Week 10: Gender, Identity and Sexuality

Lecture will

Provide a rough overview of equality movements.

2. Discuss remaining global variance, above all in terms of sexuality.

3. Offer an explanation of two trends: improvements in Europe/NA and global divergence on sexuality.

4. NOT implying that all victories have been won (Clinton and gender 2016), but that there have clearly been substantial, in some cases radical, changes.

5. NB: a certain western bias in the lecture. In southeast Asia, notably Thailand, there is a long tradition of gender fluidity, an absence of homophobic attacks, and the integration of transgender people into daily life. In South Asia, transgender and intersex people – Hirjas – have long had a very public, if not unproblematic, place in public life. The lecture approaches LGBTQ+ rights with a western understanding of them.

How in short we went from….

Or

Gender equality: three waves: 1st Wave Feminism

1st Wave Feminism (1848-1920s)

• Suffragettes (pejorative term invented by the Daily Mail, playing off the archaic ‘suffrage.’)

• Focussed efforts on securing the right to vote for women.

• Used disruptive, and at times violent, tactics: heckled MPs, smashed post boxes, planted bombs in London.

• When arrested they went on hunger strikes.

• US suffragettes: originally integrationist, then became an exclusionary movement for white women.

Right to vote extended to women in

2nd wave feminism (early 1960s to 1980s)

Started with Betty Friedan’s the Feminist Mystique about the dissatisfaction of married suburban women.

• Focussed, like the early civil rights movement, on issues of work, economic independence: right to credit cards, mortgages, employment.

• From the mid-late-1960s, issues of reproductive freedom (inseparable from economic freedom), sexual harassment, marital rape.

• Also tackled casual, systemic discrimination in portrayal of women, expectations of dress, odious practices such as “bum patting.”

• Black women played a large role, but tensions developed over sterilization (see eugenics lecture).

• Largely hostile to lesbian movement on substantive and strategic grounds.

Third-wave feminism (1990s to present)

Anita Hill hearings arguably the starting point, a sort of #metoo1.0.

• Share many second-waver goals but a greater accent on gender fluidity, queer inclusion, transgender rights.

• More supportive of allyship?

• Often part company with second-wave feminism on pornography, sex-work. Possibly more sex-positive?

• Coopted, like the gay community, derogatory terms – the ‘s,’ ‘b,’ and ‘c’ words. • Sharpest arguments over transgender rights.

• “Me too” was a paradigm shifting moment.

Gender rights

Problematizing gender; gender vs. sex. Category is socially constructed; meaning attached to gender – like race, class, sexuality – is socially constructed.

• Supposed immutable gender attributes – a preference for nesting over hunting, diffidence, femininity, etc. – are deployed, often with a great deal of help from religion, to maintain male dominance.

• The feminist movement/s is/are both about achieving concrete rights and about challenging these constructions.

• It is arguably also about creating a more inclusive and varied understanding of both femininity and masculinity, and as such also benefits the majority of men who fail to live up to Alpha male stereotypes.

Rights of women

• Achieving them required changing norms.

• And changing the law.

• Norms: public debate, protests, and argument by second-wave feminists.

• Hollywood helped.

Institutions: the legislature played a role…

Legislature: Equal Pay Act, 1963 established the principle of the same pay for the same job. Imitated by the UK in 1970 following a Ford strike in Dagenham. Amended multiple times since.

• 1964 Civil Rights Act: included sex discrimination.

• 1974: Housing Discrimination on the basis of sex outlawed by Congress.

• 1978: Pregnancy Discrimination Act outlaws discrimination against pregnant women [NB: it still widely occurs in practice].

• 1994: Gender Equity in Education Act (teacher training, math & science). • 2005: Reauthorization of Violence Against Women Act: allocates federal funds to victims for housing, justice, and children.

• But: ERA failed, following 3 states short in 1982 and languishing since.

But the courts were the real actor

1965: Griswold v. Connecticut: right to contraception (even if married!).

• 1971: Phillips v. Martin Marietta: outlaws discrimination against women with children in hiring [NB: still occurs in practice].

• 1973: Roe v. Wade: right of a women to end her pregnancy until the fetus is viable (third trimester), on health grounds after that. Overturned by Dobbs v. Jackson (2022).

• 1973: Frontiero v. Richardson: laws differentiating inheritance benefits by sex are suspect (Ginsburg case).

• 1975: Weinberger v. Weisenfeld: sex-based distinctions in awarding social security benefits are unconstitutional (Ginsburg case).

• 1981: Kirchberg v. Feenstra: invalidates right of husband to control marital property without his wife’s consent.

• 1984: Hishon v. King & Spalding: law firms are “employers,” and thus sex discriminations apply.

• 1986: Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists: invalidates state law requiring abortion methods designed to save the fetus even when such methods threaten the woman’s health or life.

• 1994: JEB v. Alabama. Courts holds that Equal Protection Clause prohibits excluding jurors solely on the basis of gender. • And many others: https://www.aclu.org/other/timeline-major-supreme-court-decisions-womens-rights

Sexuality

1920s: Germany, and above all Berlin, was the capital of gay sexual liberation.

• Thriving café, bar, sex club scene.

• Marlene Dietrich frequented it, Christopher Isherwood, W.H. Auden escaped English homophobia.

• Achieved a presence, and acceptance, not seen again until the early 1970s.

• Legislation drawn up in 1929 to overturn Paragraph 175; Nazis strengthened it.

Strains of 1920s gay/lesbian/bi liberation

Magnus Hirschfeld: sexologist, founded the Institute for Sexology in Berlin (Institut fuer Sexualwissenchaft). Defined sexuality as biological as what we would now call fluid: gay, bi, lesbian, trans, intersex, cross-dressing (coined the term ‘transvestite.’)

• Hans Blueher and the Men’s Movement (Maennerbund): universalism of bisexuality, homosexuality as the ultimate expression of maleness, masculinist, misogynist, antisemitic.

• Adolf Brand and the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (Community of the Unique): combined Spartan valorization of martial values with Greek valorization of man-adolescent love.

• Hans Radszuweit: businessmen, profited from gay/lesbian clubs, publications, theatre. Defined homosexuals as middle-class, law-abiding; was repulsed by Hirschfeld, Blueher, and Brand. Homosexuality had to be tamed and domesticated to be accepted by the heterosexual majority.

• Lesbians prominent in social, but not political, life.

1950s

Object of nostalgia, but it was a highly conservative, homophobic decade

• Hard not to view it as a dark interlude between the interwar period and the liberal 1960s.

• Reasons complex, but anti-Communist paranoia created a climate of fear and denunciation.

• Framework was needed to get women out of factories and back into the kitchen.

• Horrors of the war probably encouraged a retreat to the comforting certainties of religion, home, conservatism

Sexuality and LGBT+ Rights today

Stonewall: marks beginnings of contemporary LGBTQ+ movement.

• 1970s saw a flourishing gay culture.

• 1980s marked a political – Thatcher/Reagan/Christian fundamentalist backlash.

• Aids crisis fed prejudices, but, like Anita Bryant in the 1970s, encouraged countermobilization.

• Since the 1990s, two trends: steady improvement plus global divergence.

The Great Global Divergence

In NA, Europe, Australia/NZ, and Latin America

Attitudes in the US (most conservative of the old democracies). 1970-2010, Support For:

• Right of gays/lesbians to speak before a public audience: 62% in 1972, 86% in 2010

• Support for teaching at college/university: 48% in 1973, 84% in 2010.

• Having libraries with pro-gay books: 54% in 1973 to 78% in 2010.

• Gay marriage: 11% /40%

2000-2020: Equal Marriage

Few would have predicted the speed.

• In 1996, the Economist had a lead article entitled “Let them wed.” The author did not think he would see equal marriage in his lifetime.

• 2003: US Supreme Court validated anti-sodomy laws.

• 2008: Sodomy still illegal in Panama.

Why the shift, why the divide?

Explanation 1: Age

But…

“Should society accept homosexuality?” [Pew]

Africa, the Middle East, Turkey have younger populations.

• So age itself determines nothing; we need other mechanisms:

• Wealth?

Wealth (Encarnación reading)

Strong correlation…

• In Europe (Western Europe wealthier than Central/Southeastern Europe), the United States (California, the East Coast), Australia, Canada, New Zealand are among the wealthiest parts of the world.

But…

• Lots of counterexamples: the Middle East, Singapore.

• Increasing wealth in Turkey and Russia have not correlated with improving attitudes; on the contrary.

Religion

Strong explanation

• Is a tight correlation between the most religious countries/regions and negative attitudes towards LGBTQ+ people: Middle East, Indonesia, Northern Ireland, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee.

• Russia, once very secular, has become more religious.

• But: in secular China, 57% viewed homosexuality as unacceptable (2013 data).

So what then?

1. The state matters: where it leads an active campaign against LGBTQ+ people (Hungary, Poland, Russia, Turkey), it can inflame negative attitudes and encourage violence. Where it leads (Canada, Ireland, Israel), it can shift attitudes in a positive direction.

• 2. Democracy matters. Most positive attitudes are found in democracies. But why?

• 3. Democracies open space for social activism: street demonstrations, official representations to Parliament, talk/radio show circuit, and simply coming out [contact theory].

• 4. In the case of gender, the key actor was the courts; in the case of sexuality, the legislature. • 5. Even when legislature (or courts) acted, there remains a question timing: why then?

In contrast with gender rights, the legislature was the most important actor

Legislation (21 countries)

• Netherlands (2001), Belgium (2003), Canada (sent there from the courts, 2005), Spain (2005), Chile, Norway, Sweden (2009), Argentina , Portugal(2010) Denmark (2012), New Zealand, France, Uruguay (2013), UK (2014), Finland, Ireland, Luxembourg (2015), Greenland (2016), Germany, Malta (2017), Switzerland (2021).

• Referenda proceeded legislation in Australia and Ireland [by law], and Switzerland [by choice].

• Irish and Swiss governments signalled support; Australian remained neutral .

• 62% in Ireland and Australia; 64% in Switzerland.

Courts, not legislatures.

Why? Arguably because the courts led in most cases on gender rights; the legislature (and at times , such as the US, the courts) followed on equal marriage.

• But even where the legislature followed, some countries moved very quickly: Netherlands, Canada, Spain, while others dragged – Austria, Germany, Switzerland. • And, following the reading, some countries – Estonia – have moved, while other, very similar countries – Lithuania, Latvia – have not.

• Takes us to the….

Party System

• Pelz reading: Contrast between Estonia, on the one hand, and Latvia, Lithuania, on the other, is fascinating because of a high-degree of similarity between the cases; he is comparing ‘most-similar’ cases.

• His argument: the party system explains the difference. Where a small far-right party disrupts the party-system (Order and Justice in Lithuania, Latvia First), and uses LBGTQ+ rights as wedge issue, it prevents the moderate parties from moving on this issue.

• In Europe, the relative laggards on LGBTQ+ rights: Austria, Denmark [within a Nordic context], Italy, Northern Ireland all have a strong far-right party. A stronger explanation, it seems than religion (Ireland, Spain) in rich democracies.

• Other factors – education, gender – explain variation within countries, but regime type (democracy) and party system (stable, absence of a far-right party on which the government depends for support) determine the extent of aLGBTQ+ rights.

• However…..

Conclusion

Of the topics covered, institutional account is possibly the least convincing in the case of equality rights.

• Legislatures enacted equal marriage, but as legislatures enact everything calling this fact “institutional” risks being true but trivial.

• The courts are important – more so for gender than sexuality –and this reflects an age-old concern about the implications for minorities of majoritarianism; nothing particularly new here.

• Pelz’s argument is the most convincing institutional account and does explain the Baltic states. Question: does the argument travel?

• Likely have to search for the answer at the social level: mass coming out in NA/Europe (harder to be a homophobe when your son, daughter, uncle, best friend etc. is gay/bi/lesbian and in social movements taking advantage of democratic spaces to lobby for LGBTQ+ rights.