Finalist, 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies Offers a way
to undo the inextricable American knot of sex, politics, religion,
and power American politics are obsessed with sex. Before the first
televised presidential debate, John F. Kennedy trailed Richard
Nixon in the polls. As Americans tuned in, however, they found
Kennedy a younger, more vivacious, and more attractive choice than
Nixon. Sexier. The political significance of Kennedy’s telegenic
sex appeal is now widely accepted – but taking sexual politics
seriously is not. Janet R. Jakobsen examines how, for the last
several decades, gender and sexuality have reappeared time and
again at the center of political life, marked by a series of widely
recognized issues and movements – women’s liberation and gay
liberation in the 1960s and ’70s, the AIDS crisis and ACT UP in
the ‘80s and ’90s, welfare and immigration “reform” in the
‘90s, wars claiming to “save women” in the 2000s, and battles
over health care in the 2010s, to recent demands for reproductive
justice, trans liberation, and the explosive exposures of #MeToo.
Religion has been wound up in these political struggles, and blamed
for not a little of the resistance to meaningful change in America
political life. Jakobsen acknowledges that religion is a force to
be reckoned with, but decisively breaks with the common sense that
religion and sex are the fixed binary of American political life.
She instead follows the kaleidoscopic ways in which sexual politics
are embedded in social relations of all kinds – not only the
intimate relations of love and family with which gender and sex are
routinely associated, but also secularism, freedom, race,
disability, capitalism, nation and state, housing and the
environment. In the midst of these obsessions, Jakobsen’s
promiscuous ethical imagination guides us forward. Drawing on
examples from collaborative projects among activists, academics and
artists, Jakobsen shows that sexual politics can contribute to
building justice from the ground up. Gender and sexual relations
are practices through which values emerge and communities are made.
Sex and desire, gender and embodiment emerge as bases of ethical
possibility, breaking political stalemate and opening new
possibility.
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