What is Sexual Modernity?

Kahan, Benjamin

doi:10.26597/mod.0015

Cited by 2 publications

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“…in a special issue of Modernism/ Modernity in October of 2016. 22 Kahan quotes Afsaneh Najmabadi's study of sexual politics in Iran (Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards, 2005) to the effect that 'heteronormalization of eros and sex became a precondition for 'achieving modernity' ' in the nineteenth and debates…”

Section: Edward Dickinsonmentioning

confidence: 99%

A backlash against liberalism?

Dickinson

Hung

Marhoefer

et al. 2019

HCM

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, when Donald Trump won the US Presidential Election, people have tried to make sense of this unexpected and-for many-shocking victory. One of the most popular explanations was that of a 'backlash' of disaffected voters-mostly from the white working class-against progressive 'identity politics' in support of the rights of disadvantaged groups and minorities. Mark Lilla, professor of Humanities at Columbia University, became an influential voice in the ensuing debate. His much-discussed article in the New York Times argued that the liberal 'obsession with diversity has encouraged white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged group whose identity is being threatened or ignored'. 1 The exclusive concern with civil rights of Black people, equality for women or separate toilets for people who identify as transgender, Lilla concluded, drove these voters into the arms of a candidate who seemed to take their concerns seriously and respect their values. Trump's election victory is one of several recent political phenomena that have been explained by the 'backlash' thesis-that disaffected white working-class voters are reacting against supposedly excessive liberalism. The 'Brexit' vote in the United Kingdom has also been interpreted as a rejection of a perceived out-of-touch liberal establishment and its project of building a European identity based on free movement and free trade. 2 The recent electoral successes of the far-right party, Alternative für Deutschland, have widely been explained as a protest vote against Germany's liberal policies during the refugee crisis in 2015. 3 In effect, all of these explanations argue that the pursuit of liberal values such as the support for minorities' rights, while perhaps a noble Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2020 02:48:12AM via free access debates 2 HCM 2018 pursuit, has been so relentless that it lost the backing of the majority and is thus threatening the existence of the liberal world order itself. This is where the Weimar Republic comes in. The collapse of Germany's first liberal democracy and the establishing of the Nazi dictatorship are among the most intensely researched and debated topics in modern history. In their search to find an explanation for this catastrophic failure of democracy, historians have long argued that it was Germany's authoritarian traditions and lack of political modernization that doomed the young republic from the start. This Sonderweg (special path) thesis has attracted much criticism and recently the opposite argument has been made: to some extent at least, Weimar was too modern, too liberal, too progressive. Particularly with its famously permissive sexual politics, the republic pushed the envelope so far that an inevitable backlash followed that swept Hitler's anti-democratic movement into power. Based on cutting-edge research, three experts in the history of Weimar's sexual politics discuss the validity of this 'backlash thesis' for German history and today's politics in this forum debate. In her book Weimar Throu...

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Section: Edward Dickinsonmentioning

confidence: 99%

A backlash against liberalism?

Dickinson

Hung

Marhoefer

et al. 2019

HCM

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Conjectures on the Sexual World-System

Kahan¹

2017

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

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This article brings together world-systems analysis, which explores how the world's capitalist markets became globally integrated, and sexuality studies for the first time in order to examine how the homo/hetero binary came to integrate and govern sexual organization throughout much of the world. Zooming out from the metropolitan and national frames that have dominated sexual historiography, this article operates at a different scale and order of magnification to explore forms of sexuality shared in whole and in part across the world. My theorization of the sexual world-system aims to understand the encounter between object choice as the organizing dimension of sexuality and its collision with other sexual knowledges and organizations: intimacy, bodily practice, positionality, sexual acts, behaviors, desires, and so forth. Reading across literary, sexological, legal, and religious archives, I examine the relationship between these varieties of sexual knowledge in order to contribute to a comparative study of sexuality and to write sexuality into what Immanuel Wallerstein calls “geoculture.”

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What is Sexual Modernity?

Cited by 2 publications

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A backlash against liberalism?

A backlash against liberalism?

Conjectures on the Sexual World-System

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