hunter of justice

The week ahead: November 7, 2011

Tuesday November 8 - Los Angeles - UCLA Professor Mignon Moore, a member of the Williams Institute Faculty Advisory Committee, will discuss her new book, Invisible Families: Gay Identities, Relationships and Motherhood Among Black Women, at UCLA Law School Room 1357, 12:15 to 1:30 pm. 

Also November 8 - Election day, though not many races are happening in this off year. One to watch is in Iowa, where a take-over by Repubicans of a state senate seat now held by Dems could flip the chamber from Democratic to Republican control, which could allow a bill to proceed (and probably get signed by the Republican governor) that would put an initiative to amend the state's constitution to eliminate same-sex marriage on the 2012 ballot.

Thursday, November 10 - The Senate Judiciary Committee will begin debate and mark-up on S. 598, the bill that would repeal Section 3 of DoMA and substitute the following language: 

For the purposes of any Federal law in which marital status is a factor, an individual shall be considered married if that individual's marriage is valid in the State where the marriage was entered into or, in the case of a marriage entered into outside any State, if the marriage is valid in the place where entered into and the marriage could have been entered into in a State.

Also November 10 - Washington, DC - The Williams Institute is hosting a panel discussion of Innovative Research on LGBT Couples and Families from 6 to 7:30 pm at 1608 Rhode Island Ave., NW. 

Remembering Allan Berube as the termination of DADT nears

Allan Berube, who died in 2007, was a friend, a gifted community-based historian, and a wonderful man. His best known achievement was writing the pathbreaking history of gay and lesbian service members during World War II - Coming Out Under Fire. The book contains fascinating narratives from the people Allan interviewed and the letters and diaries he collected. Then, as now, military experience for gay men and lesbians was a mixed bag: it enabled them to leave hometowns behind and move into a structure where homosexuality was both forbidden and winked at. As Allan described, many gay and lesbian veterans settled in urban areas after the war and contributed to the embryonic stages of the lgbt rights movement.

Coming Out Under Fire also offers an incisive analysis of how the more liberal psychiatric profession, as manifest in the medical corps, lobbied their commanders to substitute the homosexuality-as-mental-illness model for the criminal law model that had been applied in World War I. As the postwar period moved into the 1950's, the mental illness rationale became in turn the basis for anti-gay policies in immigration law and the Civil Service. The Supreme Court upheld the immigration exclusion of "sex deviants" in Boutilier v. Immigration and Naturalization Service in 1967.

Allan's book still stands as the best documentation of that policy, its changing rationales and how its shape shifted to accommodate new social understandings of homosexuality. The book was the basis of a 1995 documentary of the same title that won a Peabody Award for excellence; the following year, Allan received a MacArthur Fellowship. His own papers are now at the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of San Francisco, an institution he helped start. John D'Emilio and Estelle Friedman published a collection of his essays - My Desire for History - earlier this year.

If you celebrate the end of DADT tomorrow, drink an extra toast in memory of Allan.

The impact of sexuality on American religion

From a review in The American Prospect of American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, by Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell:

...The book's story is one of a religious earthquake and two aftershocks. The earthquake was the disaffection from religion occurring in "the long Sixties." Church attendance plummeted. So did the percentage of Americans saying that religion was "very important" in their life. At every stage of their life, boomers would always lag behind their parents by 25 percent to 30 percent in regular churchgoing. The authors know well that these were the years of the civil-rights, anti-war, and women's liberation movements, of pot, acid, the pill, Roe v. Wade, and Watergate. But with a refreshing directness and only a bit of embarrassment, they emphasize sex. Between 1969 and 1973, the fraction of Americans stating that premarital sex was "only sometimes wrong" or "not wrong at all" doubled, from 24 percent to 47 percent, a startling change in four years -- and then drifted up, never to decline. Attitudes toward premarital sex turn out to be one of the strongest predictors of a host of other political and religious changes, including that of the first great aftershock, the evangelical upsurge of the 1970s and 1980s.

That reaction to "the long Sixties" has been extensively analyzed. Less so the second great aftershock, the rise of the "nones" after 1990 when young people, in particular, began rejecting identification with any religion, though not necessarily with a variety of religious beliefs and practices. More and more young Americans, according to polls, came to view religion as "judgmental, homophobic, hypocritical, and too political," overly focused on rules rather than spirituality. "The Richter rating of this second aftershock is greater than that of the first aftershock and rivals that of the powerful original quake of the Sixties," Putnam and Campbell write.

The second aftershock, however, only exacerbated the so-called God gap. The slightly shrinking evangelical camp became all the more identified with Republican conservatism. The new nones, mostly of a liberal stamp to begin with, increased the identification of Democrats with secularism.

Not that the identification of religious groups with one party or another was new in American history. A century ago a Methodist (outside the South), whether churchgoing or not, was more than likely a Republican; a Catholic, whether churchgoing or not, was more than likely a Democrat. What is new is the identification of religiosity itself, regardless of faith, with political partisanship. Today a churchgoer, whether Methodist or Catholic, is more likely to be a Republican while their indifferent or lapsed counterparts are more likely to be Democrats.

What changed? Issues of family and personal, especially sexual, morality that were always religiously salient became politically salient, that is, posed sharp choices between the parties. This was particularly the case with abortion and same-sex marriage. Would recent history be different if the conflicts over abortion and same-sex relationships had been fought out as much within the parties as between them, as has often been the case with free trade, military spending, Middle East policy, aid to education, and a number of other issues? "When abortion was emerging as a major issue during the 1970s," Putnam and Campbell note, "Democrats were somewhat more likely to oppose abortion than Republicans because, in that period, Catholics were overwhelmingly Democratic and pro-life. It was not until the Democratic and Republican parties took distinctive stands on abortion in the 1980s that the issue became a predictor of party sympathies."...

Greenhouse and Siegel reflect on "Before Roe v. Wade"

Journalist Linda Greenhouse and law professor Reva Siegel recently published Before Roe v. Wade: Voices that Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court’s Ruling.  Following are excerpts from an interviewer by Erin Miller of SCOTUSblog about what they learned in writing the book:

Q - Linda, as a journalist, you’ve been reporting on the legal battle over abortion for a long time.  Your book reprints an article you wrote on the subject for the New York Times in 1970.  How did your experience inform your writing of the book?

My early reporting experience gave me a passing acquaintance with some of the main players, but I can’t say that it really informed the writing of the book. Don’t forget, our book ends with Roe, which was decided on January 22, 1973. As a very young reporter in the early 1970s, I didn’t have the perspective to understand fully what I was witnessing, frankly, and many important events remained in my peripheral vision. I found the experience of reconstructing what was actually going on in those days rather humbling. I wish I had understood then what I know now!

Q - Reva, as a legal scholar, you’ve written extensively on abortion and the law.  How was your approach to the book different than Linda’s?

In writing about debates over abortion, race, and gun rights, I have been examining how social movement conflict can provoke and guide constitutional change.  I had written on the antiabortion movement after Roe, and feminist abortion rights claims before Roe, but in this work on “Roe’s Roots” I had only begun to explore the debate over decriminalization of abortion that feminists joined in the late 1960s. So it was fascinating to reconstruct how arguments for and against legalization of abortion evolved in the decade before the Court decided Roe.

Oddly enough, my recent work on gun rights proved important as well. Since writing on the Court’s changing interpretation of the Second Amendment, I have been interested in the ways that movements and political parties interact in shaping constitutional law.  When we noticed that Richard Nixon shifted position on abortion, we asked why, and uncovered evidence of the Republican Party’s earliest efforts to use abortion in the service of party realignment. In the years before Roe, Kevin Phillips and Pat Buchanan advised Republicans to appeal to abortion to court Catholics and social conservatives who had historically voted with the Democratic Party. A variety of documents in the book explore the roots of political polarization around abortion...

Q - After doing the research for your book, did your thinking about the Roe opinion, or the public debate after Roe, change?  If so, how?

One aspect of Roe that is rather frequently commented upon is the physician-centric nature of its argument. The opinion reads in some ways as if the case was about the rights of doctors rather than the rights of women. And neither does the Court really acknowledge the claims being made on behalf of the unborn. One might ask whether these arguments were simply not made to the Court, or whether the Justices were simply unable to hear them. In the book, we include excerpts from the merits briefs as well as the amicus briefs – and, clearly, it was all there.  In addition, we show that these feminist and right to life arguments were regularly asserted in the several years before the Court ruled.  . So the silences in Roe itself present something of a mystery. We suggest ways in which the Court’s silence might be understood as an effort to diffuse conflict—but in the end leave the question open, as an invitation to debate and further research.

Our book doesn’t really treat the evolution of the public debate after Roe, but some of the material we include certainly raises questions about the widely accepted “backlash” theory – that it was the Supreme Court that created today’s conflict over abortion.. With other historians, we show that courts are not required for conflict: a Catholic-led antiabortion movement energetically opposed decriminalization before Roe. We go on to identify another institutional basis for political polarization around abortion, offering evidence of abortion’s entanglement in party realignment in the period before Roe.  We show that before Roe, Republican strategists working toward Richard Nixon’s reelection in 1972 were pushing opposition to abortion as a way to pry Catholic voters away from their traditional home in the Democratic Party and to use the issue as an instrument of party realignment. Older readers might remember the “triple-A” label that the Republicans pinned on George McGovern, the Democratic nominee – for amnesty, acid, and abortion (although McGovern was actually no abortion-rights crusader.) In an afterword to the book, we draw on work that Reva along with Robert Post published in an article called “Roe Rage” [42 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties L. Rev. 409 (2007)] to show that, in the decade after Roe, appeals to abortion in the service of party realignment continued. In 1979, conservatives who supported Ronald Reagan’s election helped broker a new coalition of Protestants and Catholics to oppose abortion, in the name of family and faith. Our work points to crucial shifts in the shape of abortion conflict in the years before, and decade after, the Court’s decision.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Roe is commonly viewed as the cause of backlash. Our work identifies another institutional locus of conflict in party realignment—a form of conflict that does not require Supreme Court rulings and can play an important role in shaping their interpretation. Our research on the decade before Roe thus raises questions about the decades after: In what ways was Roe a cause and in what ways a symbol of political polarization?  . We explore the implications of our research for  “Roe-caused-backlash” claims in “Before (and After) Roe v. Wade,” forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal.

Minow: Expect issue of sex segregated schools to reach Supreme Court

Harvard Law Dean Martha Minow has just published In Brown's Wake, a book that analyzes the multiple legacies of Brown v. Board of Education - including in litigation over non-race issues, social science and beyond the U.S.

From an interview of her at SCOTUSblog:

Which big issues concerning school integration – racial or otherwise – do you think are likely to come before the Court next?

Minow: I think that the treatment of gender separation in schools is on its way to the [Supreme] Court.  There are an escalating number of single-sex classrooms and single-sex schools operated by public school systems or with public dollars.  And there’s confusion, even among advocates, about what is the best interpretation of statutory as well as constitutional law with regard to those programs, including whether there must be a comparable alternative offered to people of the other sex.  That was a question that was left open in the Virginia Military Institute case [United States v. Virginia (1996)], and I think that there will be further litigation on that question in the federal courts.  It may well make its way up to the Supreme Court.

Queer and (in the) country

Following is an interview in Wiretap magazine
with Mary Gray, author of Out in the Country: Youth, Media and Queer Visibility in Rural America, a new book on rural gay life. The author, a professor in the Gender Studies Department at Indiana University, is doing readings this fall in New York, DC, San Francisco, Philadelphia and other locations; full schedule and details are here. Although not about legal issues,the discussion opens a window onto an aspect of lgbt political and social life about which little is known.

The advice given to queer and questioning youth by gay rights icon Harvey Milk was simple: Move to the nearest city. Why is this statement a disservice to queer rural youth?

This sentiment effectively tells rural LGBTQ-identifying youth they can't be happily queer right where they are and should expect -- perhaps deserve -- hostility if they do stay in their communities.

Many of the youth I met struggled with reconciling the deep connection or pride they feel for their hometowns with the popular representation of their communities as backward, ignorant and unlivable -- not just for queer folks, but for anyone with taste or class. They feel they're not supposed to see their communities as viable options, and are being told they need to choose between being queerly out of place in the country and moving to a big city to find legitimate visibility.

How does class affect the lives of LGBTQ folks in these areas?

Working class and poor rural communities require citizen solidarity to weather the neglect and marginalization from the nation-state. In this environment, LGBTQ people must be seen primarily as "locals" and risk too much advocating for their concerns as queer folks because familiarity, not difference, ensures one's access to basic necessities.

Beyond churches, there are few resources available in rural communities to cover these basics should one's family be unable or unwilling to provide them. The fact that rural queer youth feel they have to choose speaks to the assumption that queerness not only resides in urban settings, but only comes with social and economic mobility.

According to the 2000 Census, rural America is 82 percent white. How do queer people of color navigate their personal and political alliances in a space of overlapping marginalization?

Queer youth of color are doubly estranged and, if they openly identify as queer, have more to risk. While parallels drawn by white peers or allies between the civil rights and LGBTQ rights movements might help young people of color feel more connected to LGBTQ activism, this uncritical argument also creates dissonance. As one young African American man named Brandon noted, he could see the connections between the two movements, but ultimately felt a greater responsibility to be a leader among students of color because that's where his community was.

For Brandon, the internet introduced another layer to racial divisions. He went online to find other bi- or gay-identifying men in his region and found almost exclusively white men, some of whom spoke about their desire in ways that struck Brandon as incredibly racist. While Brandon still felt the internet was an important part of allowing him to feel his desire for other men was normal, it also demonstrated how hard it would be for him to synthesize his racial and sexual identities.

How is the internet used by rural queer youth to shape or reinforce one's own queer identification?

The internet's value to rural queer youth identification can't be understated, but its impact cuts both ways. The internet offers an opportunity to explore queer identifications and search for other youth in the area, but it also make things more difficult by homogenizing what LGBTQ life and people are like and erasing the rural from the picture of queer life.

The internet also gives ideas for organizing politically that have no viability in rural communities. A door-to-door voter registration drive for LGBTQ issues won't work in a place where people don't see LGBTQ issues as a local concern.

What should national organizations do to re-center rural queer youth needs in the larger gay rights movement?

We need to re-examine our assumption that rural places are endemically hostile to queer folks. The frequency of hate crimes in cities should signal to us that rural and urban spaces are differently [but] not more or less violent to queer people. Without rural communities and their LGBTQ constituents, national and statewide advocacy groups will be unable to advance basic civil rights issues on a national scale.

Assuming LGBTQ life necessarily improves through securing the right to marry without equally valuing, and in rural communities prioritizing, accessible LGBTQ-specific healthcare and job protections will do very little to change the lives of working class and poor rural LGBTQ youth. Anyone who thinks rural queer kids are just a wedding ring away from full citizenship and equality hasn't spent time looking for healthcare or a living wage in rural Appalachia.

Your research was rooted in uncovering best practices for rural queer youth organizing. What strategies did you find?

The importance of coalitional politics in rural communities and the need to prioritize the "localness" of an issue is crucial. In some cases, gay-straight alliances will work, but human dignity student clubs that address homophobia alongside other discrimination may work better to build community support. The argument that non-LGBTQ folks should care about LGBTQ issues like marriage equality because it's "the right thing to do" misses the complicated meaning of marriage and families to people who depend on those institutions for both material and symbolic support.

For more information, visit:

http://queercountry.fromthesquare.org/

Important new book on gay marriage

Lee Badgett's new book When Gay People Get Married is out soon from NYU Press; you can order it now.  Here's the description:

In order to find out the impact of same-sex marriage, M. V. Lee Badgett traveled to a land where it has been legal for same-sex couples to marry since 2001: the Netherlands. Badgett interviews gay couples to find out how this step has affected their lives. We learn about the often surprising changes to their relationships, the reactions of their families, and work colleagues. Moreover, Badgett is interested in the ways that the institution itself has been altered for the larger society. How has the concept of marriage changed? When Gay People Get Married gives readers a primer on the current state of the same-sex marriage debate, and a new way of framing the issue that provides valuable new insights into the political, social, and personal stakes involved.

The experiences of other countries and these pioneering American states serve as a crystal ball as we grapple with this polarizing issue in the American context. The evidence shows both that marriage changes gay people more than gay people change marriage, and that it is the most liberal countries and states making the first move to recognize gay couples. In the end, Badgett compellingly shows that allowing gay couples to marry does not destroy the institution of marriage and that many gay couples do benefit, in expected as well as surprising ways, from the legal, social, and political rights that the institution offers.

Porn in 19th century NYC

Kudos to Donna Dennis (Rutgers-Newark) whose book on 19th century erotica snared a review in the April 5 NY Times Sunday book review section. Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York describes how, by the 1840's, "flash weeklies" had appeared in the city, catering to a sexually cosmopolitan audience.

Here's an excerpt:

Dennis traces the ways in which provocative material was passed off as edifying, like the guides to the city’s prostitutes that purported to steer unknowing rubes away from their clutches. And she also notes that prohibitions of one sort of racy material only led to another innovation, often more popular than the first. From closer restrictions on sexually explicit writing came the success, in the mid-19th century, of the novelist George Thompson, who combined graphically violent scenes set in urban dystopias with coy peekaboo references to sex. Thompson stopped short of describing those scenes but encouraged the reader to imagine them, while mocking the authorities for compelling him to draw the curtain.

New book on conservative cause lawyering

The following review in the Law and Politics Book Review describes Ann Southworth’s LAWYERS OF THE RIGHT: PROFESSIONALIZING THE CONSERVATIVE COALITION, published late last year by the University of Chicago Press.  Southworth is a member of the founding faculty at UC-Irvine Law.  The review was written by Joshua Wilson of the Government Department at John Jay College.

...As the title suggests, Southworth looks at issues related to both infrastructure development as well as the “conservative coalition’s” use of litigation as a political tool. The book’s main task, however, is to describe who the various lawyers within the broader conservative coalition are (e.g. where they went to school, their socio-economic status, what motivates their work, and so on), as well as what connects and separates the various groups that these lawyers represent and to which they belong. ....

[The book] delv[es] into the descriptive details that open the “window into the world of lawyers for conservative causes and probes the little discussed cultural conflict among them” (p.1). Southworth begins this section by asking “whether lawyers of the conservative coalition are likely to contribute to mutual understanding and cooperation within the alliance or whether disagreements and dissimilarities among them make them unlikely to build consensus” (p.42). The short answer to this question is that the lawyers, like the constituencies they represent, are divided by social space and policy goals.

Chapters Three and Four use data about law schools attended, practice location and setting, religion, funding sources, motivation, and professional identity to illustrate the social differences between the various groups of lawyers. Chapter Five begins by continuing this demographic data argument by applying generational grouping to the various lawyers, but it also transitions to investigating other potential substantive or issue-based bridges for the gaps exposed thus far. [For example], the disharmonies around the specifics regarding the desire to reshape the Federal bench and other issue-items, as well as the shared “dissatisfaction with what they viewed as the pillars of the liberal legal establishment” were quite compelling (p.116).

Chapter Six is possibly the most interesting in the book. The data from the preceding three chapters expose multiple rifts that lead one to question the usefulness of collectively identifying the groups as being part of a conservative coalition or movement. In the words of one interviewee, “you quickly find out that [conservative public interest law groups] are really autonomous and inward looking. And there’s not a lot of [collaboration]” (p.121). Chapter Six, however, ... provides the support for the claim that these groups are still part of a common movement.

Gender war in Iraq

From The Guardian:

Women [in Iraq] are being killed simply for being women," says Nadje Al-Ali when I meet her at her home in south London. "In Basra in 2008 a reported 133 women were killed for not 'being Islamic' enough. And these are only the ones that made it to be officially counted. I saw the police photos - they were horrific."

Al-Ali's new book, What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq, analyses how Iraqi women have fared since the US invasion of March 2003. The news, unsurprisingly, is grim. Written with the political scientist Nicola Pratt, the book is based on interviews with 120 women, including Iraqi women's rights activists, NGO workers and international policymakers. The climate that they describe in Iraq is one of lawless "hyper-patriarchy", and with this evidence in tow, Al-Ali and Pratt take aim at a wide range of targets. These include the occupying powers, extremist Islamist militias, Iraqi leaders and "imperialist feminists" (those who claim solidarity with women from developing countries while stereotyping their cultures as barbaric).

Al-Ali, 42, is a second-generation Iraqi immigrant whose extended family has seen the sharpest end of both Saddam Hussein's regime and the post-invasion chaos. An established author and academic at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, she is staunchly "anti-imperialist and anti-war" but finds herself regularly at odds with some of her natural allies, who object to her speaking out against Iraqi resistance fighters. Still, Al-Ali believes it's important to take this stance. "A significant proportion of Iraqi groups engaged in armed resistance against the occupation are also harassing, intimidating and even murdering ordinary Iraqis," she says, "particularly women and vulnerable groups."

In her book she highlights the fact that, as a result of consecutive wars, the Iraqi population is now disproportionately female - with some estimates putting the ratio of women to men at 65/35. There are 300,000 impoverished widows in Baghdad alone, forced to run their households on two hours of electricity a day. As early as July 2003 a Human Rights Watch report highlighted "the vulnerability of women and girls to sexual violence and abduction", and kidnaps that target women (often related to sex trafficking) have increased since the start of the war, as have female suicide rates and honour killings.

According to Al-Ali's interviewees, women are being bullied back into the home. The fact that George W Bush depicted the invasion of Iraq as a path to women's empowerment makes the situation even more outrageous. In her book, Al-Ali meticulously explains how Condoleezza Rice and Laura Bush were deployed to reassure the world that the US was concerned with women's liberation - Laura Bush being wheeled out for photo-opportunities with US organisations such as Women for Free Iraq.

Al-Ali feels that the cynical use of the women's rights discourse by the US has also led to a backlash against feminist activists in Iraq, who can be easily undermined, or even vilified, by being accused of supporting an American agenda.

Does she see the establishment of a 25% quota for women in the Iraqi parliament as a sign of progress? "Yes, but who are the 25% in practice? They are the sisters, daughters and wives of the male conservative leaders. They've no political background and when there's a vote they look around to see what the men are doing before they lift their hands. However, yes it is a positive because it has allowed six to eight secular women's rights activists into parliament who wouldn't have got in otherwise."

Tomes from (way) back in the day

From Bitch Magazine, a guide to six feminist classics - and why they're worth tracking down -

In the 1976 cross-country race film The Gumball Rally, the late, great Raul Julia rips off his rearview mirror and tosses it over his shoulder, saying “What’s behind me is not important.”

He didn’t win the race.

Maybe that’s because what’s behind us actually is important. Feminist literature and history did not spring fully formed from Betty Friedan’s and Naomi Wolf’s pens and word processors; they have had long, complex, and often buried lives. The six works profiled here, ranging from once-famous titles to all-but-unknown works, were dead-on portraits of the state of women when they were written in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, but they still resonate with readers today. Themes like race and the women’s movement, gender and identity, and body politics are evergreen; discussions of these topics still roil in books, on blogs, and in person. And while mainstream feminism may not be grappling with issues like separatism these days, the passion, politics, anger, and truth contained in these books can inspire us to burn as brightly as these authors did.

Sontag at 16: "I intend to do everything"

“… I killed the afternoon at a badly-done student production of three one-acts at Cal Hall, and then came by the bookstore at 5:30. We walked over to her room  [where I read the first few chapters of Steppenwolf]...[at 4 a.m.:] “My concept of sexuality is so altered—Thank god!—bisexuality as the expression of fullness of an individual—and an honest rejection of the—yes—perversion which limits sexual experience, attempts to de-physicalize it, in such concepts as the idealization of chastity until the ‘right person’ comes along—the whole ban on pure physical sensation without love, on promiscuity. …

“I don’t intend to let my intellect dominate me, and the last thing I want to do is worship knowledge. … I intend to do everything … to have one way of evaluating experience—does it cause me pleasure or pain, and I shall be very cautious about rejecting the painful—I shall anticipate pleasure everywhere and find it, too, for it is everywhere. I shall involve myself wholly … everything matters! The only thing I resign is the power to resign, to retreat: the acceptance of sameness and the intellect. I am alive … I am beautiful … what else is there?” --

-- Written in May 1949

More, from Jonathan Liu's review of Reborn: Journals & Notebooks 1947–1963, the first of three volumes of Susan Sontag's journals, in the New York Observer:

* * * The lasting impression on the reader * * * is of Sontag’s prodigious self-awareness. The rest of us, in comparison, barely know who we are. Whether it’s the teenage provincial attempting Rilke and Gide for the first time (“Look back on the 16 years. … Could be better: more erudition, perhaps, but it’s unreasonable to expect much more emotional maturity than I have at this point”) or the semi-prominent 29-year-old divorcée aphorizing personal failures (“Premature pliability, agreeableness, so that the underlying stubbornness is never touched, accounts for 80% of my notorious flirtatiousness, seductiveness”), Sontag’s ability to blueprint the analytic and affective machinery turning in her own mind is brilliant in the strict gemological sense—all bottomless clarity and refracting facets.

But despite the cross-eyed intensity of its inward gaze, each page sopping with the intimacy of preternatural self-knowledge, Reborn is resolutely not autobiography, of either the personal or intellectual sort. The most perilous decision of Sontag’s early adulthood—to marry the sociologist Philip Rieff after a 10-day courtship at the age of 17—occasions a yawning narrative lacuna: One moment, the reader is wrapped around tumultuous romances with fiery women; the next, “I marry Philip with full consciousness + fear of my will toward self-destructiveness.” Soon her son is born (David Rieff, editor of these journals), and Sontag begins raging artfully against the confines of a marriage that’s never explained.

Heteroflexibility: the fluidity of women's sexuality

Girl with Pen

Jacqueline Hudak

Sexual politics are in a time of huge transition – think Ellen and Portia – and still, there is simply no public cultural consciousness about the concept of “sexual fluidity.” A well-crafted recent book by Lisa Diamond, Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire (Harvard University Press), takes another step toward putting it on the map.

While perhaps not yet a public story, the notion of women’s sexual fluidity is certainly coursing through the zeitgeist. I was in the midst of writing this post on Diamond’s book when I decided to take a break and see Woody Allen’s new film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. And there it was, right there on the big screen: sexual fluidity, and all the attendant complexities.

In one scene, Scarlet Johanssen’s character Cristina, is relating the complicated story of her relationship with Maria Elena, who happens to be her lover’s ex-wife. Her friends Vicky and Doug listen intently. As Cristina pauses, Doug rushes to ask, “So, what, you mean you’re a bisexual?” To which Christina replies, with some discomfort, “Oh, I’m not really into those categories.”

Not into those categories indeed.

Diamond, a Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies at the University of Utah, has conducted, to date, the only detailed longitudinal study of women’s same gender attractions. She interviewed nearly one hundred young women at two year intervals over a period of ten years about their relationships and desires and found that, for women, love and desire are not rigidly lesbian or heterosexual. By the 10th year of her study, two-thirds of the women had changed their identity label at least once.

The notion of "sexual fluidity" contradicts the dominant cultural story about sexuality—the idea that you are one thing or another, but rarely both. That story shapes our ideas about sexual orientation as fixed in early adulthood and remaining static throughout a lifetime. But as Diamond so eloquently points out, for women, this has not been the case.

One of the many things I loved about this book was the depth and analysis of research that Diamond amassed. Having done research on this topic myself, I was aware that there was a lot of data around that supported a more fluid conception of sexuality for women – Kinsey, Adrienne Rich, and the ‘erotic plasticity’ model in 2000, to name a few. The only problem was, it didn’t conform to the (male) sexual standard. Since genital sex is not necessarily how women construct their sexual identities, the sexual experiences of women have been invisible, or somehow deviant from the (male) norm. My friends, we have been called ‘outliers.’