Sex, Panic, Nation

Sex, panic, nation. Remove the punctuation and it reads as a working hypothesis. Add a verb or two and it becomes a premature conclusion. We all know, after all, that the US has been characterized from the outset as a nation shaped through a history of recurring sex panics. D. H. Lawrence traced these repressive conjunctures of sex and affect from Benjamin Franklin to Walt Whitman in his 1923 Studies in Classic American Literature, instructing his readers to respond to each iteration by “pull[ing] the idealistic and democratic clothes off American utterance, and see[ing] what you can of the dusky body of IT underneath” (14). Gayle Rubin told a similar tale in her 1984 essay “Thinking Sex” when she referred to “moral panics” as the “political moment of sex” and suggested that the “great nineteenth-century moral paroxysms . . . have left a deep imprint on attitudes about sex, medical practice, child-rearing, parental anxieties, police conduct, and sex law” (4, 25). We all know that the reverse is also true. Sex, in public discourses and practices of US nationalism, occasions panic when it takes the form of what Michael Warner calls “matter out of place,” when it compromises the moral and bodily sanctity of the normative citizen-subject by allowing knowledge about the “messiness and variety of sex” either to contaminate official policy publics or to escape legally sanctioned zones of privacy (18, 174). Panic, in the first sense, characterizes a nationalist culture that polices sex. Panic, in the second sense, polices sex in ways that produce nationalist culture.

Adopting and modifying the opening gambit of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality (1976/1978), we might think of these intimate couplings of sex, affect, and nation as two closely related variations of an overarching panic hypothesis. Foucault’s intervention into historical and political discourses of sex and sexuality called attention to the pitfalls of what he referred to as the “repressive hypothesis”: the research framework that figures sexuality as a physical drive that intersects with political and social power solely through dynamics of repression and liberation (17–49). Foucault spelled out his counter-hypothesis in a widely cited passage: “Sexuality is not the most intractable element in power relations, but rather one of those endowed with the greatest instrumentality: useful for the greatest number of maneuvers and capable of serving as a point of support, as a linchpin, for the most varied strategies” (103). The influence of this counter-hypothesis on subsequent research can be felt even among scholars who might otherwise disagree with Foucault. As Carol Vance, David Halperin, and many others have observed, Foucault’s counter-hypothesis is often equated in the scholarly literature with the commonplace idea that sexuality and sexual identity formations are “socially constructed,” the lesson being that researchers ought to commit themselves to denaturalizing received ideas about sexuality as they trace and document the diverse manifestations of a thing called sex across time and space. This is a tempting research project, especially in a world in which one of my local papers recently recycled on its front page a Washington Post story about the “gay brain” (Stein). Yet Foucault was very clear that his stakes were different: “It is the agency of sex we must break away from, if we aim—through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality—to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance” (157).

One of the benefits of the panic hypothesis is that it extends this more radical project by naming mass-mediated sex panics—“white slavery,” “anti-homosexuality,” and “child pornography” are among Rubin’s examples—as the sites where sex and sexuality are assembled as instrumentalities of power. I describe in my conclusion to this article how the panic hypothesis might point toward some promising interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral bridges between literary, cultural, or social history and media studies, policy, or activism. To get there, though, I follow Foucault’s lead: What happens if we reject the panic hypothesis as our starting point as we seek alternative means of approaching...