Sex and the State
When: Saturday, March 16, 2024, 11:30 AM - 6:00 PM
Where: BLOC Cinema, Mile End
Speaker: Speakers include Gargi Bhattacharyya, Sita Balani, Abeera Khan, Alexander Stofel
Speakers include Gargi Bhattacharyya, Sita Balani, Abeera Khan, Alexander Stofell, Felix Del Campo, Rahul Rao, and Bryony White.
States have long been concerned with the regulation of sexual behaviour, with determining who has sex with whom, whether sex is mediated by marriage, money or something else, and what status is given to any child that might issue from the act. Whether in the brutal context of the plantation or through the seemingly benign operations of the post-war welfare state, the management of sex has been essential to imperial and national projects, and to the regimes of accumulation, expropriation and exploitation they undergird.
Sexual violence follows the movement of capital, with extractive projects such as mines and pipelines generating the conditions under which organised sexual exploitation thrives. However, as the twentieth century’s struggles for sexual liberation moved into the mainstream, they tended to view sex through the prism of individual rights and freedoms, with questions of militarisation, policing, and access to resources displaced by a focus on more limited gains.
As our economic conditions rapidly deteriorate and the limited protections of a liberal order collapse, we nonetheless appear to have greater sexual freedom than ever. What is the role of the state in the regulation of sex today? What is it we understand by ‘sex’ now? Do states and other authorities still care what we do with our bodies or the bodies of others? Did they ever?
The rhetoric of prudery, normativity (often still hetero but not only) and lifestyle discipline continues to pervade the theatrical announcements of electoral politics. However, in the messier business of everyday life, sex appears more various and unknowable than ever. We seem far from the vilification of particular acts that characterised the becoming public of discourses of sexuality. People do, accept and discuss all sorts of things. At the same time, however, sexualised logics also animate the punitive violences of our time, with crackdowns on crime, immigration, welfare and trade unionism all referencing a sexualised dysfunction or excess (okay, we made up the bit about trade unionism).
This one-day event returns to questions about sex and the state, starting from genuine curiosity and uncertainty about the sexual politics of this conjuncture. We hope to create space for an open-ended conversation about what states are doing about sex or in the name of sex - and what they are not. We hope you agree that understanding this better should be part of how we seek to comprehend the workings of power, and to make something different. But, even if you are doubtful about the project, we hope you will still come for the innuendo.