The Baldy Center Podcast

The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy at the University at Buffalo

Fall 2023/Spring 2024, Episode 37

Podcast recording date: 11/10/2023

Host-producer: Logan

Speaker: Greta LaFleur

Contact information: BaldyCenter@buffalo.edu

Transcription begins.

Logan:

Hello, and welcome to The Baldy Center for Law Social Policy Podcast. I'm your host Logan. On this episode, we are joined by Baldy Center Mid-Career Fellow, Dr. Greta LaFleur. Dr. LaFleur is an Associate Professor of American Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. We discussed their fellowship here at UB and her current work on a second monograph tentatively titled “How Sex Became Good: The Feminist Movements and Racial Politics That Made Modern Sexuality.” Here is Dr. Greta LaFleur.

Logan:

Thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate your time and your willingness to participate on the podcast. I just want to start off by having you introduce yourself to the audience.

Greta:

Well, thank you for having me. My name is Greta LaFleur. I am an Associate Professor of American Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University, and I'm also a Fellow at The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy this semester.

Logan:

So could you explain what a Mid-Career Fellowship looks like and why UB?

Greta:

Yeah, so one of the reasons that I applied is that this is one of the few interdisciplinary legal studies centers. There's not a ton of them. Mostly when you have centers attached to law schools or that are part of law schools, they tend to be about, not entirely exclusively legal scholarship, but I think from the outside, as someone who's not a law professor, I'm appointed in a humanities department, it looks to me like there is not a lot of space for interdisciplinary scholarship in a lot of those programs. So this is one of the few that seemed to really sponsor interdisciplinary legal scholarship. So that was one of the reasons why I wanted to come here. I also am from Toronto and my mom is from Utica, New York. I have a lot of ties in this area. What the big things that fellowships do is they basically buy you time away from teaching so you can sort of accelerate and advance your research. So that is what I'm trying to do here this semester.

Logan:

And could you give us a little background on what first drew you to this area of study, American Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexual Studies?

Greta:

Yeah, I think part of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies interest is I am a queer person. I was assigned female at birth. And I think that there is a way that some of the politics surrounding gender and sexuality, especially being born in 1981, the older I get increasingly think about how the sort of really, really vast shifts in the landscape surrounding gender and sexuality or the politics of gender and sexuality in the United States have really defined my life in a lot of ways. So I think, and as a naturally kind of curious person, I like to think about them because we encounter them a lot just in our everyday lives. And then when I went to college, I studied WGSS or I took a bunch of WGSS courses, and I've always been, in terms of my scholarship an Americanist. I was trained as a colonial Americanist when I was doing my PhD.

And there was something that was kind of a natural fit. I work on the history of gender and sexuality, in terms of my work in Colonial American studies, and there is a way that when I'm working on, in some cases, the exact same place. Although maybe I wouldn't say it is exactly the same place because the geopolitical distinctions that define place have changed so much since the 17th and 18th century. But I might be writing about what is now Boston and my mom lived outside of what is now Boston for the last 20 years. There is some sort of natural continuousness around the ways that you think and the questions you asked when you are thinking about the same place and the same sort of questions.

Logan:

Now you are working on a book that is tentatively titled “How Sex Became Good: The Feminist Movements and Racial Politics that made Modern Sexuality.” And from the description that you sent over, there are a few phrases or words that I really would like for you to elaborate on that I found pretty interesting. So it says, “the work tracks how cultural and legal responses to the problem of sexual violence shaped the politicalization of sexuality in the modern period.” Could you elaborate on that phrase, ‘politicalization of sexuality’?

Greta:

Yeah. Maybe I'll back up, and I think I also maybe said this, but I think this is a useful way to frame it for people who don't know the project. I'll frame it in two ways. One more academic and one less academic. So the academic way, which is more of a historical account. As a Colonial Americanist who wrote a book on the history of sexuality in early America, one of the really notable things about working with 17th and 18th century archives that just immediately stands out is almost every explicit representation of sexual cultures, sexual encounters, everyday sexual behavior is that almost all of it is bad. Do you know what I mean? It's coercive, it's violent, it's exploitative, it's frequently unwilled, unwanted, not consented to in the words of our time. So that was what I was coming out of the first book thinking a lot about. And then at the same time, as a queer person living in the 21st century, now the 21st century, previously the 20th century, I'm also the inheritor of this tradition that I think is indebted to the women's liberation movement to queer liberation movements, increasingly to trans liberation movements. And I say this is not to suggest that trans lib is less old than either of those two things. It's rather to say that the politics have gotten absorbed differently over time. And I think we're in a moment where we're absorbing a lot of the benefits of trans lib right now in a broader sense. But I'm the inheritor of these traditions that also teach us that sexual autonomy is one of the purest forms of freedom. And that's such a bizarre mismatch. How did we get from A to B? How did we get from a time when sexual practice was primarily defined by non-consent and violence to a time when we think about sexual practice as one of the purest ways of being free? I mean, that's just a bizarre set of things to line up next to each other. And so that's kind of where the project came from. So when I talk about the politicization of sexuality in the modern period, what I mean is the modern period. Basically right now I'm defining the modern period as sexual modernity according to most historians of sexuality happened sometime in the late 19th century. Some people date it as early as the 1830s. I actually am a little bit more in that camp. Some people think it's more like the 1880s, 1890s. Regardless of where you put it, there's sort of no dissension or no dissent around the idea that we are sort of in this period that's defined by a modern or modernized understanding of sexuality. And what that means is, the way that people talk about that is that, in a previous time you might, as a person across your life, seek out sexual encounters with lots of different people of different genders, in the parlance of our own terms sexes, in a previous parlance ages, across class lines, and it didn't really mean anything about you. It was just you sort moving through the world. But around the turn of the 20th century, because of things like the sciences of sexology, psychiatry, the long, long proliferation of racial sciences or what we now call them pseudo sciences, but they were very much considered real sciences in their own moment and any number of other things. There was an increasing sense that sexuality is not something you do, it is something that you are, do you know what I mean? So the way that people will gloss this, and this is something that gets attributed to the French philosopher Michel Foucault. They'll say, well Foucault charted the transition from acts to identities. It's not really what he says, but it's a useful way of thinking about it. And so right now, in our own moment, we think of sex or sexual desire as something that is internal to us. It lives inside our bodies. It's individuated. It's not something that is defined by the world around us. It's defined by our own experience. It's expressive. Our behavior is a direct indication of what our sexual orientation or comportment might be. So that's the modern way of thinking about the meaning of sexuality and the politicization of that. I think the way that sex and sexual desire has been bound to identity politics increasingly over the last 50 to 70 years, that too, I think is part of the very specific politicization, the way that sexuality has been made political and has been shaped into a very specific political thing in the modern period. And so that's what I mean. So I'm curious about the way that efforts to address the problem of sexual violence over time shaped how we came to think about sexuality as something that's indelibly linked to freedom.

Logan:

And you were an author on a book earlier in 2018 called “The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America.” Were there things in your research or when you were putting that together that led you to creating this book? And what did that look like, or what did that process look like?

Greta:

Yeah, so my current book project, direct outgrowth of my first one, very different sources. I think one of the things that I kept running into in my first book is there's a real tradition among historians of sexuality and especially historians of sexuality who do not work on slavery and colonialism, and that is actually until very recently, kind of most of them. So people who are working on enfranchised communities of usually white and or European descended peoples who are not bonded or enslaved or indentured, that has tended to be the sort of communities that have been studied by historians of sexuality. But when you study those communities primarily, and I should say also that most of the people that were being studied for the first couple decades of the field's development were men. So when you study that group of people, so like white and franchised men who really are, of all the people who are able to exercise a certain type of sexual autonomy, it's really them. Which is not to say that every white man, European descended man was, but if we're looking at the population as a whole, especially in North America, it really was mostly that, or mostly them. You're getting a very specific vision of what sexuality looks like. And there's reasons that early histories of sexuality looked like that. And I don't want to generalize, there were lots of different types of early histories of sexuality. But in terms of the way that the field is formed, especially in the 70s, 80s, 90s, the voices of people who work on white men tended to be prioritized in universities straight up. So you got a very particular vision, if that's the community that you are looking at, about what sexuality is. And one of the reasons that they were invested in doing that, a lot of the earliest historians, historians of sexuality, were gay scholars who were A) increasingly living through the AIDS crisis, and B), were facing massive, massive homophobic attacks from all. I mean, honestly, we're seeing another, a renewed surge of that kind of stuff right now, but it was a different moment from when it happened in the 70s and 80s and 90s and 2000s and 2010s.  One of the things that they were trying to do were say, look, gay people, the legitimacy of gay people now, of queer people now, is in part verified by the fact that queer people have a past. So they were trying to prove that queer people have a past. So I don't want to just dunk on this group of scholars because they were doing really important work, but the work that they were doing definitely shaped the way that the field went. And this is all just to circle back to the question about my first book. The more I worked on it, the more I was like, oh, I was coming in with this idea that sexuality was a good thing. But by the end of the book, I was like, wow, every single example I'm looking at is basically not really an example of what we would today include under the umbrella of sexuality. It would be what today we would include under the auspices of sexual violence. And of course, there was a lot more room. There was a very high tolerance for sexual violence, to put it mildly in those periods. And I would argue that there's still a very high tolerance for sexual violence today, unfortunately. So I'm not trying to just apply our standards for sexual consent to the past, but I think it's interesting that we don't talk about violence. Historians of sexuality don't talk about violence that much unless they're historians of sexuality or historians of colonialism who are looking at, or excuse me, historians of slavery or historians of colonialism who are looking at sexuality. And those are the scholars that have really tried to theorize violence and its relationship to sexuality.

Logan:

And so with the ushering of the fourth wave of feminism, how do you see your book fitting in with today's culture? And what do you hope the women of the younger generation, or the younger generation as a whole pull or take away from your book?

Greta:

So I want to just push back a little bit. I hate the Waves model. The only reason I hate the waves model is I think that it tries to force discontinuities between the different waves. And I think there are some really great continuities and some really poisonous continuities that have actually linked feminism in North America, for example, over time. But anyway, I'll leave that for now. But yeah, in terms of what I'd like people to see, I think there's a strain, and I don't think it's actually hard to find in the thinking about sex and sexuality within feminist movements, including fourth wave as you call it, but including contemporary feminism or feminist work by young people that are, it's kind of hiding in plain sight, where people are grappling with the fundamental negativity of sex. And I'm saying this as someone who I think sexual politics have been probably, and my experience with sexual politics have been one of the defining conditions for my political engagement in my life. I'm very much a pro-sex person. But the fact that I have to say that is, I think kind of tells an interesting story about the history of feminist and otherwise women's movements in the United States. And I think the Me Too movement has been an interesting example because, I'm trying to think of how to say this. I want to be very clear that I'm not criticizing Me Too. But the other side of those conversations, if you look at it from the margins, you're like, oh, the premise of Me Too is that sex should be good. And there's not really a lot in the history of sexuality that actually supports that. I'm not saying that it shouldn't be. I believe that sex should be good. I believe that sex should be consensual. But what I see people trying to do is usher in a radically different experience of or of standards around what sex is, which is great and really important. But I think that there's just a sort of negativity around sex that I think we need to look more squarely in the face. And I think that there can be a lot of room, and again, I'm not trying to undermine anything that any people who do advocacy against sexual assault, against the structures that allow for sexual assault. You know what I mean? I'm not a sexual assault denier. But I think that there's a way, there's a lot of space between what Me Too was talking about and the vision of sexual liberation that we have. That's really just a lot of people grappling with the negativity of sex. Here's an example that will maybe ground this. I don't know if you've heard of the movement. It's both political and intellectual, the movement called Heteropessimism. It's basically a lot of primarily straight cis women, not exclusively, but primarily straight cis women who kind of write about how devastating it is to be straight and to have to engage with the sort of strictures that heterosexuality places on the cultures of sex and sexuality. So part of it, a lot of Heteropessimists would say, is a huge tolerance for sexual assault, for sexual violence. A lot of them would say that heterosexuality as a sort of structural culture or as a structuralist culture, I don't know if that's the right way to put it, also really allows for misogyny, for the deprioritization of women and women's experiences or the experiences of women and feminine people, because I'm not just talking about cis women here. So I'm really interested in that conversation. I think it's basically a group of people who I think are coming to the same questions as I'm coming to, but from a really different angle. And I think there, there's got to be space for thinking about, okay, sexual violence is bad, consensual sex is good, but there's a lot in consensual sex that is still really ambivalent for people. And I think that's kind of what I'm interested in grappling with too.

Logan:

There was another phrase that you used when in the description for your book, and it says, “using vulnerability as a structural position in political claim.” Could you talk more about what that means ‘using sexual vulnerability as a political claim’?

Greta:

Yeah, and this is not my idea at all. This is a very, very well-trod ground in Gender and Sexuality studies. And also something that I've really learned a lot from, again, scholars of slavery and its after lives who have really thought about the way that sexual violence is weaponized and deployed in the service of things like white supremacy. So sexual vulnerability. I mean, the tricky thing about Me Too, and I also want to, there's different Me Toos, right? So Tarana Burke, the founder of the Me Too movement, who specifically used Me Too as a way of describing or not even describing, of trying to bring people together and specifically black girls together and unite people in a sort of political stance around a particular kind of structural violence that consistently over hundreds of years as targeted black women and girls, and also feminine people, and also black men. I don't want to just, sexual violence is unfortunately really pervasive. Her version of Me Too, and she's given so many interviews about this, is really trying to think about its structures. That it's not an individual on an individual sort of encounter. Of course, it is also that, but it's also the 300 years of history that's informed or that informs the kinds of everyday violences and sexual violences in particular that are aimed at black women and girls. But I think the way that Me Too got picked up, especially by people in Hollywood, and again, I am not trying to denigrate their claims at all. Experiences of sexual violence are awful, and I don't want anyone ever to have them. But that was framed much more as bad apples, bad guys, you know what I mean? Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey. And of course, those things are real, and I want people to be held accountable, although I'm very ambivalent about, to say the least, the kinds of legal accountability that people are searching for. But that gets framed as a one-to-one interaction where there's one bad guy and one good person. There's a perpetrator and there's a victim. And so those are very different visions of what that means. So what I'm trying to do in the book with sexual vulnerability, and again, building on a lot of other people or the scholarship of a lot of other people, is just try to think about, okay, whose vulnerability gets seen? And when? And how do women's and feminist movements over time work to basically weaponize the sexual vulnerability of women, girls, feminine people, feminized people in order to make political claims? And what I argue in the book is that it's really, I mean, this is not a surprise. This is literally the most obvious argument on earth. And so many people have made this before me, but it's really white women's claims that get heard. So for example, you could barely, and in many state courts you just literally could not, but if you were a black woman trying to make a claim of sexual violence, a complaint of sexual violence against someone, you would not even be able to make that claim in a court until the early 19^th, the early 20th century. Wish that it were the early 19th century. But until the early 20th century, and this continues to be a problem today we see over and over and over again. I actually just listened to the podcast “Exposed” about Columbia University's gynecologist that was consistently sexually assaulting people. But one of the things they do is they talk to the assistant, the ADA, who was tasked with prosecuting the case. And the first time they have 300 victims, and they don't bring the case. Because courts, not even courts, but prosecutors, district attorney's offices, the doubt starts so early in the process. Anyway, so the sexual vulnerability of white women becomes this kind of point around which white women and women's movements, and even the first, if we're going to go back to the Waves, the first wave feminist movement, it becomes kind of the consistent thread through all of their different platforms. So suffrage, one of the reasons that they wanted suffrage, their articulated reasons for why they wanted suffrage, is because they wanted to be able to own property and basically they wanted to get rid of the doctrine of coverture, which meant that the man legally covered the women, so that they could own property, so that they could inherit property, pass it on to their children, and so that they could make claims in court against their husband, which of course didn't happen in terms of rape until the 1990s in a lot of places, lot of states. And then the temperance stuff, they were like, well, when men get drunk, they sexually assault women. I mean, all of this in a lot of ways is about the problem of sexual assault and sexual violence. But again, the only claims that are being listened to, or the only concerns that are being listened to, are of not only white women, but enfranchised wealthy. I shouldn't say enfranchised because they couldn't vote, wealthy or white women. White women who both had the leisure and the education to speak and write and travel, and also not get censured when they spoke publicly about this kind of stuff. And then it kind of goes on from there. But they realized really quickly that sexual vulnerability, that articulating their own sexual vulnerability and making that the point around which to organize, they realized really quickly that that's effective. And that's what I'm interested in, which is, so I'm not trying to deny the sexual vulnerability of all sorts of people, including men, including men and boys, and especially trans people. But I am interested in the way that certain claims gain a lot of traction and other claims are completely dismissed, and that continues to this day.

Logan:

So for your Mid-Career Fellowship and for the book, what does the rest of that timeline look like? Or when can we expect that to come out?

Greta:

Oh my God, that's the most traumatic question. It's like when your parents are like, so what job do you have after college? And you're like, I don't have a job. Okay, so the book right now, it's due to the press at the end of this summer. So I guess that would be August 2024. I really hope to make that timeline. The tricky thing is the more I work on it, I keep adding chapters, which is an illness I have. So I am hoping to make that timeline, and I'm not sure if it will. So if I do, it'll probably come out in early 2026 would be my guess. Publication timelines are slow. I would submit it in August, it would go out to readers for a second review. They'd send it back. I'd do some revisions, I'd send it back in, and then it would come out a year later. So yeah, that's the thing. But sadly, I'm done with my fellowship at the end of the semester. So what I'm just trying to do, excuse me right now, is finish up. I'm working on a chapter on late 19th century and early 20th century age of consent reform movements. So efforts to, one of the things that I'm trying to sort of think about in the repackaging sex as this incontrovertible political good in the 20th century is what had to happen to sexual politics and sexual cultures to make them sort of eligible for being seen as these freeing things. So one of the things that had to happen, I'm arguing in the book, is that sex needed to be for adults. There was so much. The problem of sexual violence against children, which remains with us today, of course, was such a major problem. And this was also the moment where societies for the prevention of cruelty to children were popping up all over the place. And so that chapter is trying to sort of argue sex needed to be repackaged as something that only adults could do, because there was a sort of association between willingness and adulthood, which of course is baked into law. That's why we have ages of consent and ages at which you can vote and serve in the military and whatever. So that's the chapter I'm working on right now.

Logan:

Well, thank you so much for making time for me. I really appreciate it.

Greta:

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Logan:

If there is anything else you would like to plug or speak about, please feel free. But I think for my questions, I think you've hit all those points for me.

Greta:

Okay, awesome. Yeah, no, I don't think I have anything else to plug. Yeah.

Logan:

Awesome. Thank you so much.

Greta:

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Logan:

That was Baldy Center Mid-Career Fellow and Associate Professor of American Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University, Dr. Greta LaFleur. And this has been The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy Podcast produced by the University of Buffalo. Let us know what you think by visiting our X, formerly known as Twitter, @baldycenter, or emailing us at baldycenter@buffalo.edu. To learn more about the Center, visit our website, buffalo.edu/baldycenter. The theme music for this season was composed by Matias Omar. My name is Logan, and on behalf of The Baldy Center, thank you for listening.

End Transcription.