Consenting Adults in Private: in Search of the Sexual Subject

1 Consenting Adults in Private: in Search of the Sexual Subject Thesis submitted by Kate Gleeson in fulfilment of the requirements for a Doctor of Philosophy in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of New South Wales 2 Even I must understand it (Bertolt Brecht’s donkey)* * On Brecht’s desk stood a writing-aid in the shape of a toy donkey with a sign around its neck that read ‘even I must understand it’ (Eyre & Wright: 2000: 214). Abstract In this thesis I examine the ways in which the modern state addresses sex. I want to ascertain by what considerations the state is informed in its relationship to sex. What is behind the state’s regulation of sexual practices? What is its interest in regard to sex? To answer these questions I examine fundamental artefacts of the modern state, especially the law (but also the bureaucracy), as directed by Brown. Brown involves the search for the sexual subject; The Lords in Brown were at a loss for how to conceptualise the sexual subject before them. Their search is my own: who is the sexual subject? What is his relationship to the state? To answer these questions, Brown directs me for authority to two widely separated moments of supposed classic ‘discontinuity’: the 1957 Wolfenden Report, and the late-Victorian Queen’s Bench. These two moments in government - the 1960s and the 1880s - are usually depicted as ideologically different, indicating discontinuity, difference, change and perhaps even revolution between the relative approaches of the state to sex. And yet, in Brown, both are upheld as appropriate contemporary authorities on sex, the individual and the state. Here I take my cue from the Lords and interrogate the artefacts of these two periods in government to ascertain the story of the 20th century state’s relationship to sex. Although not a search for origins, my thesis does involve a search for the object of the state in addressing sex through legislation, Parliament and the judiciary. My work is not a history in the Classical sense of a transcendent totality, but is rather a political analysis, a history of the present driven by genealogy, in which I am driven to comprehend the past in order to understand a contemporary situation. My thesis is a political analysis that incorporates genealogy in its focus on law as indicative of the state. Law is precedent. Precedent is genealogy. It incorporates a detailed study of primary artefacts of the state. I present detailed analyses of seemingly discontinuous moments: individual court cases, individual Committees, individual treatises and opinions. I employ ‘thick description’, to unearth the static continuity within these moments. I make use of political memoirs as well as academic political, sociological and historical analyses. These artefacts, together with the academic products that so far have brought them to protracted life, constitute the ‘entangled and confused parchments’ of my study: they represent the pantheon of men responsible for the sexual myths and practices of the modern state. They represent the state itself. I conclude by drawing together my overall argument in this thesis, that during the 20th century there has been no radical change of the modern state in regard to sex, and that the success of the permissive mythology has generally blinded us to this fact. Not only have we mistaken the nature of the permissive state as concerned with evolution, we have erroneously been persuaded of the blanket repression of the Victorian state. The big break, the discontinuity of the 1960s, that often is described as ‘revolutionary’ (and inevitable in the teleology of progress), is a re-configuration of the same object as the Victorian state. The permissive state enacts the latest stage in the great Victorian project of embodying the sexual subject – a subject at once embodied and created as an object of control. 3 Table of Contents Preface ..............................................................................................................................7 Acknowledgements and thanks ........................................................................................... 10 Introduction: Myth Making and the Modern State ......................................................12 Brick layering: practising history ....................................................................................... 12 The Wolfenden Report: significance and effect................................................................ 14 The Victorian foil and revisions in history: a necessary component of the permissive mythology .............................................................................................................................. 18 Theorising the modern state ................................................................................................ 20 Embodiments of the age and the power of individuals’ mythologies of the state ........... 25 Methodology, limits, of the thesis ........................................................................................ 28 Thesis outline/structure........................................................................................................31 Section One: The freewheeling 60s and the Modern Sexual Subject..........................38 Brown: the ‘most important recent event’. ........................................................................ 38 Turning to Wolfenden: Lords in search of the sexual subject.......................................... 42 The old state and a respect for the individual.................................................................... 45 The battle of Brown, between good and evil ...................................................................... 47 The new state: the usual stories and the usual suspects .................................................... 50 Chapter One: Myths of the Permissive State ................................................................55 Mythologies of progress: the usual stories of the 20th century.......................................... 57 Universal values: understanding the new and old states................................................... 58 The legislation of consent: typifying the 1960s................................................................... 61 Suicide and the death penalty: the beginnings of the permissive state ........................... 63 Capital punishment in crisis: Ellis, Bentley and Evans, and John Christie .................... 65 The causalist (utilitarian) explanation................................................................................ 67 Blood and toil and sweat and tears: the threat of homosexuality to the empire............. 68 Just husbands killing their wives: the state’s view of homicide ....................................... 70 An apparent relinquishing the body: the role of the state in the 1960s ........................... 71 Public demands? A comforting myth of the permissive state.......................................... 72 Homosexual Law Reform and Permissiveness................................................................... 74 The modern individual: another comforting myth of the permissive state..................... 75 Conclusions: the ruse of the demands of the permissive society ...................................... 76 Chapter two: Starting with sex, The Wolfenden Report...............................................78 Sir David Maxwell Fyfe: the man who made sodomy legal .............................................. 79 John Wolfenden and freedom ............................................................................................. 82 4 Getting liberal with ‘liberalism’: another myth of the modern state............................... 85 Liberalism and homosexuality ............................................................................................ 89 Hart and Devlin: the 20th century debate of the old and the new states .......................... 92 Embarrassment: the mother of invention and the motivation for Wolfenden................ 96 Recalcitrant bodies: controlling the sexual subject in Wolfenden ................................... 99 Speaking of the 20th century homosexual subject: creating the homosexual subject in law ........................................................................................................................................ 103 Conclusions: the facts of Wolfenden................................................................................. 106 Chapter Three: Myths of Wolfenden, Our Moral Panics...........................................108 Moral panics: defining the 1950s....................................................................................... 109 Behind the myths that continue to work against women ................................................ 114 The excited press, the DPP and the purge........................................................................ 116 The homosexual surge: the great 1950s myth .................................................................. 119 The Kinsey Report.............................................................................................................. 121 Prostitution panic ............................................................................................................... 123 Defending the Empire: Earl Winterton............................................................................ 126 Policing sex in the 1950s....................................................................................................

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