Berlant & Warner

Pages
(NATC, 3rd ed.)

## Biography

* Lauren Berlant was born in the Philadelphia area, went onto Oberlin college for her BA in 1979, and earned her Ph.D. in 1985 from Cornell University. She teaches at the University of Chicago.
* Michael Warner was brought up in a pentecostal family and attended Oral Roberts University and graduated with his BA in 1980, he received his MA from the University of Wisconsin in 1981, and received his Ph.D. in 1985 from John Hopkins University. He has taught at Northwestern and Rutgers Universities and Yale University since 2007.
* They were considered to have "spearheaded thinking about what it means 'to queer' theory as well as practice" (2452).

## "Sex in Public" (1998)

### **Background and Historical Context**

In "Sex in Public", Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner discuss how queer culture can survive and promote itself in a world of heteronormativity. They also examine how "presumably intimate things like sex are public issues, and how political issues are privatized and reduced to personal feeling" (2451). Berlant and Warner also discuss the politics of their time regarding queer culture such as Ted Kennedy and Jesse Helms who supported "amendments that refuse federal funds to organizations that 'promote, disseminate, or produce materials that are obscene or that depict or describe, in a patently offensive way, sexual or excretory activities or organs...obscene depictions sadomasochism, homo-eroticism, the sexual exploitation of children, or any individuals engaged in sexual intercourse'" (2454).

### **Key Words and Terms**

**Heteronormativity** -- a system that works to normalize behaviors and societal expectations that are tied to the conscious or unconscious privileging of heterosexuality.

### **Key Quotations**

"The aim of this paper is to describe what we want to promote as the radical aspirations of queer culture building: not just a safe zone for queer sex but the changed possibilities of identity, intelligibility, publics, culture, and sex that appear when the heterosexual couple is no longer the referent or the privileged example of sexual culture. Queer social practices like sex and theory try to unsettle the garbled but powerful norms supporting that privilege-including the project of normalization that has made heterosexuality hegemonic as well as those material practices that, though not explicitly sexual, are implicated in the hierarchies of property and propriety that we will describe as heteronormative” (2452-2453).

“Meanwhile, senators such as Ted Kennedy and Jesse Helms support amendments that refuse federal funds to organizations that "promote, disseminate, or produce materials that are obscene or that depict or describe, in a patently offensive way, sexual or excretory activities or organs, including but not limited to obscene depictions of sadomasochism, homo-eroticism, the sexual exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sexual intercourse." These developments, though distinct, are linked in the way they organize a hegemonic national public around sex. But because this sex public officially claims to act only in order to protect the zone of heterosexual privacy, the institutions of economic privilege and social reproduction informing its practices and organizing its ideal world are protected by the spectacular demonization of any represented sex” (2454-2455).

“She and her husband did some mail-order shopping and have
become increasingly involved in what from most points of view would count as
queer sex practices; their bodies have become disorganized and exciting to
them. They said to us: you're the only people we can talk to about this; to all
of our straight friends this would make us perverts. In order not to feel like
perverts, they had to make us into a kind of sex public” (2466).

### **Discussion**

#### Heteronormativity

In the footnotes of "Sex in Public", Berlant and Warner write "By heteronormativity we mean the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent—that is, organized as a sexuality—but also privileged. Its coherence is always provisional, and its privilege can take several (sometimes contradictory) forms: unmarked, as the basic idiom of the personal and the social; or marked as a natural state; or projected as an ideal or moral accomplishment. It consists less of norms that could be summarized as a body of doctrine than of a sense of rightness produced in contradictory manifestations—often unconscious, immanent to practice or to institutions. Contexts that have little visible relation to sex practice, such as life narrative and generational identity, can be heteronormative in this sense, while in other contexts sex between men and women might *not*be heteronormative. Heteronormativity is thus a concept distinct from heterosexuality" (2453). Berlant and Warner argue that the world is structured around heterosexuality and therefore reinforces and privileges heteronormativity as the "norm."

Privatization of Intimacy

By keeping heteronormative institutions and practices in place, and attempting to remove individualized accounts of sexuality from the public sphere, heteronormativity becomes the only acceptable version of sexual life, to the point where even heterosexual couples must hide the fact that they enjoy using vibrators as demonstrated by Berlant and Warner (2466).

### **Discussion Questions**

Define "heteronormativity" as it operates in this particular selection from Berlant & Warner.

To what extent might we catch glimpses of our reading of Althusser in our selection from "Sex in Public"?

To what extent might we catch glimpses of Marx or Gramsci?

"Sex in Public" appeared over 20 years ago. How recognizable is the cultural and political landscape to which Berlant and Warner are responding? (Rather than tracking some kind of "progress" per se here, I am more interested in what conjunctions of media, ideology, and/or power remain in place or not).

### **Major Criticism and Reception**

According to the NATC, Berlant and Warner "have been attacked in mainstream media for encouraging homosexuality and Warner has been labeled a "dangerous professor" by a right-wing pundit. Within academic circles, they have been criticized for targeting normativity" (2452).

## **Related Works**

* Berlant, L. G. (1997). *The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship*. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
* Warner, M. (1993). *Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory*. Minneapolis, MN: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

## References

Leitch, Vincent B., editor. *The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism*. 3rd ed., W.W. Norton & Co., 2018.