The sexual subject, which is the theme of this book, is both a pervasive and elusive figure. It can be viewed in many different ways: as an ontological proposition, a construct, or even natural fact. Depending on the emphasis of our approach, it could be addressed as a therapeutic or a psychoanalytic subject; it could be interpreted as a moral being, a biological individual, or as a historical subject, born in a specific time and space; it could be the political subject, formed through and within social practices; a subject of power, an intersectional subject, or the site for sexual agency ; the list could go on endlessly, depending on our chosen epistemological framework.
What is clear is that, despite successive deconstructive moves, the notion of the sexual subject endures. In one way or another, it seems we cannot do otherwise than presuppose that there is, ostensibly, something like a sexual subject—in other words that subjectivity necessarily has a sexual dimension, and that sexuality is first and foremost intrinsically located in the subject, or more specifically in the subject’s body, although of course not only there.
This common sense assertion has been widely theorized and debated. So, why write another book on this? The sexual subject this book is concerned with is the subject who has become entitled to be sexual as a subject of rights. In other words, it is a reflection on the production of the sexual subject as a subject who, on the one hand, is entitled to become a subject of rights on the basis of having a sexuality, or being assumed as sexual and, on the other hand, is a subject that becomes sexual on the basis of the rights that such a subject is entitled to claim.
The Question of Freedom and the Sexual Subject of Rights
I will examine here how Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer (LGBTQ) politics have transformed the consideration of what a sexual subject might be. If we want to talk about sexual subjects and rights, the most obvious path will lead us back to feminist interventions in this field, as it was at the juncture of women’s bodies and (hetero)sexuality that the question of sexual rights first came to prominence (although if we attend to the genealogy of the notion of gender in relation to the normalization of intersex subjects, this case should be seriously reframed). 1 However, if we look at the Western genealogy of sexuality, the configuration of the sexual subject and subsequent questions pertaining to its rights take us back to the theorization of heterosexuality via its myriad complex ‘deviations.’ This was the point when that which exceeds normative heterosexuality became a matter of concern, and when the sexual subject emerged as an object of study 2 —and also a subject of discourse. It has been in dialogue with the field of sexual dissidence that different understandings of the sexual subject and sexuality have developed.
The emergence of LGBTQ politics has not only had an impact on the field of sexual dissidence and the transformation of gay and lesbian life. More crucially, it has contributed to the redefinition of the sexual subject, which has involved the consolidation of the homo/heterosexual divide. This divide became crucial for the understanding of sexuality, now primordially organized around ideas of sexual identity, object choice, and rights.
Starting with the idea that LGBTQ rights are not only about LGBTQ rights, but have in fact transformed the whole relationship between sexuality and rights, I argue here that we should also reflect on the constitution of sexuality as a right to which an individual becomes entitled, qua sexual subject or a subject of sexuality. How does the sexual subject have to be conceived to become a sexual rights-bearing subject? And how does sexuality have to be imagined to become a right? These very basic questions form the kernel of this book. We will see—if I succeed in my endeavor—that many other sexual subjects will be included in the discussion when addressing the specific formation of the sexual rights-bearing subject: the historical, the political, the intersectional, and the therapeutic, among them. But within all of these figures we can find the pervasive form of the liberal individual of Western democracies, or, more broadly, of political representation within the tradition of political liberalism. This becomes clear in relation to the neoliberal subject, as the subject that is mobilized by current neoliberal policies depends on, and is in fact a re-articulation of, the ontology of the individual proper to the liberal tradition.
So what kind of implications can we identify from the fact that the sexual subject of rights is a liberal subject? In a way, this book questions both the liberal subject and the liberal understanding of sexuality: the task is to highlight those instances where subjectivity and sexuality could be understood otherwise. I believe that this is important because, among other reasons, if the freedom we can imagine for sexuality and for the subject is restricted by this liberal paradigm, our notion of freedom is inevitably limited. So I have decided to undertake this task in pursuit of an expanded idea of sexual freedom, beyond liberalism. This seems a timely endeavor if we consider the costs of inclusion and liberal sexual rights gains, as well as the racist ways in which sexuality has been considered within current colonial or imperialist discourses. This book is also about the liberal ethos that dwells in widespread notions about the subject of politics more generally, and democracy tout court. At a time when democracy has come to be synonymous with liberal democracy, and has been hijacked to the point that we talk about post-democracy, it is also time for us to try to think again about freedom and the frameworks that have both shaped and restricted it.
We may ask ourselves why we need another book against the liberal subject of sexuality. There has been a whole strand of queer scholarship specifically dedicated to questioning the liberal paradigms that reign within identity politics and LGBTQ politics, and in some important ways this work could be considered a contribution to this field. 3 Much of critical queer scholarship has criticized this neoliberal politics, suggesting that a way out of its trap is to focus on questions of equality and social justice. An example of this is Lisa Duggan’s significant intervention depicting homonormativity as a neoliberal formation. 4 But I do not think that we have to abandon the ideal of freedom, as if the only way to imagine it were within liberal grids.
Amber Hollibaugh, for example, reclaiming freedom in a way that clearly challenges the LGBTQ mainstream agenda, remarks that we should not consider sex as a separate issue; desire and the erotic are at the center of any political vision. 5 Reframing the question of LGBTQ rights as the right to be desiring beings, Hollibaugh insists that any political vision has to consider the role of desire, that is, the possibility of desire for all. We all have the right to be desiring beings and to fulfill our desires, but sexual liberation has a social context that involves questions of economic and social justice. And so Hollibaugh asks: in what conditions can we have sexual freedom? How can we have sex at all? When the right to have sex is usually depicted in heterosexual terms—as tends to be the case within disability, medical realms, and so on—social and economic conditions that allow us to act on our sexual desires should be queered as well. I totally agree with this position, but still the reconsideration of freedom in the light of social justice might not provide us with all the answers to the question as to how sexual freedom is currently imagined. To address this question it is important to look at the politics of the LGBTQ social movements and consider the extent to which ideas of sexual freedom might have been reframed by neoliberal ways of reasoning.
My interest here is to revisit these politics once again to reflect upon the ontological presuppositions embedded in the imaginary of sexual freedom that belongs to the pervasively liberal conception of the subject that the neoliberal reason seems to re-articulate.
The Psychosocial Imaginary of Post-Essentialist and Transnational Times
To talk about ontology and subjectivity might seem untimely now, when the subject seems to have been theorized to exhaustion. Symptomatic of this exhaustion is the decentering of the subject within the current focus on the agency of objects—an ontology oriented toward objects, which goes hand in hand with new materialisms. Similarly, the so-called turn to affect, which has constituted for some of its strands a serious challenge to the centrality of the subject as a clear and distinct entity, is an indication of the shortcomings that such a subject as an object of study involves.
And yet, the figure of the subject in its most conventional form persists. The critical work that aimed to deconstruct it has been done and we can congratulate ourselves within the walls of our academic bubble, but the world keeps going on as usual. The focus on the object, the subject’s historical, logical, and ontological alter ego, might offer valuable insights into this critical work. However, the pervasiveness of the self-centered subject demands reflection, especially if we take into account that the re-articulation of this liberal figure continues to be mobilized in this particular historical constellation against the background of, and responding to, the cultural turn, the discursive turn, the performative turn, and the certified death of poststructuralism (or at least of the efficacy of critique, its most valued attitude).
When I insist on this figure of the subject I am neither referring to the Cartesian subject of reason, nor to the Kantian subject of phenomenology. Although the current liberal subject still carries some of their basic features, this is a complex formation pretty much based on post-essentialist and post-identitarian imaginaries. In this regard, the book contends that current mainstream trends toward the democratization of sexuality are framed by a psychosocial imaginary configured around the prevailing figure of a neoliberal post-essentialist subject who nevertheless is characterized as transparent and autonomous in its self-understanding. It also argues that renewed orientalist and colonial mentalities emerge within this imaginary to sustain this refashioned modern subject. In this context, then, despite the fact that we are said to live in a post-identitarian moment, one of the aims of the book is to question the naturalization of the idea of sexual identity. Basically, one of my main arguments here is that the ideas of sexual orientation and identity ultimately rely on a liberal understanding of the subject. So the question for me is: how is this liberal version of sexual subjectivity built in such a way that it can both retain classic characteristics and sustain a deconstructive disenchanted view? The move from the liberal to the neoliberal subject explains this in part, but it does not exhaust all the aspects in question here.
If the affective forces that traverse social life have been the focus of more attention in recent years, I believe that it is partly due to their capacity to reveal the affective life of categories, which seems to follow a dynamic of its own, and effectively survives and circumvents critique. In other words, what the renewed attention to affect underscores is that neither the critical work of historical contextualization nor the deconstruction of social categories and constructs have been successful in understanding, and therefore hopefully contributing to the transformation of, our deep attachments to those categories that shape our ways of seeing, thinking, living, and ultimately being. My sense here is that the fantasy of a deconstructed post-ideological time actually depends on the disavowal of this affective dimension. What I find strange is that some quarters reject the psychoanalytic insight into the world of affective life.
There are two main ways in which a psychosocial approach enters my discussion. Firstly, my point of departure is that the continued pervasiveness of the liberal ethos is due to the fact that, at a psychic level, we continue to be invested in the categories that we have otherwise abandoned. Secondly, I believe that by paying attention to the psychic formation of the sexual, we might find ourselves on a path that contributes to the undoing of these liberal assumptions, revealing that therein lies the fragility of sexual imaginaries. I believe that the psychic dimension of sexuality might in fact allow us to understand sexual freedom in a way that marks what this liberal politics cannot capture.
My aim here is to provide some grounds for a relational and performative approach to sexuality that is capable of challenging these assumptions—or at least to provide a framework for those who cannot organize their sexuality according to a neat type (or types) of object choice. I would like to offer an approach that is not organized around the presupposition that the object is central to the organization of sexual lives. On a personal level, I have, historically, had some difficulties with the ways in which sexual desires are socially codified. ‘Are you a bisexual?’ might have been one of the recurrent questions I have had to confront. And to make my life easier I often just limited myself to responding ‘yes.’ Well, the situation is, of course, more complex, and this book is a way of giving the long response. Why? Because I am certainly not the only person who has been in this situation, but also because the new politics of gender have altered the cartography of gender positions and desires. Just as the current gender positionalities available today are not the same as those that were available in the past, the cartography of desire in relation to object choice shifts as well. What I mean by this is not just that we have ‘more categories available.’ I mean that the logic of distribution of what is socially considered masculine and feminine has shifted in ways that have radically transformed the dynamic relations between identification and desire as well.
Framing things this way, however, requires an important caveat. To start this book by setting such a context presupposes a very specific location from where I am writing. However, I embarked on this project while going through a number of transitions from one academic context to another, and along this journey, there was a point at which I felt somehow uneasy about it. A large part of my hesitation was related to what I felt as certain lack of timeliness of my project. This thought came to me as a scholar working in London for some years. But I am also a Latin American scholar, and someone who has worked for many years in Spain as well, and I still maintain close contact with those worlds. So my thinking lives not only in different spaces, but also in different times. Time is heterogeneous, as we know. And just as borders are predominantly figured spatially or geographically, they work through time lines as well. Where is it that this or that debate may not seem timely? From which vantage point may we say that certain debates have already been exhausted after all? What is the time of this figured ‘we,’ referring here to my community of academics working in the humanities and the social sciences?
Of course, I am not proposing here a progressive narrative, by which one should assume that certain debates have taken place already in some places, and have yet to take place in others (although unfortunately it does work in this way to a great extent). We cannot even assume that these would be the same debates, even if theories, concepts, ‘turns,’ and arguments do travel, and often in not the most promising foreseeable modes. What I am suggesting is that the definition of what is contemporary or currently relevant depends on the hegemony of certain centers of knowledge production, and so another challenge for me is to contest this definition of what the contemporary supposedly is—hence the focus on cultural translation that is also present in the book.
At the intersection of politics and theories in translation, then, this book describes the political imaginary that belongs to what could be broadly described as a ‘new sexual democratic turn,’ providing a critical examination of the sexual subject conceived within current configurations of citizenship and human rights, and notions of progress in contemporary sexual politics on a transnational scale. The ‘new sexual democratic turn’ reveals the complex and multidimensional political and cultural processes by which the ideal of sexual freedom has assumed a new imaginary legitimacy since the early 1990s. It is clear that the mobilization of progressive ideals regarding gender and sexuality through the language of rights in the last three decades has enabled positive social transformations that are the result of social and political struggles that now appear normal to us. However, in the course of this transformative proce...