BEYOND BARNARD: FEMINISM, LIBERALISM, AND THE SEX WARS By LORNA BRACEWELL A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2015 1 © 2015 Lorna Bracewell 2 To Paola, my wife 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank my advisor, Daniel O’Neill, for introducing me to history and showing me why it might behoove a political theorist to know a little something about it. I thank my committee, the Department of Political Science, the Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the Graduate School at the University of Florida for giving me the opportunity, financial support, and intellectual freedom to follow my curiosity wherever it led. I thank my undergraduate teacher and mentor, Art Vanden Houten, for introducing me to Catharine MacKinnon’s Toward A Feminist Theory of the State and, inadvertently, the sex wars when I was a student in his Contemporary Political Thought course at Flagler College in the spring of 2003. Finally, I thank my wife, Paola Aguirre, my friends and colleagues, Mauro Carracioli, Alec Dinnin, Billy Kelly, Jessica Lancia, Manu Samnotra, and Seaton Tarrant, my parents, Lana and Michael Bracewell, and my sister, Amy Wenditz, for listening patiently, sharing generously, and forgiving readily when I neglected my most important obligations for the sake of this comparatively inconsequential project. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...............................................................................................................4 ABSTRACT .....................................................................................................................................6 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................8 Terminology ...........................................................................................................................17 Chapter Summaries .................................................................................................................25 Notes .......................................................................................................................................27 2 THE END OF OBSCENITY AND THE RISE OF ANTIPORNOGRAPHY FEMINISM .............................................................................................................................31 Antipornography Feminism and Liberalism: The Early Years ..............................................34 Antipornography Feminism and Carole Pateman’s Critique of Liberalism ...........................50 Notes .......................................................................................................................................67 3 LIBERAL APPROPRIATIONS OF ANTIPORNOGRAPHY FEMINISM .........................73 Antecedents to Liberal Antipornography Feminism ..............................................................75 Liberal Antipornography Feminism .......................................................................................79 Notes .....................................................................................................................................113 4 SEX RADICAL FEMINISM AND LIBERALISM .............................................................119 The Sex Radical Feminist Critique of Liberalism ................................................................121 From Sex Radical to Anti-Censorship/Pro-Sex Feminism ...................................................136 Notes .....................................................................................................................................147 5 CONCLUSION.....................................................................................................................152 The Sex Wars and Feminism’s “Carceral Turn” ..................................................................152 The Sex Wars and Recent Calls for Trigger Warnings ........................................................156 The Promise and Poverty of Liberalism ...............................................................................161 Notes .....................................................................................................................................170 LIST OF REFERENCES .............................................................................................................172 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................................188 5 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy BEYOND BARNARD: FEMINISM, LIBERALISM, AND THE SEX WARS By Lorna Bracewell December 2015 Chair: Daniel I. O’Neill Major: Political Science From the mid-1970s through the early 1990s, feminists in the United States were embroiled in a series of debates over matters pertaining to sex and sexuality that have come to be known as feminism’s “sex wars.” During the sex wars, feminists staked out a variety of positions on a number of issues, including pornography, prostitution, sadomasochism, heterosexuality, lesbianism, intergenerational sex, and butch-fem identifies and practices. Unfortunately, these complex and heterogeneous debates tend to be remembered as a rather straightforward conflict between “antipornography” feminists on one side and “sex radical” feminists on the other. In my dissertation, I challenge this simplistic and inaccurate view of the sex wars. Rather than focusing exclusively on the differences dividing antipornography and sex radical feminists, I highlight significant points of contact and overlap between them, particularly the challenges they posed to the sexual politics of post-war liberalism. I also highlight other conflicts and relationships that, I argue, were central to the sex wars, including conflicts and improbable alliances between antipornography feminists, sex radical feminists, and liberals of various stripes. By reimagining the sex wars in this way, I hope to provide not only a more nuanced, richly contextualized, and complete account of the sex wars than has heretofore been available, 6 but also to illuminate in fresh and provocative ways a range of contemporary phenomena that, I argue, the sex wars helped produce, including recent controversies over the use of trigger warnings on college and university campuses, the increasingly carceral character of modern feminism, and the narrow and unimaginative politics of so-called “sex positive” feminism. 7 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION On April 24, 1982, some 800 scholars, students, artists, and activists convened at Barnard College for a conference entitled “The Scholar and the Feminist IX: Towards a Politics of Sexuality.” According to Carole Vance, the academic coordinator for the conference, the conference’s aim was to “refocus” the “feminist agenda on sexuality” by addressing “women’s sexual pleasure, choice, and autonomy, acknowledging that sexuality is simultaneously a domain of restriction, repression, and danger as well as a domain of exploration, pleasure, and agency” (Vance 1993a, 294; Vance 1984, 443). Judith Butler, who attended the conference as a graduate student1 and reviewed its controversial program, A Diary of a Conference on Sexuality, stated the conference’s aim more directly: “The clear purpose of the Diary – and of the Barnard conference – is to dislodge the anti-pornography movement as the one and only feminist discourse on sex” and “counterbalance the anti-pornography perspective on sexuality with an exploration into women’s sexual agency and autonomy” (Butler 1982). Not all those who attended the Barnard conference embraced this aim. In fact, on the morning of the conference, just outside the gates of Barnard Hall, a group of self-identified “radical” and “lesbian feminists” formed a picket line. Sporting t-shirts that read “For a Feminist Sexuality” on the front and “Against S/M” on the back, the protestors distributed a two-page leaflet2 accusing the conference of endorsing “sexual institutions and values that oppress all women,” including “pornography,” “butch-femme sex roles,” “sadomasochism,” “violence against women,” and the sexual abuse of children. Although the leaflet was signed “the Coalition for a Feminist Sexuality and Against Sadomasochism (Women Against Violence Against Women; Women Against Pornography; New York Radical Feminists),” it was soon discovered 8 to have been the almost exclusive handiwork of Women Against Pornography (WAP), the leading antipornography feminist organization in the U.S. at the time.3 The events I have just described are often portrayed as the catalyst for feminism’s sex wars,4 a series of conflicts over matters pertaining to sex and sexuality that embroiled the feminist movement in the United States from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s.5 In the course of these conflicts, feminists staked out a variety of positions on a number of issues, including pornography, prostitution, sadomasochism, butch-fem identities and practices, intergenerational sex, the nature and limits of law, the meaning of the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee, the wisdom and sufficiency of state-centered politics, and how (and whether) to define the boundaries of the category of woman. However, the sex wars tend to be remembered as coextensive