Sex Obsession

Finalist, 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ StudiesOffers a way to undo the inextricable American knot of sex, politics, religion, and powerAmerican politics are obsessed with sex. Before the first televised presidential debate, John F. Kennedy trailed Richard Nixon in the polls. As Americans tuned in, however, they found Kennedy a younger, more vivacious, and more attractive choice than Nixon. Sexier. The political significance of Kennedy’s telegenic sex appeal is now widely accepted – but taking sexual politics seriously is not. Janet R. Jakobsen examines how, for the last several decades, gender and sexuality have reappeared time and again at the center of political life, marked by a series of widely recognized issues and movements – women’s liberation and gay liberation in the 1960s and ’70s, the AIDS crisis and ACT UP in the ‘80s and ’90s, welfare and immigration “reform” in the ‘90s, wars claiming to “save women” in the 2000s, and battles over health care in the 2010s, to recent demands for reproductive justice, trans liberation, and the explosive exposures of #MeToo.Religion has been wound up in these political struggles, and blamed for not a little of the resistance to meaningful change in America political life. Jakobsen acknowledges that religion is a force to be reckoned with, but decisively breaks with the common sense that religion and sex are the fixed binary of American political life. She instead follows the kaleidoscopic ways in which sexual politics are embedded in social relations of all kinds – not only the intimate relations of love and family with which gender and sex are routinely associated, but also secularism, freedom, race, disability, capitalism, nation and state, housing and the environment.In the midst of these obsessions, Jakobsen’s promiscuous ethical imagination guides us forward. Drawing on examples from collaborative projects among activists, academics and artists, Jakobsen shows that sexual politics can contribute to building justice from the ground up. Gender and sexual relations are practices through which values emerge and communities are made. Sex and desire, gender and embodiment emerge as bases of ethical possibility, breaking political stalemate and opening new possibility.

It has become common sense that U.S. politics around issues of sex, race, and gender are an intransigent political struggle between Christian conservatives and secular libertines. Yet how true is this narrative—and whom does it serve? Jakobsen argues this simplistic dichotomy of religious traditionalists vs. secular progressives shores up, rather than dismantles, persistent inequalities ... Highly recommended for those seeking greater clarity about how sex, race, and gender are mobilized in American political life., Janet Jakobsen’s The Sex Obsession is a tremendous book; it makes a major contribution to our understanding of US culture. In four crisp chapters, Jakobsen convincingly demonstrates that many of our most strongly held assumptions about politics and sex are false—and also dangerous. She skillfully highlights the ways in which narratives of ‘progress’ produce skewed understandings of US culture and politics. Jakobsen’s analysis of the complicated relationships between secular ideologies and religious ones is especially compelling. The Sex Obsession is both timely and brilliant.”, Jakobsen presents an interesting, loosely structured series of cases to support the thesis that American politics is characterized by a tension between a white, Protestant, and evangelical conception of the family animating conservatives and a secular mimicry of that ideal animating Liberals., An essential companion to this moment and all that troubles it, The Sex Obsession begins with the beguiling question, why is sex everywhere in US policy debates? It then refutes the commonsensical answer: because of religion. By showing how the secular/religious binary clouds an understanding of the dense intersections between myriad social forces, Janet Jakobsen offers a brilliant, riveting, and incisive study full of transformative conceptions of the possible and previously hidden passages to social change. Read this book to imagine life differently.”, Shreds our common-sense narratives about sexual politics in the United States. The author dismantles the misleading opposition between religious regulation and secular freedom and leads us through a dynamic intersectional analysis to a provocatively thrilling call for theoretical promiscuity and relational perversity in the service of an expansive practice of social justice. This meticulously argued, groundbreaking book is a must-read for all of us engaged in building another world from the ground up.

Janet R. Jakobsen is Claire Tow Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University where she has also served as Director of the Center for Research on Women and Dean for Faculty Diversity and Development. She is the author of Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference: Diversity and Feminist Ethics, and the co-author, with Ann Pellegrini, of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance.