A Response to Bruce Burgett

It is a pleasure to respond to Bruce Burgett’s timely and insightful analysis of the current state of sexuality studies. Burgett presents a stunning account of how the discursive invention by scholars of “sexual panics” simultaneously pictures intimacy as the scene of conservative backlashes and the locus of liberating social transformation. What sex/sexuality/intimacy academics often share is an urge to project progressive politics onto our intimate lives at the same time that intimate lives are imagined as potential springboards for successful democratic practice. I am especially interested in how “model” intimacies are so often construed as heralding “model” social formations, and vice versa. Burgett asks us to re-imagine how we might make our scholarly work do “work” in the society at large instead of interminably projecting our own psyches and practices backward as self-legitimation that consequently resists more precarious encounters with alternative “intimate events,” as Elizabeth Povinelli very usefully terms this broad and often unwieldy terrain of physical and emotional experience and attachments.¹ Perhaps the difficulty lies in the emotional materials themselves, which are often structurally resistant to our abiding leftist academic imperatives.

Early on in his essay, Burgett highlights a ubiquitous and significant misreading of Foucault, a misreading that often has culminated in an advertent reversal of his call for a productive resistance of “bodies and pleasures.” This is a critical distinction for Foucault, who focused at length on the differences between resistance to and reenactments of power. Easier said than done, of course—for how, exactly, do we unhinge our desires from our politics? More to the point, how do we coordinate them without compromising one or both? At moments, Foucault himself was caught up in the very social fantasies he interrogated. While he was expert at unraveling the institutional deployments of sex and sexuality, he was nevertheless at times seduced by the subversive potential of “love.” In a 1981 interview for Le Gai Pied entitled “Friendship as a Way of Life,” Foucault made what seemed to be a counterintuitive pronouncement about the straight world’s panic over homosexual love (rather than homosexual sex). After observing that straight people find it easier to reduce their notion of homosexual attachment to anonymous and “immediate pleasure,” he suggests that “what makes homosexuality ‘disturbing’ [is] the homosexual mode of life, much more than the sexual act itself. To imagine a sexual act that doesn’t conform to law or nature is not what disturbs people. But that individuals are beginning to love one another—there’s the problem. The institution is caught in a contradiction; affective intensities traverse it which at one and the same time keep it going and shake it up” (136–37). This diffuse “love” happens in and through the various forms of attachment that arise in nonheteronormative terms and forms, even in the most casual of what Samuel R. Delaney would call “contacts,” because such contacts are the texture of one’s intimate life.²

How is Foucault distinguishing here between sex and love, and is the phrase “affective intensities” intended to embrace both terms? Surely both “sex” and “love” seem unmoored from their conventional definitions. Cast from the beginning as incommensurate, the terms nevertheless emerge at the other end of Foucault’s commentary so altered that it is almost beside the point to contrast them. And why would it matter? Foucault suggests that there are relationships (“friendship,” “alliances,” and “unforeseen kinds of relationships” are other descriptors³) being formed in the gay community for which heterosexuality and its physical and affective conventions and institutions have no equivalent. These new relations envisioned by Foucault are uncharacteristically utopic and seem at first glance even to fly in the face of his own rejection of “sexual liberation” as truly liberatory.⁴ Note, however, that it is not sex that is liberatory (sex in this context is as conventional as ever). Rather, “love” functions as the emancipatory term.

Burgett asks, “What, more generally, can the histories of sex and sexuality within and across the borders of the US tell us about the after-effects of the isolation of sex and sexuality on...