hand is on our shoulder’.
Boyce reminds us that Clendinnen was a member of the celebrated ‘Melbourne Group’ of historians that came into being at La Trobe University in the 1970s and included Greg Dening, Donna Merwick, Rhys Isaac, June Philipp, and Tony Barta. They pioneered approaches to ethnographic history and took on the challenge of integrating anthropology and history by attending especially to cross-cultural encounters and episodes. In remembering Clendinnen, we honour also the work of these friends and colleagues and the inspiration they gave a generation of Australian historians.
The collection ends with Clendinnen’s later writings on illness and memory. In the netherworld of the hospital, Clendinnen’s researched pasts began to interlace with her own. The deities (‘monsters of caprice’) who held sway over the Aztecs of Mexico now seemed to have her in their grip. The gruesome Aztec theatre of excising a living, beating heart from the body of a warrior became weirdly inverted in her own experience of having a living organ from a dying body installed in hers. She wrote about this paradox in her memoir Tiger’s Eye (2000) and also in an article for the Australasian Journal of Psychotherapy, which, rather wonderfully, has been included in this collection. Clendinnen happily presented herself to the psychological profession as ‘a talking document’.
Clendinnen loved the way literacy connects ‘the living with the living, but also with the great company of the dead’. She cherished her friend Michel de Montaigne, who died more than four hundred years ago but who ‘is still alive to me’. She saw her art as achieving a kind of triumph over death, as denying the immutability of time. James Boyce’s selection has been made with such insight and sympathy that it produces what feels almost like a new book of Inga Clendinnen’s, a secular resurrection of its own. g
Tom Griffiths is Emeritus Professor of History at the Australian National University and Chair of the Editorial Board of the Australian Dictionary of Biography. His book The Art of Time Travel: Historians and their craft (2016) includes a chapter on Inga Clendinnen. Among historians of sexuality, it is customary to stress that there was never just one sexual revolution, but many. There were the pop-culture versions, the countercultural expressions and perhaps most momentously, but least discussed, the everyday or ‘ordinary’ sexual revolution. Or conversely, as French philosopher Michel Foucault so influentially argued in The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: The will to knowledge – first published in French in 1976 and in English in 1978, in the very thick of the so-called sexual revolution – there was no liberating sex from the disciplinary and regulatory effects of modern sexuality, already by then at least three centuries old. One of the delusions of the age was that, as we put sexual repression behind us (by saying yes to sex, for instance), ‘tomorrow sex will be good again’.
In her timely and genuinely refreshing new book, Katherine Angel’s title, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and desire in the age of consent, nods to Foucault with good reason. Angel writes in her powerful opening chapter that the promise of good sex looms – if we get consent right. And it is women and girls who bear the burden of what Foucault called the ‘incitement to discourse’. Under the terms of what Angel labels ‘consent culture’, ‘women’s speech about their desire is both demanded and idealised, touted as a marker of progressive politics’.
When it comes to good sex, women must know and say what they do or don’t want. The 1970s feminist mantra ‘No Means No’ has given way to ‘enthusiastic consent’ – a fine idea in theory – but as Angel points out, it is not always easy for women to work out what they want sexually, and even if they do ‘enthusiastically consent’, they can be punished for it, and often are, one way or another. For instance, the emphasis in rape and sexual assault trials on ‘whether a victim consented to sexual activity’, rather than ‘whether the act took place’, often works against women who exhibit in any way ‘a confident desire for sex’. From another direction, the woman who is uncertain about her sexual desires is pathologised, and it is up to her to fix it – otherwise she remains doomed to ‘bad sex’.
Angel’s concern is not with disavowing consent, which is, after all, a ‘bare minimum’. Instead, she interrogates consent and its limits in the interests of advancing sexual ethics beyond their current impasse. In doing so, she joins others on similar quests, including Michaela Coel, creator and star of the British television series I May Destroy You (2020), a polyphonic examination of all kinds of sex not always easily reducible to consenting or not, and gender and sexuality scholar Joseph J. Fischel, author of
After the revolution
Zora Simic
Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again
by Katherine Angel Verso $29.99 hb, 147 pp Why We Lost the Sex Wars
by Lorna Bracewell University of Minnesota Press US$25.95 pb, 277 pp
Screw Consent: A better politics of sexual justice (2019). Angel cites both approvingly, while staking out her own specific terrain. She questions what it means to consent to sex, and to express desire, in a sexual culture so infinitely loaded against female sexuality. From this starting point, Angel considers the proximity of sex to violence and questions the ‘truths’ of sex research, including the enduring maxim that if women just got in touch with their bodies, sexual pleasure would be theirs. Within the limits she sets herself – or perhaps more accurately, the limits of contemporary sexual knowledge about heterosexuality and binary male and female sexuality – Angel does much more than merely refresh what has become a tired conversation about consent.
In the final chapter, Angel flips the scripts of consent culture, ‘confidence feminism’, and the edicts of sex research. Against these forces, she acknowledges the vulnerability of all people when it comes to sex. Her ‘utopian horizon’ is the surrender of the ‘illusion that any of us have real, or total, power when it comes to pleasure and sex’. Apart from an occasional misstep – in an uncharacteristically narrow interpretation, Angel says that masturbation is clearly ‘not sex’, a suggestion that would outrage feminist sex educator Betty Dodson if she were still alive – her conclusions, and the many insights and well executed arguments throughout, are welcome interventions, especially given how low the bar can still be for public discussion about consent and sex.
Like Angel, Lorna Bracewell, author of Why We Lost the Sex Wars: Sexual freedom in the #MeToo era, is an academic committed to bringing a feminist perspective to contemporary sexual politics, including via the entry point of #MeToo. She also references Foucault, in Bracewell’s case in a methodological sense as well as a political one: her aim is to provide what Foucault calls a ‘critical ontology of ourselves’, or a history of the present. However, while the two books make for fine companion pieces, they demonstrate different routes by which feminist academics communicate their work. Angel’s is a slim, potent, elegantly argued polemic aimed at a wide audience, while Bracewell’s book is a thorough, scholarly account of the socalled feminist sex wars, published by an academic press, which includes chapters previously published in journal article format. It is to be hoped that her book – or at least, her arguments – find some traction beyond those parameters, for Bracewell makes several important challenges to what she calls the ‘catfight narrative’ of the sex wars, all of which have wider significance.
Bracewell defines the sex wars as a ‘series of conflicts over matters pertaining to sex and sexuality that embroiled the feminist movement primarily in the United States, but also, to a lesser extent, Australia, Canada, and England, from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s’. (Interestingly, it is from this point that Angel traces ‘confidence feminism’, a mash-up of third-wave and post-feminist sensibilities.) Major fault-lines were pornography and commercial sex, but also sadomasochism and butch/femme roles. The origins of these conflicts are typically dated to a 1982 feminist conference on sexuality at Barnard College, convened by Carol Vance and attended by eight hundred or so scholars, activists, artists, and students, including Judith Butler, a graduate student at the time, and anthropologist and sex radical Gayle Rubin, who presented the first iteration of what would become the incredibly influential essay ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality’. Outside, feminists from the then-ascendent anti-pornography movement picketed, wearing T-shirts that read ‘For a Feminist Sexuality’ on one side and ‘Against S&M’ on the other.
Bracewell vividly narrates these internecine conflicts. Even more crucially, she expands and complicates them, drawing attention to what the ‘catfight narrative’ has hitherto obscured, beginning with the chronology. She is not the first to do this – many participants rejected the terms of a ‘sex war’ – but Bracewell does offer fresh analysis. She highlights, for example, how lesbian feminism seeded both anti-porn activism and sex radicalism, and how both ‘sides’, to begin with at least, challenged key tenets of US liberalism, including the public/private distinction. The ‘we’ in the title refers to how all feminists involved in the sex wars ‘lost’ as liberalism gradually infected or co-opted both the anti-pornography movement and feminist sex radicalism, culminating in what Bracewell convincingly argues in the final chapter is the carceral feminism evident in SlutWalk and #MeToo. This ‘alternative genealogy’ upends the hitherto dominant explanation that carceral feminism ‘is primarily a product of the confluence of feminist and conservative energies’.
Bracewell, a political scientist, brings serious rigour to her ‘counternarrative’ of the eventual ‘convergence of antipornography feminism, sex-radical feminism, and liberalism’, though curiously the wider political context sometimes slips from view. Of even greater interest and import, however, is how she brings Black and Third World feminists to the fore, not just as critics of the sex wars but as participants and theorists. Again, Bracewell is hardly the first to do this – a recent standout example is the work of leading Black feminist scholar Jennifer C. Nash, who is not cited – but she does it well, elucidating both intersectional anti-porn feminism and intersectional sex-radicalism, and by extension revealing blind spots in the theorising of key figures such as Andrea Dworkin, Patrick Califia, and Rubin when it came to race. Bracewell’s wide-ranging account of the diverse sexual politics of feminists of colour recuperates a third way, encapsulated in the experiences and critiques of queer Third World feminists Mirtha Quintanales and Cherríe Moraga. Both attended the conference where they each ‘resisted the compulsion to choose sides in a sex war oriented around the experiences of white women’.
As should be obvious by now, Lorna Bracewell identifies significant and enduring problems with the sex wars and their legacies, including the ‘catfight narrative’, which has filtered down into popular consciousness as two designated feminist camps: pro-sex on one side, and anti-sex or sex negative on the other. Along with Katherine Angel, she is well aware of the limitations of this binary for contemporary feminist sexual politics, including how it marginalises or doesn’t speak to the experiences of Black women and women of colour. Ultimately, however, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again and Why We Lost the Sex Wars are optimistic books that bring feminist analysis to the centre of contemporary sexual politics in generative ways. Together, they have much to offer any reader – regardless of their sexuality or gender – who has found themselves uneasy about the valorisation of consent, the categories ‘pro-’ or ‘anti-sex’, or the endless cycle of sex research that creates as many sexual problems as it purports to resolve. g
Zora Simic is a Senior Lecturer in History and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of New South Wales.
