The Digital Closet, page 4
Second, heteronormativity’s obsession with gender at times makes it difficult to differentiate between gender and sexuality. This is because heteronormativity is definitionally tethered to the nuclear family and the gender roles it dictates. The family is a powerful and persistent force in American life because it is not simply a structure imposed from above or ideologically inculcated in an unwilling or unwitting population. Investing in the concept of marriage is a highly rational choice for the majority of the population because of the massive material and ideological privileges it grants to its adherents, ranging from fiscal benefits (e.g., cohabitation or tax incentives), to promises of emotional security and care later in life, to the offer of a privileged site for rearing children. The family also offers a sense of “naturalness,” including a set of social scripts that work as formulas for—and almost algorithms for automating—complex social interactions, such as dating, socializing, and procreating. The family is thus difficult to critique because it offers, though often fails to deliver, widely held social ideals like intimacy, commitment, nurturance, and collectivity.35
That said, it is a myth that marriage is a naturally occurring dynamic in society. First and foremost, like heterosexuality, the family is not a singular concept but instead varies widely in its definition and form across space and time. As Michael Anderson notes,
The one unambiguous fact which has emerged in the last twenty years is that there can be no simple history of the Western family since the sixteenth century because there is not, nor ever has there been, a single family system. The West has always been characterized by a diversity of family forms, by diversity of family functions and by diversity in attitudes to family relationships not only over time but at any one point in time. There is, except at the most trivial level, no Western family type.36
What does seem common across this history is that the family is never actually defined by networks of kinship so much as it is determined politically and economically by the needs of the state and capital to reproduce the population and reinforce patriarchal authority.37
Jacques Donzelot has traced such a shift from governance issued from families to government through the family, demonstrating a shift from the patriarchy of the head of the family to a patriarchy of the state.38 In this new structure, the dynamic articulation of the structure of the family is constantly modulated by the state to serve the interests of capital. The family is both the privileged social site and a “prisoner” of the state, being used to police sexuality, reproduction, education, the inculcation of ideology, and the general formation of good citizens. A huge portion of the family’s function within the capitalist state is to reinforce gender norms, most notably because they offer a means through which unpaid care and domestic labor can be morally assigned to a portion of the population—namely women. Despite feminist victories in the twentieth century that, at least partially, granted women financial and sexual independence, this function is only amplified by the neoliberal turn. The evacuation of state welfare responsibilities in the latter half of the twentieth century only amplified the need to extract unpaid care and domestic labor from the population. In short, as Barret and McIntosh note, “[I]f marriage is the basis of the family, then this supposedly individual and freely chosen form has a state instrument at its heart.”39 The family thus serves as a key site for the perpetuation of heteronormative ideology as administered by the state.
The reproduction of the working class has also historically involved a policing of sexuality. Friedrich Engels pointed out as early as the nineteenth century that it was no coincidence that monogamous marriage and prostitution became cultural staples in the same moment.40 What we can take from this is that the internal structure of marriage shapes the kind of sexuality that can exist outside of marriage, and, as Barrett and McIntosh explain, marital monogamy is not the answer to the problem of sexuality but the cause of “deviant” or “abnormal” sexual behavior.41 Much like proponents of Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the solar system through the ages, proponents of marital, monogamous heterosexuality continually fail to realize that the starting point to their sexual schema is flawed. Instead, they continually create exceptions and carve-outs to explain the model’s failure to map onto human desire. The majority of these exceptions and carve-outs were historically for male, heterosexual desire, such as the acceptance of male promiscuity and the maintenance of precarious female bodies through which they could sate their desires in excess of the opportunities offered through marriage. Though the twentieth century also saw some partial concessions to female, heterosexual desire, allowing for premarital sex but only within the confines of amorous relationships with the apparent promise of long-term monogamous viability. These concessions to female sexuality were always contradictorily coupled with a misogynistic backlash though; women who took advantage of them were labeled “sluts,” unfit for male commitment and thus the financial and ideological benefits of monogamous marriage, and, paradoxically, women who abstained were labeled “prudes” or “bitches,” not deserving the time or energy required to build the foundation for a monogamous marriage.
LGBTQIA+ sex acts have historically occurred at the limits of these exceptions and carve-outs, stretching the Ptolemaic model of heterosexuality to its limits, demonstrating its internal contradictions, and, thus, frequently triggering violent and reactionary policing from the state and its privileged mechanism of sexual power, the family. In a sort of détente, the state is willing to tolerate these acts so long as they remain silent or invisible and in so doing alleviate the threat of exposing the contradictions of heteronormativity. “The closet” can be understood as the mechanism through which a space—a silent or invisible space, and thus a partial or nonspace—is produced at the myriad sites of these contradictions in heteronormativity that can capture, contain, alleviate, and thus nullify the threat of deviance and aberration. As Eve Sedgwick writes, “‘Closetedness’ itself is a performance initiated as such by the speech act of a silence—not a particular silence, but a silence that accrues particularity by fits and starts, in relation to the discourse that surrounds and differentially constitutes it.”42 Sedgwick has persuasively demonstrated how these silent and invisible spaces are just as essential to the structure of heteronormativity as are its more vocal and visible portions. Their silence and invisibility are foundational to the structure of heteronormativity. Similarly, the increasing silence and invisibility of LGBTQIA+ sexual expression online is emblematic of a digital closet and is foundational to a heteronormative internet.
We can see this more concretely when it comes to the problem that LGBTQIA+ communities face when trying to publicly organize movements based around acts that state power relegates to the closet. As Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant have shown, confining sexuality to the private sphere of the bedroom, and LGBTQIA+ sex acts to the closet, is always at odds with civil rights activism.43 This is because LGBTQIA+ individuals don’t have the luxury of confining their sex acts to the bedroom. Instead, they must don the identity that comes with those sex acts, even when they are out in public. Here it is impossible to confine sex to the bedroom, to keep it silent and invisible, because LGBTQIA+ sex acts form the keystone to cultures, communities, and identities that definitionally exceed the confines of the closet. Nancy Fraser has similarly argued that when sex acts are the organizing principles of entire identity formations, then barring them from the public sphere and treating them as purely matters of private concern effectively brackets sexual politics from democratic mechanisms and procedures.44
Gayle Rubin has forcefully argued that sex is by default considered to be a “dangerous, destructive, negative force.”45 The United States reverses its famous juridical dictum when it comes to sex: all erotic behavior is considered sinful until proven innocent. For Rubin, this is a remnant of Christian religiosity that makes sex more meaningful ethically, culturally, and politically than it needs to be. As we have seen, at the turn of the twentieth century, the proof of innocence shifted from a Christian imperative toward procreation to a scientific and medical imperative toward healthy outlets for the libido. This paradoxical shift brought with it an increase in the number of categories used to describe sexual misconduct, which Rubin visualizes through her diagram of the charmed circle and the outer limits (see figure 0.1). The charmed circle consists of several descriptors of sex acts that have frequently been understood as “good,” “normal,” “natural,” and “blessed.” The outer limit consists of descriptors of sex acts that have frequently been understood as “bad,” “abnormal,” “unnatural,” and “damned.”
Figure 0.1
Gayle Rubin’s Charmed Circle and the Outer Limits. Source: 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 (New York: Routledge, 1984), 281.
Rubin’s concept of the charmed circle is certainly dated and could benefit from several additions, such as one’s gender identity conforming to versus differing from anatomical sex on state identification documents. That said, it can help us wrap our heads around the slippery concept of “queerness” and the paradoxical nature of heteronormativity. The paradox of heterosexuality is that it has conflicting definitions. On the one hand, heterosexual sex acts seem to be definitionally dominated by the anatomical sex of the people engaging in them—gay and lesbian sex acts are categorically different from straight sex acts, regardless of how kinky those straight sex acts are. On the other hand, one can deviate from heteronormativity even in anatomically male/female sex acts in several ways, like, for instance, using sex toys, engaging in BDSM, having cross-generational love affairs, or having group sex. For an example of this paradox in action, take, for instance, the fetish called vore, which most often involves the simulation of men being eaten by women (or a female playing the role of an imaginary being). Vore has a small but dedicated group of pornographers producing content readily available if one knows the appropriate keyword to search with. The oddness of heteronormativity is that it positions vore as being only different in degree from heterosexuality, whereas missionary sex acts between people in a long-term monogamous relationship who happen to have the same genitalia are positioned as being different in kind. Yet somehow at the very same time, it can condemn vore as an aberration.
The utility of the concept of queerness, at least for the purposes of this book, then is that it functions as an umbrella term for capturing all of the types of sex acts that are positioned as deviations from heteronormativity without equating the degree or the stakes of their deviation. It is important to note here that the idea that homosexuality differs in kind from heterosexuality, while vore differs only in degree, in combination with the publicly identifiable performative dimensions of LGBTQIA+ identities, leads to different stakes for gay, lesbian, or trans people, for instance, than for vore fetishists. In essence, they face different degrees, and maybe different kinds, of marginalization, and the former have all too real bodily, psychological, familial, and financial risks associated with their identities that the latter might not. Queerness is thus a slippery concept because it is articulated in response to an irresolvable paradox at the heart of heteronormativity. It at the same time must capture all forms of deviation while preserving their unique differences and stakes.
It is impossible to neatly tie up the proliferating contradictions contained within heteronormativity or the dynamic forms it takes across space and time. I hope that this short overview of some of the forms it has taken and contradictions it has contained might be indicative, if not wholly representative of, the current functions and stakes of heteronormativity in American society. I also hope to have demonstrated the essential connections between the concept of heteronormativity and its attendant phenomena, like reproduction and the family, gender roles, LGBTQIA+ sex acts and the closet, and queerness. As we will see throughout the following chapters, the emergence of porn filters is deeply tethered to the perpetuation of heteronormativity and has dire stakes for the future of LGBTQIA+ communities and sexual expression. With this necessarily partial and hopelessly imperfect articulation, I would now like to turn to one last matter of concern, which is the role that feminism and intersectionality will play in shaping this book, as well as its limitations for fully addressing all of their attendant concerns.
Sex-Critical Feminism and Intersectionality
Locating one’s work within feminist scholarship on pornography is difficult, as feminists have had a sustained and multifaceted conversation on pornography for the past fifty years. Chief among these difficulties is navigating between a sex-negative carceral feminism and a sex-positive postfeminism, both of which fail to address the material conditions of sex work or provide adequate social justice frameworks for sex workers. The sex-negative, carceral, and/or anti-pornography varieties of feminism draw on what Melissa Gira Grant describes as “the prostitute imaginary.”46 This imaginary is one in which the sex worker is articulated as “other,” full of sexual excess, loss of social standing, and the possibility of contagion. The sex worker is both a structurally necessary outlet for desire and a dangerous temptation. In their book Revolting Prostitutes, Juno Mac and Molly Smith explain the prostitute imaginary through the historical social understanding of the vagina:
Ugly, stretched, odorous, unclean, potentially infected, desirable, mysterious, tantalising—the patriarchy’s ambivalence towards vaginas is well established and has a lot in common with attitudes around sex work. On the one hand, the lure of the vagina is a threat; it’s seen as a place where a penis might risk encountering the traces of another man or a full set of gnashing teeth. At the same time, it’s viewed as an inherently submissive body part that must be “broken in” to bring about sexual maturity. The idea of the vagina as fundamentally compromised or pitiful is helped along in part by a longstanding feminist perception of the penetrative sexual act as indicative of subjugation.47
As Mac and Smith note, this conceptualization is interlinked with heteronormative anxieties about trans people and gay men. It connects to heteronormative anxieties over the status of trans people’s genitals, their ability to “pass,” and, subsequently, their capacity to “trick” cisgendered heteronormative people into having sex with them. As Leo Bersani notes, it also connects to heteronormative anxieties over gay men, who might “turn” heterosexual men gay and threaten contagion through HIV.48
This formulation of feminism often uses humiliating and misogynist language to describe sex workers in an attempt to differentiate “decent,” “respectable,” “independent” women from “sluts,” “whores,” and “holes.”49 As Jo Doezema explains, “What [these] feminists most want of sex workers is that they close their holes—shut their mouths, cross their legs—to prevent the taking in and spilling out of substances and words they find noxious.”50 As we’ll see in the following chapter, in the worst instances, this dehumanization of sex workers leads to carceral feminism, which allies itself with Christian conservative anti-pornography crusaders in its focus on criminal justice reform to address the ills of sex work and pornography. This is often framed in the lens of “penal welfare” or “therapeutic policing,” whereby police intervention is considered necessary to dislodge sex workers from their environments, leverage the criminal justice system to push them into rehabilitative services, and make deviant lifestyles so uncomfortable that people will accept state interventions.51 Carceral feminism joins Christian conservatism in leveraging a focus on human trafficking—particularly of children—to rhetorically legitimate its sex-negative, anti-pornography, carceral position.
The predominant alternative to this approach is often formulated along the lines of what many feminist scholars have described as “postfeminism,” which works to transcend feminism, positioning it as a mission accomplished and envisioning a subsequent world in which women are empowered to act as men’s equals.52 As Sarah Banet-Weiser notes, postfeminism understands this empowerment to act as men’s equals in problematic ways, stressing things like “leaning in,” being a “girl boss,” and embracing and expressing female sexual desires, all of which often get channeled through structural patriarchy and end up looking a lot less like what feminists had envisioned empowerment to look like.53 Their corollary in the sex work community is those that stress the value of sex work, describing it as enjoyable, rewarding, freely chosen by empowered and autonomous actors. In doing so, they attempt to make sex work look less like work and more like the type of sex that is more common and socially acceptable.54 This presents inherent problems though, as it tends to equate the desire of the worker and the client, eliding the commercial interaction in such a way that can downplay the sex worker’s needs as, well, a worker.
What all these forms of feminism have in common is that they tend to reinforce rather than destroy structural patriarchy, translating feminist demands into a palatable and defanged heteropatriarchal discourse. Further, by envisioning empowerment through this patriarchal lens and achieving partial empowerment for some, they end up losing sight of allies left behind—most frequently Black and Indigenous people of color (BIPOC), the LGBTQIA+ community, the disabled, the working class, and those from the Third World or Global South. As Mac and Smith note, “Sex positive sex work politics are useful for the [postfeminists] who advocate them and for carceral feminists who push for criminalization. These groups share an interest in glossing over the material conditions of sex workers’ workplaces.”55
In this book, I hope to avoid identifying with either pole of this unfortunate dichotomy, though the range of sources I draw on, voices that I incorporate, and issues that I touch on may make this commitment difficult to track throughout the book. I’d like then to set out a few parameters for the project that might help keep things clear and that I will try to remain consistent on and refer back to throughout the book. When it comes to sex work, I identify with anti-prostitution and sex-critical feminists in their commitment to ameliorating the material conditions that leave people no option other than sex work and that make sex work bad work (lack of access to health care; inability to benefit from labor laws and regulations; exposure to violence, danger, and trauma; social stigmatization; and marginalization, and so on). Highlighting an anti-prostitution framework is complicated by the digital nature of much of my investigation, as much less of the feminist discourse and empirical evidence deals with the peculiarities of sex work online. My aim in regard to online sex work is to make some of the material and structural components that undergird it transparent so that sex workers and their allies might better critique internet platforms and organize and advocate for change.
