Under the umbrella of sex: or, Foucault’s wet dream

Two weeks ago, my new New York pal Kat Bridgeman (who has given me permission to call her fella) invited me to an unconference that she’d helped to organize, and at breakneck speed. SocialChangeCamp was for internet people and non-profit people to get together and figure out the answer to everything, or at least as much we could before the open bar. Out of my commitment to the BarCamp model of valuing one’s ability to show up and talk cogently about whatever, and one half of one cup of coffee, I proposed a session to round-up the people who worked in sexuality and related issues, and the people who wanted to absorb us talking shop.

Which produced (ha ha, that’s the first Foucault callback) this thing! This thing! I am in love with this ad hoc infographic. At the very top of the session, one participant commented that his organization (a pretty progressive political party) “doesn’t work with these issues” because sex was so “private” and “personal,” and I couldn’t hide my shock-dismay-educable-moment-face and called out, “I’m shocked.” And then asked someone to fetch me a marker and started drawing this: first writing Sex, then /uality, then a nice little protective bit of nylon umbrella (it’s red in my head, of course), a pretty curvaceous handle, and then these two divided spheres: the bedroom and the public square.

And from there, the rest, until it was clear that sex contained (yes) a lot more than fucking.

There are tensions here, all over this thing: my head broke a little when I had to figure out where to place GLBTQ on the infographic, and so I deemed the umbrella broken — until we had to figure out where to put race, gender, and class, too, and so mended the spine with all four of them.

Also awkwardly positioned in the middle: that would be the internet.

While the conversation swung and wheeled around sexuality as a cluster of concerns — how the physical act of sex is re-constituted across issues like health care, citizenship, rights to mobility, and education — we stayed grounded in this idea that it was wrong to confine sex to the realm of illness, or danger and risk, or even the erotic. To people who work in policy, or development, or health, or human rights, this isn’t abstract. We can say from experience, we are not usually turned on when gathered around those tables together. Even at St. James Infirmary, which is a pretty sexy place to work, the exam rooms adorned with marabou feathers and signed posters from all the major gay porn studios, we hold firm boundaries between our individual sex lives and the ways we talk about sex with our community members (which was St. James-ese for the people formerly known as the patients). Maybe it’s because so many of us have done sex work that we have that ethic, that we value it so: we know from experience how to set the tone around sexual talk, and we know how to keep different parts of our lives and experiences separate yet still whole.

It turns out (and here’s where Michel and I may diverge) the more we think and talk about sex, the more control we develop — and the more forms of social control we participate in. For good and certainly for ill, sexuality isn’t an unruly, messy, overly personal force: it’s one of the most regulating forces in the human social order. Sometimes I’m sure that nothing could be less private, less personal, less individual than sex.

Just like in the hot mess of a picture at the top of the blog, there’s a big middle space between who and how we fuck, and our power and mobility in the world. That tension across the middle is where sexuality lives: just like fucking, it’s always taking place between people.