Sex, Panic, Nation

Abstract

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.

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