Nepali Maoists on Homosexuality
Posted by Mike E on April 21, 2008
This article originally appeared on Counterpunch, April 23, 2007
The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), leading what many have considered the most advanced Maoist movement in the world for the last decade, has recently been accused of attacks on gay people and of indulging in anti-gay rhetoric. Unfortunately the reports seem valid. In January a senior party leader, Dev Gurung, now Minister of Local Development in Nepal’s transitional government, was quoted in the press as stating: “Under Soviet rule and when China was still very much a communist state, there were no homosexuals in the Soviet Union or China. Now [that] they are moving towards capitalism, homosexuals may have arisen there as well. So homosexuality is a product of capitalism. Under socialism this kind of problem does not exist.”
The statement seems quite un-Maoist in its description of any twentieth-century socialist experiment as truly “communist.” Mao broke from Stalin in emphasizing the long-term nature and fragility of the construction of socialism as a transitional stage between capitalism and the classless society of communism theoretically posited for the human future. And it seems oblivious to historical reality in denying the existence of homosexuality anywhere, anytime in human history. Dangerously foolish (if I can assume that it was indeed said), it was made in the context of reported abuses of gay men and lesbians by Maoists in areas under their control.
Such mistreatment has not been particularly associated with the Maoists in recent years, but indeed more with the old security apparatus of King Gyanendra. It’s not clear that it represents a clear party line; Hisila Yami, a Maoist member of parliament, Minister of Physical Planning and Work and wife of party leader Baburam Bhattarai told a Nepali gay organization, the Blue Diamond Society in January that the party’s policy was “not to encourage homosexual behavior but not to punish homosexuals either.” But plainly there is cause for the sort of concern recently expressed by Human Rights Watch in a letter to Khadga Bahadur Biswokarma, a CPN(M) member and now Minister of Women, Children and Social Welfare. The letter claims that in December 2006, Maoists in Katmandu ordered homeowners not to rent rooms to gays or lesbians, and that Amrita Thapa, general secretary of the Maoist women’s association, told participants at a national conference in March 2006 that homosexuals were unnatural and were “polluting” society.
I’ve sometimes been critical of Human Rights Watch, which has little sympathy for revolutionary movements and has sometimes sided overtly with repressive regimes. (It congratulated the government of Alberto Fujimori in Peru for capturing Maoist leader Abimael Guzman in 1992 and has done little to protect the human rights of Maoists imprisoned under successive Peruvian regimes.) But here HRW seems to be on target in its criticism.
The communist movement of course has a long sordid history of homophobia—just as does bourgeois liberalism. Up to 1962 homosexual sex was punishable by lengthy jail terms everywhere in the U.S., and it was only in 2003 that the Supreme Court invalidated the “anti-sodomy” laws operative in Texas and several other states. The sentiments expressed by Gurung and Biswokarma are obviously not unique to communists but part of an historical continuum of intolerance that crosses all kinds of ideological lines.
Marx and Engels themselves were, as their private correspondence clearly establishes, distinctly hostile to homosexuality, which they viewed as “unnatural.” On the other hand, in the 1890s, the German Social Democratic Party leaders Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky, and the socialist Reichstag deputy August Bebel, called for the repeal of the German statute criminalizing sex between consenting adult males. Bernstein called for “a scientific approach” to sexuality rather than one based on “more or less arbitrary moral concepts.” (Meanwhile the British socialist Edward Carpenter, influenced by the work of German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, argued that “uranians”–or members the “intermediate sex”–served in a positive role as a bridge between [heterosexual] men and women.) Adolf Thiele, a socialist deputy in the German parliament in 1905, declared that he “wouldn’t even admit that [homosexuality] is something sick.” It was, he opined, “simply a deviation from the usual pattern nature produces.”
Between 1917 and 1933, the USSR pioneered in sexual legal reform. The Bolsheviks in power rescinded all the anti-homosexual statutes in the czarist legal code and sent Soviet delegations to international sexual reform congresses in Europe. The early Soviet state officially declared “the absolute non-interference of the state and society into sexual matters, so long as nobody is injured, and no one’s interests are encroached upon.” Soviet law regarded homosexual intercourse as the same as “so-called natural intercourse” and was far ahead of (for example) U.S. law at the time.
All this changed in 1933, when the Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party introduced a statute penalizing consensual homosexual activity (muzhelozhstvo or sodomy) between men; thereafter Soviet writers increasingly conflated male homosexuality as indeed “unnatural,” and associated it with German fascism. Not all Marxist theorists followed the Soviet lead in castigating homosexual activity, but the most prestigious of Marxist psychoanalysts, Sigmund Freud’s student William Reich, wrote in 1934 that men of a “homosexual tendency” were easily “drawn toward the right.”
Gurung’s association of homosexuality with capitalism echoes the Stalinist line that homosexuality represents “bourgeois decadence.” But Gurung should realize that Maoists outside Nepal have largely abandoned the Stalinist legacy on this issue. The Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, a close ally of the Nepali Maoists, up until 2001 stated in its program that under socialism “struggle will be waged to eliminate [homosexuality] and reform homosexuals.” But the RCP now accepts homosexuality and renounces its past position on the issue (if without adequate self-criticism or explanation for why a bankrupt line was held so long). The Communist Party of the Philippines, another Maoist party with cordial ties to the CPN(M), officially recognized gay relationships among its members in 1998 and has been conducting same-sex marriages since 2005. The Nepali party lags embarrassingly behind.
Many have derived inspiration from the People’s War in Nepal, which in a mere decade acquired control over about 80% of Nepali territory and proved to the world that revolutionary communism remains the hope of the hopeless. I myself was happy to endorse Li Onesto’s first-person and very sympathetic account of her Maoist-sponsored visit to Nepal, Dispatches from the People’s War in Nepal (Pluto Press, 2005). The party now shares power with its former foes, heading six ministries in the provisional government. Some who have supported the CPN(M) are expressing grave concern that the party is abandoning its commitment to socialist revolution by its deal with the seven mainstream parties and its abandonment of the People’s War.
The Nepali Maoists deny that that’s the case, and I’d just as soon withhold judgment on that issue. But if the sentiments of Comrades Gurung and Biswokarma are at all representative of party sentiment, and if measures against gays are part of the party’s agenda, the outlook for a new revolutionary model in Nepal is looking worrisome.
* * * * *
Mao Zedong was all about struggle, always stressing that it’s right to rebel against reactionaries. He saw inter-party two-line struggle as a good and inevitable thing. There is already some apparent struggle within the CPN(M) regarding gender and sexuality issues. Earlier this months Maoists protested the television broadcast of the Miss Nepal Pageant. But it went forward, with the support of the new Information and Communications Minister, Krishna Bahadur Mahara, himself one of the newly-appointed Maoist cabinet ministers. He argued “practical considerations” (including a contract between pageant sponsors and the state-run channel) did not allow cancellation.
So—so far—beauty pageant okay, homosexuality “polluting.” May the Maoists of Nepal struggle these things out among themselves, with some input from the world, and the correct line win.
* * * * *
Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch’s merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.
He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu
Sean S. said
This is odd, considering the Philippine Marxist group celebrated the first “legal” (in their territory anyways) gay marriage a couple years back. Part of that might come out of a general aversion to the Catholic dominance of the island, and therefore it would be easier to sell the idea, since it sticks two fingers in the eyes of the Catholic hierarchy.
the cold lamper said
A minor factual question: does Leupp mean to refer to the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets? I don’t remember the Bolshevik Party ever slipping the word “Executive” into the name of their CC.
Sean S. said
I think the persecution of homosexuals within most Communist regimes comes out of a idolization of the working man; the big buff man, wielding the gun, the plow, and the hammer all at once. I also think that a kind of revolutionary asceticism is found in alot of Communist parties and sects; the feeling that pleasure comes out of the gluttony and excess of bourgeoisie capitalism. A not untrue point most of the time (I thought the movie Marie Antoinette was a good example of the absurdity of noble-aristocratic life), but raises the specter of a constant tightening the belt attitude that often leads to burnout and the simple inability to have FUN. It also becomes a kind of political football, and the word “Decadent” (which may describe things as “bad” as liking to dance, or gasp! enjoy sex!) becomes an epithet alongside “bourgeoisie”.
Of all the statist regimes, I find the Cuban’s to be generally the best on this score, though certainly not winning any gold-medals. The initial push for “re-education” camps for effeminate men, the ping-pong of harassment from the police forces, has generally given way to a slightly more enlightened attitude, and the vague promotions of LGBT rights from the agency for sexual health.
Gary Leupp said
A few quick points.
This column was posted a year ago on Counterpunch. I did not suggest its posting on the Kasama site and was surprised to find it here.
I feel enthusiastic about the recent victory of our friends in Nepal and think that in the wake of that victory the most important thing is to express solidarity with them.
After writing my column a year ago I learned more about the construction of sexuality in Nepal, and in particular, learned that the community affected by discrimination was/is principally not gays and lesbians in the U.S. sense but cross-dressing entertainers connected to certain establishments who occupy a niche in Nepal’s caste system. This does not excuse discrimination, period, nor justify the quotes I provide in my piece. But I feel I need to investigate further before speaking further.
Nando said
You can’t analyze from the general to the particular the way this previous comment by Sean does.
The Vietnamese and Chinese parties had the view of homosexuality that it was a phenomenon of external influence, and that it was not present in the liberated parts of their country.
Was that “I think the persecution of homosexuals within most Communist regimes comes out of a idolization of the working man; the big buff man, wielding the gun, the plow, and the hammer all at once”?
No. It had nothing to do with that.
And in fact the “macho” association you have with “the working man” is very western. And your attempt to generalize really is overreaching.
Do you have any basis for saying that the Nepali Maoists have a narrow and hostile view of “pleasure”? And if not, why go there?
Lots of verdict and opinion, without much knowledge or investigation. Not a great method. I think you need to learn to do particular analyses of contradictions, not proceed from prejudices formed without much information.
Similarly, it is not “odd” that the Nepalese have this view (as someone claimed). And we can’t deduce an “oddness” from the fact that the Filippino Maoists have, at least on one occasion and in one area, showed a different approach — by having a public gay marriage.) These movement are not nearly as simply defined by ideology as you think, and are very linked to the active rev processes in their countries. And need we say, that the experience around sexuality, the degree of urbanization, the influence of outside ideas, is far far different in these islands than in isolated Nepal.
Personally, I don’t know much about the history of sexuality in Nepal, and I know nothing about the history (and culture) around homosexuality. So i won’t comment on that, and I look forward to learning what others know about it.
I do know, however, that the Nepalese Maoists have an extremely radical approach to sexual and love relations — which focuses on (a ) supporting love marriages, (b ) overthrowing arranged marriages (c ) opposition to the sale of women (both into marriage and prostitution), and (d ) marriage across caste lines (i.e. the abolition of caste relations and oppression). These are the kinds of views that people get killed for in feudal countries. And I think we should start with an appreciation of how radical and exciting their views on love and sexuality are in this whole part of the world (including in pakistan and india and afghanistan.) This radicalism is one of their very attractive qualities.
Gary seems to document a view of homosexuality that includes both critical condemnation and some degree of tolerance. How that relates to the existing dominant traditional culture on these matters (whether it is some degree of radical break, or a tailing of existing views) — I just don’t know.
I found Gary’s article very interesting (and not just in its discussion of Nepal, obviously). And i’m glad it was written and posted. But I would not have written his closing summation:
“But if the sentiments of Comrades Gurung and Biswokarma are at all representative of party sentiment, and if measures against gays are part of the party’s agenda, the outlook for a new revolutionary model in Nepal is looking worrisome.”
On one hand, this is, thankfully, a measured and qualified statement (”But if…”). However i also don’t think we can start to judge (or worry about) the whole “new revolutionary model” based on very partial snippets on one social issue (without any significant investigation into the contradictions in that society).
Even if the anti-feudal revolution thundering out of the Himalayas, overthrowing king and daring to challenge Indian expansionism, liberating girls and women in countless villages…. even if that movement had some approaches and views on sexuality (and other social matters) that don’t jibe with ours (and which are objectively “wrong”)… does that mean that their whole “new revolutionary model” may be fucked?
An example: Much more is known on the Maoists’ approach to alcohol, which was banned in their base areas. They practice a form of prohibitionism that is obviously odd to us (to our culture and our history — where prohibitionism has been associated with the very conservative forces). I think we can note the differences in approach (between them, and what we would do) without bringing their “new revolutionary model” into question (and also without tailing them, or pretending we think their approach is just fine!)
Now, of course, I wouldn’t compare Gary’s piece to the long run of other commentary that finds the negotiations “worrisome,” or the decision to enter the CA elections “worrisome.”
But this constant tone of judgemental “worry” around these revolutionaries does make a cautionary point necessary (over and over) that drawing sweeping verdicts from a few statements (oozing out to use from the mainstream press), or even repeating them (with presumed credibility because that’s all we have to go on) is a “worrisome” method. And though it appears to be a “critical” method, it is really not that rooted in a deep and materialist analysis.
One person said to me, “Well if I can’t make a judgement based on the statements and quotes that i find in the media, what am i supposed to base my judgements on?”
but the assumption here is that we need to rush to judgment, even if we only have brief bits of data. I think we should study these experiences — critically but with a little reserve of judgment, and even a little humility. We should make verdicts and judgments when we actually can. And we should have a view of learning about the specific dynamics producing specific policies, not simply judge by our own prepackaged beliefs, discoveries and assumptions.
Nando said
I appreciate the comments made by Gary above (just as I was writing and posting similar points).
Jaroslav said
Thanks Gary for the article as well as the clarification comment. The ‘entertainment establishments’ you speak of certainly remind one of the situation in pre-revolutionary China (see below).
Sean, although the CP Philippines has long been supportive of treating & valuing homosexuals as equal human beings, it has nothing to do with religion. The CPP is in fact not atheist in principle, & they allow religious people (even Catholic clergy) to become party members. The party’s constitution, programme, & other basic documents are under revision right now though, some things will surely change, & I hope this is one of them because real communists are atheists.
The Philippines as a society has always been more open to homosexuality than, for example Europe. This, & not any desire for sticking fingers into Church eyes, is the basis for CPP’s correct position on the matter.
The ‘decadence’ issue however is very correct for the ICM taken as a whole, including specifically USSR (& as Gary points out above, only starting in 1933 there). China’s wrongness comes from two sources, though: 1, this inherited wrong orientation from the ICM, & 2, the traditional role of ‘visible’ homosexuality in China. By ‘visible’ I mean the homosexuality which everybody knew about. In China this was homosexual rape by feudal lords of their servants. Certainly there were homosexual relations between average people based on mutual affection, but this was not in the open; so the main thing about homosexuality in China, on the surface anyway, was feudal oppression. That’s not an excuse, just an explanation for where the incorrect idea came from.
redflags said
I am strangely in agreement with Sean here, at least in terms of the underlying aceticism of revolutionary movements. There’s some truth to that, though in my entirely anecdotal experience, where anarchists say “if I can’t dance, I don’t want your revolution” they don’t actually know how to dance and that’s not our fault. Communists on the other hand, tend to be FAR less moralistic, depressive and uptight… but that’s just what I’ve seen… Sometimes we hate the thing we fear inside our own selves, Sean – and confuse that projection with other people. It has been known to happen.
In any case, Cuba’s longtime anti-gay policies were among the most brutal and dehumanizing on earth. Reactionaries and dissidents were routinely called (the spanish equivalent of) “faggot” and homosexuality was tied in classic machismo terms to an effeminate elite. Che and Fidel were celebrated for their conquests of women, and male entitlement was more or less official policy.
Speaking with a close friend who left Cuba as a child, she has memories of people forced to kneel in the crowded street and say they were “fags” after applying for exit permits during the time of the Mariel boatlift. This same friend had a close cousin who became a gay hustler in the 90s during the special period, having sex with Canadian, Mexican and European (Italian) sex toursists. He contracted HIV. So while there was a thawing of sexual regulation by the state, it was also accompanied by the increasing commodification of what could otherwise be intimate relationships.
The Cuban CP engaged in serious self-criticism during that period and no longer tolerates or promotes anti-gay or lesbian violence or discrimination. Despite the thick machismo of the culture, women have reproductive freedom and the abilty to leave relationships even when they have kids. This produces a degree of egalitarianism hard to describe to those who haven’t experienced it. Legal marriage is largely gone in Cuba, and the family structure is much more extended and less controling than what I’ve seen elsewhere.
From what I saw on one extended visit, cross-dressers are plainly visible in the streets of Havana, largely concentrated in the (more or less) arty, middle-class district of Vedado, that butts up against the University of Havana. I spent a few days with a traveling group of clowns, who were all gay and lesbian, called Grupo Cubensi, which is apparently the name of a psychedelic mushroom. They were flaming, and mainly performed for kids. They were popular, quite radical in a kind of anarchish way. They took me to a great rave at a Young Communist League retreat where about 200 people danced and partied for three days in a small bay a few hours out of the city near the old (now nationalized) Bacardi plant.
From discussions, they said physical violence was largely non-existent – but that people still tended to look down on gays or feel shame.
Sexual liberation, in the sense that we are freed from being property or turning each other into reproductive/eroticized property, must be a key feature of any revolution worth the name. Without love matches, and a whole revolution in values – including especially the erotic – we are really not digging into the psychic roots of exploitative power’s reproduction in our lived lives.
That Nepal has recognized a “third” gender is an important legal step that is still unheard of throughout much of the world. It would seem they CPN is coming from behind in their understanding of this, but they are making up for lost time.
I’d also note that the Blue Triangle Society is a George Soros-funded NGO, which has only gotten play specifically for denouncing the Maoists over what by all other accounts are isolated incidents that do not represent the intention or line of the CPN(M). That whole NGO apparatus has been recently shown for the constituency hustlers they are (see UML’s election returns) – and we should also mention that no other party of force in the society has a better record.
———
Perhaps the state just has no business regulating the intimate, sexual behavior of consenting adults. Perhaps persecuting gays (and lesbians) is about enforcing rigid, patriarchal rules on squirmy people who manifest their erotic spirit in ways that just don’t fit in that box. Perhaps shame and repression are essential tools for an alienated state to cow people into submission. And perhaps we should have no part of that.
The right to love is a first principle.
Sean S. said
Sometimes we hate the thing we fear inside our own selves, Sean – and confuse that projection with other people. It has been known to happen.
Jesus fucking christ. Can’t you make a response without making boorish ad-homenim attacks? I was just putting my views out there, which evidently, under your psycho babble views, is some sort of projection. No, thanks, my sex life is great.
Sean S. said
The ‘decadence’ issue however is very correct for the ICM taken as a whole,
That’s mostly what I was arguing for. You can see it in the influence of socialist realism, and its focus on the national family, the rejection of modernist and abstract, and its building of the image of the ideal worker. You can also see it in the architecture of the era under Stalin, focusing often on a kind of modern and gaudy update of traditional Russian architecture.
Which was disappointing. I have always been a big fan of constructivist architecture, and I especially liked alot of the plans made for communal housing, which would feature large common areas with individually assigned rooms, irrespective of gender and family, thus leading to the collective raising of children, as opposed to the individual family. Theres actually a fantastic show going on in LA if anyone lives there Cosmic Communist Construction Photographs
Certainly there were homosexual relations between average people based on mutual affection, but this was not in the open; so the main thing about homosexuality in China, on the surface anyway, was feudal oppression. That’s not an excuse, just an explanation for where the incorrect idea came from.
Thats how things went in Japan as well, though slightly different; Japanese shogun nobility despised women, and generally revered homosexual sex as “pure” as opposed to the “debasement” that was heterosexual sex. So when the Meiji restoration came, and the push for a new bourgeoisie culture was needed, the overt homosexuality of the Tokugawa era was generally thrown out, though the superiority of men was still in place. In the collapse of the Imperial system after the war, homosexuality still was tainted with its association with the Shogun and militarism in general, so it still found itself in an awkward position.
Since then, I can’t say much has changed. Being to Tokyo’s various red-light districts, it certainly is available, but its not accepted publicly, or in any overt way, much like most “Deviations” from accepted mores that are allowed to be broken in only specific, secretive ways.
saoirse said
dont know really where to begin here but i would like to throw out two things. The problem is what gets defined as decadence dovetails with patriarchy and homophobia.
Look at the religious rights attacks on the GL movement during the 80s. The most enduring image being flamboyant behavoir during SF pride. Images of very macho men juxaposed with images of effeminate men. Gay men in drag and the occasion denim and leather. All things you’ll find a blue collar judas priest show during the same time period but in the formers context it becomes the embodiment of the decline of western civilization.
That the RCP linked homosexuality with bourgeois decadence as did/do many communist is to, often, reign in the unbridaled expressions of gayness when given a small bit of space in an otherwise repressive society.
Two I think moves to identify a third gender must be understood through the context of that society. And also we need to examine where this move is coming from is it coming from the party or the felt demands of the people. If the former what do the people think of this move?
For example the hijras of india are an india specific development closely referrenced when speaking about 3rd gender people. Western attempts to map the hjira onto US queer culture really make little sense. It would be like mapping intersex people in the US onto the queer scene without recognition of their seperate realities.
some thoughts.
Ulises said
On Jed’s discussion, crossdressers are a regular sight in Latin America. And not just in swanky bourgeois areas, but in rural working class areas. Their gender/sexuality system is different than ours in some senses, but patriarchy and machismo rule even where crossdressing is tolerated. Put it this way, in the bars of rural Mexico women are typically not allowed or, rather, women in some bars are assumed to be working. But to my surprise it wasn’t just the women working. These bars also draw in crossdressers and male prostitutes, and this is all part of the larger system of male privilege. My surprise was compounded by the heavy layers of machismo that permeate these places. In effect, it seemed to me, that there was something of a pitcher/catcher definition of “gay”, and that gay was seen mainly as being in the subordinate gender, not as an identity or a lifestyle. It reminded me more of some of the conceptions described in Gay New York by George Chauncey. I think this changes once you move into more cosmopolitan and urban settings, but the truth is that the concept of gay which is prevalent in the United States (but which is also very diverse in different situations), and many other first world countries, is an outgrowth of movements in the 70’s and 80’s not something that has always existed or which is universal. And it is not something that spontaneously rises out of the experience of same sex relations.
And in this respect there is a problem of not only in moving from general to particular in analysis, but in moving from particular to particular, that is, the assumption that gender and sexuality systems in any particular place are the same as that in the U.S., or should be. As Gary points out, there are some real particularities to this gender question in Nepal, and South Asia in general, where it is sometimes understood as being third-sex. This is a different conception than the one that prevails in the U.S.
While homosexuality is a normal aspect of human sexuality, the prevalent model of homosexuality as an identity in the U.S. is limiting, in my opinion, and not something to be universalized. On the other hand, there is no doubt that the movements of the 70’s and 80’s that brought the gay identity out of the closet have had a positive effect in opening up the space for people to simply be sexual, and not be categorically defined by that. But I think it’s going to take a negation of the negation to get to a more liberated sexuality. I think we have a very long way to go in our own society.
To put it in another way, I think humanity is in transition over these issues. The persecution of “deviant” sexualities around the world, but particularly in the West, gave rise to a distinct community of people organized around their shared experience of repression, and of their shared sexuality. Their fight for the right to exist developed alongside a deepening sense of identity, but within the overall system of a binary gender model, which was then mirrored with a binary sexuality model. At this point these binaries are not working socially, the explosion of variances in the LGBT alphabet (LGBT2Q, LGBTQ, LGBTQQ, LBGTQA, etc.), the recent news of a female to male transsexual getting pregnant, the experimentation in polyandry and other relationship forms, all of this stuff is making a mockery of the gay/straight binary and its mirror reflection in the male/female dichotomy. [As an aside, I think there is something significant in the recent focus on polygamists, though I'm not sure in what particular way it relates to these larger issues of human sexuality and reproduction] A different way of looking at human sexuality and gender is called for, and I see the basis for it in the work of scientists like Kinsey, and Anne Fausto-Sterling, and in certain aspects or strains of Queer Theory. I don’t think the revolutionary perspective should be one of simply upholding the most advanced popular thinking on the issues of gender and sexuality, but should seek to push further to a point where people are truly free to experience the full range of sexual possibilities without also taking on a series of inherited categories and divisions amongst themselves on the basis of who they love or have sex with.
Nando said
I need to think over many points here before responding. So just a few minor things in passing:
* Equating the International communist movement with the stalin era in the Soviet Union is reductionism, and inaccurate. Just because they did it there (socialist realism etc.) doesn’t mean that is the norm since then or elsewhere among communists. The experience varies. Defining the International communist movement as “stalinist” — and then thinking you have critiqued the whole by refering to the Stalin era is an avoidance of analysis.
* I think that we need to get a sense of a genuine communist view of sexuality in general. I think that the approach to gay people and same sex relations is often colored by the overall approach to sexuality (and toward experimentation and non-normative behavior generally).
In china it was not just “visible homosexuality” that was at issue, but visible expressions of sexuality altogether — down to handholding in public. And it is worth asking “how much is this an extension/evolution of one country’s culture under new more revolutionary conditions, and how much is it a view among communists toward these matters that arises from a common communist theory?”
In general I assume that the Chinese Maoist approaches to sexuality were rather Chinese (and tied to the emerging radical currents emerging from China, in regard to issues like love marriages, fidelity and privacy).
It is not just on homosexuality that we will find ourselves challenged if we “zoom in” on the approaches of previous socialist societies, or in the views of contemporary communist movements.
Cuba seems to be a rather extreme example, and its rather stark machismo flows, i suspect, from the very fact that the Castro July 26th movement’s approach to women and sexuality was NOT particularly radical, and NOT much of a critical rupture with the views of the society it imerged from.
Maoism represented, in general, a much more radical break — i believe — in the second class status of women in china. And today, in the world as a whole, the ruptures made around women’s status are being pressed to the fore by rapidly changing objective conditions.
There is an objectively common world process. The situation of women and the web of intimate relations are affected by the tightening of global integrations (culture, mass migrations, sex trade, mutual influencing of countries, and more.)
The actual social relations of intimacy (on planet earth today) are intolerable and the source of endless misery and also endless debate among people. We need to enter into that pretty fearlessly, with a sense of ending (really ending) the crap women endure, of challenging layers of assumption, promoting radical change and experimentation in intimate relations, and speaking about these things in a way that doesn’t concede much to the weight of tradition and illusion.
And in that framework, I think our movement should be shocking — and attractive because of the content of that shock. Must be shocking — to every kid, teenage girl, single mother, and progressive person of any gender. I think that we should have something very sharp and very explosive to say about matters of sexuality — about the relations of objectification and isolation, about the pain of how things are, about the potential for something much different and better.
And if we aren’t shocking and mind-blowing in such ways, then (on some level) we are not coming to grips with the conditions and potential. This means something more than advocating tolerance or even equality.
saoirse said
thanks for writing Ulises. I was just going to add some comments regarding the negation of the negation you speak about. I was going to cite Larry Kramer’s 1978 Faggot for its exploration of the limits of the sexual revolution in 1970s gay male culture.
“In effect, it seemed to me, that there was something of a pitcher/catcher definition of “gay”, and that gay was seen mainly as being in the subordinate gender, not as an identity or a lifestyle.” This is worth examining further. A possibly parallel form of gender subordination and oppression exist in the “tranny chaser” scenes in most US urban cities.
As to your comment, ” the prevalent model of homosexuality as an identity in the U.S. is limiting, in my opinion, and not something to be universalized.” what is the model you are speaking of?
There are certain things I like about gay male culture and there are things I dont like. To the extent I get to comment on these things which is marginal at best I usually find it useful to follow a version of “unity-struggle-unity.”
Nando said
I think we need to dig into Ulises point on the conditional character of the very concept “homosexual.” One weakness of the RCP’s work is that it seems to accept this as a category (uncritically, and as if the concept is just a give, rather than what it really is: a highly specific and loaded way of looking at sexuality that has its own history.)
Throughout much of western history, the “pitcher” was seen as virile male, and the “catcher” was seen as the effeminate (and feminized) male. This is still true of same gender sexuality in many male-only situations (prison, military, merchant marine, boys schools etc.) where the “top” is seen as male and the “bottom” is seen as feminized.
The invention of “homosexual” as a category (embracing both “pitcher and catcher”) is relatively modern (in late 19th century) and represented a break from the past. It is not a given at all.
And there are alternative views (as Ulises points out) including the widespread view of “third sex.”
Even the idea that people “are” something — gay, straight, bi — is confining, and ignores the complexity of how people experiment and relate (over their lives, and in different situations).
In fact, human sexuality and attractions come in a complex spectrum of patterns — and the concept “homosexual” covers a very diverse set of relationships, attractions and orientations that have some structural similarity (i.e. same gender sexual relations) but that on examination seem much more different than the term implies.
In my experience, communist theory rarely explores or discusses desire (or any other psychological phenomena) — and often (though obviously not exclusively) simple turns such things into “ideology” in a reductionist way. Scientific inquiries into personality development, desire, emotional states, unconscious motivations, psychological underpinnings of worldviews, etc. are often a closed book (or seen as, somehow, inherently “petty bourgeois” in character.) far too often, I have seen communists assume that the brain only works on the level of conscious ideas, and that the adherence to various ideas is essentially or simply a matter of choice and reason alone.
In fact, there is no reason that the functioning (or “disfunctions”) of the human mind (both collectively and individually) should be considered outside the exploration of science, and should be removed from the analysis of communists.
Mike S. said
Here’s a genuinely curious question, not an attempt to be snarky or score points: did conversations like this one (which I’m generally impressed by) happen within the orbit of the RCP? If not, was it a direct encounter with queer theory and/or activism that led people to the thinking that is expressed in the comments here? I ask because the tone and content of this discussion thread is just about the exact opposite of my own knee-jerk assumptions about discussions of sexuality, and especially homosexuality, within the RCP milieu. Were my assumptions wrong?
Mike E said
I think there were different views contending within the RCP… and people here are expressing a line different than the RCP’s line (both before and after the leadership’s change on homosexuality). On my part, I studied such questions, just like I independently studied many questions as an editor of Revolution newspaper, including studying new theories developing around sexuality. When I wrote on the Hardwick supreme court decision on sodomy (in the 1980s) i undertook my first major study of homosexuality in general (especially the questions of history and legality).
And during the AIDs crisis of the 1980s, there was a great deal of critical struggle over the RCP’s line on homosexuality — largely between the organization and its youth periphery which (in my experience) pretty universally thought the RCP’s line on gay sexuality was wrong (and even reactionary).
There was some open discussion in the RCP around homosexuality as part of the creation of its new Draft Programme — but that door was rather quickly and harshly slammed shut (as is discussed in the section “open and shut discussion” in the 9 Letters.)
zerohour said
Mike S. -
Although not everyone here was in the RCP, or even a communist, many of us worked with them. If they provided the proper atmosphere for theoretical struggle and development, I’m sure these are the kind of discussions they could be having, but in my experience as a “fellow traveler” for many years, I can confirm that I never heard any discussions of sexuality on this level with individual supporters or in the Revolution Books where I live.
saoirse said
I was aware of some line diff. in and around the rcp over “homosexuality,” although I dont remember ever actually engaging open memeber of the party.
I participated in a kiss-in at revolution books during the largely anarchist propelled stonewall now actions during June of 94 (a very good action) and worked closely with the rcp through refuse and resist and the october 22nd coalition. I also was around the party during mumia work and student organizing in the 1990s.
saoirse said
More comments in reference to Mike S. post.
I think there was a vetting process whereby if you were interested in revolutionary politics and you were gay or lesbian in the 90s you were likely drawn into the milieu of anarchist scene or draw to Workers World Party and to a lesser extent to the ISO post-1995.
The RCP’s line flatout alienating many and led to many more dismissing them outright. Most people I knew didnt know the official line but would say publicly the RCP is homophobic.
Others like myself felt the most of the left was homophobic while the RCP just had an open line about it. Therefore as queers (and leftists) we worked in and around the left on the issues that mattered to us without very high expectations.
redFlags said
Here’s a genuinely curious question, not an attempt to be snarky or score points: did conversations like this one (which I’m generally impressed by) happen within the orbit of the RCP?
Yes, in my experience there was lots of in depth, engaged discussion on these matters. Opposition to the anti-gay line was widespread among people in the RCYB, and the youth group had no ban on LGBT participation. Though, it’s worth mentioning that the most vehement opposition to the anti-gay line (again, in my experience) was from heterosexuals, not LGBT folks who mostly avoided the organization as noted by Saoirse above.
The periphery of the RCP has always been a lively place, though the bifurcation of the organization (solid core of acolytes/elastic periphery of organizers, artists and activists) kept such discussions from playing any democratic, transformative role in that profoundly centralist organization.
There were a serious of meeting between RCYB members and the RCP leadership in the late 1980s over sexuality, which I participated in to no satisfaction. They were “wrangling” sessions where we were supposed to be convinced of the rightness of the position but mostly ended up even more disgusted. The gist was that the erotic is bad. That sex is bad, and male chauvinsist – and the most important thing was to stifle sexuality in the name of combatting women’s oppression. Some may say I’m exagerating… but I really don’t think so.
Flirting, hooking up, frank talk of sexuality… all that was frowned on by leadership and treated as suspect.
As a good friend of mine said, paraphrasing Wilhelm Reich, “if you can tell people how to fuck, you can make them do anything.” I think that pretty much sums up the RCP’s line on sex. It is something uncontrollable, and in the erotic is human force that can’t help breaking laws.
However… when people started “towing the line” on non-heterosexuality, that was one of the main sign people had become members. The other sign was not smoking marijuana. There’s a non-economist, non-pragmatic line to win the youth: fucking is nothing to be celebrated and weed is bad.
For years, upholding a reactionary, psuedo-materialist line of sexual repression was treated as a badge of integrity. This was during the years when gay liberation came out of the closet and changed our whole culture. Another shameful episode.
We should never build a movement where doing the wrong thing is rewarded and help up as an example of commitment. Who needs that?
redFlags said
the end should read:
For years, upholding a reactionary, psuedo-materialist line of sexual repression was treated as a badge of integrity. This was during the years when gay liberation came out of the closet and changed our whole culture. Being among the last anti-gay stalwarts in the North American left was a shameful episode in the RCP’s history.
redFlags said
All this said, I don’t think these “reports” from Nepal, now from over a year ago, are what they are about as a party or force in Nepal. I am sure that they have many of the values inhereted from their society, just as we do.
There is no pattern of abuse, and women’s liberation has been a defining characteristic of their whole movement. I think Leupp’s article was important in saying that we shouldn’t cover up or deny where there are problems, and that we should reach out and struggle with comrades who may actually have backwards attitudes on sexuality and sexual minorities.
Does anyone want to help work on a short paper about sexual liberation for the ICM?
Ulises said
Saoirse writes:
“As to your comment, ” the prevalent model of homosexuality as an identity in the U.S. is limiting, in my opinion, and not something to be universalized.” what is the model you are speaking of?”
The model I was criticizing is one in which sexuality=identity in a crude and binary form. I mean that for many in this society there is either straight or gay, and these categories define how you exist socially. Who hasn’t seen the overt concern over someone’s private matters expressed when confronting ambiguous sexuality, as in “do you think this or that person is gay?” The broadening out of this into “queer” as some understand it has simply widened the categories into straight and “not-straight”, or normal and abnormal. As Mike E puts it, “Even the idea that people “are” something — gay, straight, bi — is confining, and ignores the complexity of how people experiment and relate (over their lives, and in different situations). In fact, human sexuality and attractions come in a complex spectrum of patterns — and the concept “homosexual” covers a very diverse set of relationships, attractions and orientations that have some structural similarity (i.e. same gender sexual relations) but that on examination seem much more different than the term implies.”
If I had to make a basic division in sexual matters, one that I think can be the basis for a more liberating sexuality, it would be between human kindness, love and intimacy, and a sexuality of domination, humiliation and cruelty. And I think this can get us back to this issue of “decadence” and bourgeois decadence in particular. I think the hallmark of normalized (gay or straight) sexual relations in our bourgeois society are their basis in power relations that are built into the gender dichotomy of passive and active genders. True bourgeois decadence in the realm of sexuality is the reification of this power dynamic as expressed by a sexuality of domination, cruelty and humiliation. It is an extreme expression of this underlying dynamic.
I recommend seeing Pasolini’s film Salo: 100 Days of Sodom (based on the book by Sade). [Pasolini was an openly gay and communist film director and poet from Italy] It is a very powerful film delving into the implications of power and fascism on human sexuality, and it gives a clear example of what I would call, without any scare quotes, bourgeois sexual decadence. And though it is extremely unorthodox, I believe it is the closest thing that I have seen to an expression of a communist sexuality, not in what it mainly depicts, but in its clear polemicizing against what it depicts, and in the brief moments of transgressive sexual relations developed within the overall fascist rule. It is, I think, one of the most ethical films on issues of sexuality that has ever been made. I have never seen anything like it.
On the issue of level of debate and discussion over these matters in the RCP. My brief experience was that the changing of the line against homosexuality did open up the stage for this discussion. I and others I knew did discuss the issue, and I think our discussions were often held at a relatively high level. On the other hand, where the change in policy by the RCP created this room for the discussion, and in fact was so open ended in its own explanation of the issue that it implicitly called forth the discussion, there was never any organized attempt post 2003, that I know of, to grapple with this issue deeply and collectively. Discussions developed around the more central political work and indoctrination, and the question of sexuality was more or less left for people to figure out on their own, though there was an ever present sense of conservatism with respect to sexuality.
TellNoLies said
This is a great discussion. I just wanted to take issue with Red Flags casual dismissal of the Blue Diamond Society (not the Blue Triangle). This is, as far as I can tell, an organization that has courageously challenged the dominant and oppressive sexual morality in Nepal. If they get money from Soros all that indicates to me is the failure of otherwise better forces to step up on this question. This is one of the most important reasons for opposing the monolithic party-state model of 20th century socialist revolutions, the way it inevitably holds back certain sorts of challenges to the way things are. I look forward to the day when the Nepali Maoists unequivocally take up the demands ofthe Blue Diamond Society. Until then criticizing them for taking money from where they can is objectively a call for them to be silent.
Iris said
Redflags–I was a Women’s Studies major until recently. Email me about writing the paper–it’s about time!
gangbox said
“The gist was that the erotic is bad. That sex is bad, and male chauvinsist – and the most important thing was to stifle sexuality in the name of combatting women’s oppression.”
RedFlags,
Speaking as someone who only recently came into the RCP’s orbit, I can tell you, the Party still views sexuality pretty much the same way – in particular, male sexuality (and especially the sexuality of proletarian men, straight or gay).
nhorning said
I looked up some things about this a while ago while in Nepal. There was a rash of reports in the mainstream press about the CPN(M) abusing gays, and they had quotes from Hisilla Yami constantly saying it was not Maoist policy. I saw a post from the Nepal Blue diamond society somewhere, and they said they were abused by people claiming to be Maoists. But when they contacted the Maoists about it, they came and investigated, and convinced them that those involved were not actually Maoists. Follow up stories like that never get reported of course.
In south Asia as a whole GLB are highly discriminated against. It is actually very weird to be in a society like that. The upshot is that it is so unacceptable to be gay that homophobia as we know it in the west is nonexistent. Men walk down the street holding hands, hug each other from the back, sit on each others laps, put their and on each others knee, etc. Those things aren’t considered gay because you simply CAN’T BE gay. Of course I don’t think this really gets rid of it, and there is a whole underground scene etc.
nhorning said
this should add some perspective..
http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/south-asia/anti-gay-bias-evicts-dying-aids-patients-in-nepal_10029692.html
http://gayswithoutborders.wordpress.com/2008/04/14/nepal-urgent-blue-diamond-society-needs-your-support-the-hivaids-hospice-shut-down-in-kathmandu/
Questioning said
Ulises says:
“If I had to make a basic division in sexual matters, one that I think can be the basis for a more liberating sexuality, it would be between human kindness, love and intimacy, and a sexuality of domination, humiliation and cruelty.”
I think agree in general but want to raise what ought (among people who pay attention to issues of sexuality) be an obvious point.
Among the vast range of sexual fetishes that prevail in this society (I don’t want to say ALL societies, because sexualities are actually specifically constructed and differ greatly between societies, reflecting different material conditions)there are those that center on domination and humiliation.
There are people whose sexual response mechanisms (for whatever reasons) are triggered by inflicting or receiving some form of humiliation. Or asserting or submitting to some type of domination. One can say, “That’s sick. Pathological. Something to be overcome under socialism.” But maybe this level of thinking is the same as that which led psychologists in the past to label homosexuality as a sickness.
What do you say to the man or women who experiences orgasm while being spanked, for example? “No, comrade, that’s wrong, don’t get off that way, we’ll help reeducate you”? What do you to people into leather, bondage, sado-masochism, and other widespread fetishes? “We as dialectical materialists understand why you have these problems, and since were ’scientists’ knowledgeable about sex we’re here to liberate your sexuality?”
Sexual desire, in its innumerable forms, often involving role-play and theatrics, ought to be the subject of dispassionate materialist analysis. Shouldn’t the communist movement, having gotten so much so wrong so long, should give some serious thought about what “liberating sexuality” means, without imposing boundaries, even those requiring “love and intimacy”?
Sam said
I don’t think we can look at sexuality simply as the act of sex. It’s more about the character of the relationship, and how the couple relates to each other. Things like sadomasachism sometimes never leave the bedroom. I think there can also be relationships where one person is obviously more dominant, but the couple still respects each other mutually.
What are everyones thoughts on issues such as the various flavors of codependance?
saoirse said
Questioning- you have led the discussion to a logical point. I think you touch on many issues here. I want to clarify for purposes of our discussion a few things.
One is BDSM which stands for Bondage and Discipline, Domination and Submission and Sadism and Masochism. Two is sexual fetishes. Three is fantasy and role playing. All of these things can become and are more mutable in real life but there are valuable distinctions to be made if were are going to discuss there particulars.
As a sex educator, a longtime participant in the bdsm scene, a dyke and a communist, I see most communist, certainly most modern communists as having little to say on these matters that gets beyond Kraft-ebbings, freud and Engels.
The 80s “sex wars” debates within US based feminist organizations over many of these issues are useful places to begin looking more closely at these issues.
One additional thing distinction it might be worthwhile to make is between sexual orientation, gender identity, and sexual practices.
This thread largely began by discussing Lesbian and Gay men in Nepal. I think the disgressions and shifts to other issues has been natural and very good.
But talking about bdsm in the context of speaking about gay and lesbians rights including the right to love has often obsured both the rights of queer people. And the fact that the vast vast majority of bdsm particioners are straight and heterosexual.
My own two cents. If its consensual between adults its none of the party’s business.
saoirse said
Ulises I want to return to your post (#24) and your offering of the Salo as ” a film delving into the implications of power and fascism on human sexuality…”
Now I confess I have never seen this film a leftist talking about movies they have never seen reminds me of tipper gore ranking about slayer and Michael Medved whining about hostel while both of them are ignorant of the actual pieces of art they are talking about.
That said, I know of Salo, every hardcore horror flick and film nerd has heard about it as one of the disturbing and gross films ever made, just take a gander on amazon.com and see what films its linked to cannibal holocaust and i spit on your grave often pop up amongst fans of the film.
which isnt my point, per se, but I do want to put the film in perspective for a purpose. you see for me when I speak of bourgeois decadence I think see small moments that exist in our culture every day. daily humilations like loneliness, depression, loveless lives, empty careers, uninspired marriages, sex driven by drugs and alcohol, prostitution where noone has choice or feels there are non-left.
The depictions of bourgeois decadence in films like salo and say gore vidal’s caligula are undenialable powerful. they hammer home the point of a society cancer’s cruelty. To offer another film I think Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam does a good job of illustrating the weaknesses and failings of sexual liberation of the 70s. Watching working class men re-assert their patriarchial rights within the culture of free love and free sex at plato’s retreat and looking at the self-destructiveness of studio 54 scene illustrates some of the walls our culture hit during this period.
But again those walls that we hit arent all bad. having worked as a sex educator for many years and dialoguing with women and men about such things as fantasy, role play and bdsm, sometimes its useful to fail at something new rather than never having tasted the forbidden fruit.
zerohour said
“hen I speak of bourgeois decadence I think see small moments that exist in our culture every day. daily humilations like loneliness, depression, loveless lives, empty careers, uninspired marriages, sex driven by drugs and alcohol, prostitution where noone has choice or feels there are non-left.”
I saw Salo years ago and I have to disagree with Ulises here. I think the sadism in the movie is highly affecting because it is very low-tech and visceral in contrast to something like Saw, which involves intricate contraptions. This use of technology, with the added element of the brilliant criminal, creates a strange distancing effect whereby one can wince at the violence while reveling in its “cleverness.” With Salo it’s all wincing.
Unlike modern horror movies, where the violence itself seems to rely on sexual tension, with the act constituting a powerful release, in Salo, all the sadistic power games are explicitly sexual. Where I disagree with Ulises is that, because of it’s extremity, Salo posits bourgeois norms as an acceptable, even desirable limit, r3egardless of Pasolini’s own politics. By setting the line so far out, almost everything short of it seems reasonable. Similar to a process whereby people convince themselves that they are expressing racism as long as they do not transgress certain limits: use of explicit racial language, dressing in white sheets and burning crosses on people’s lawns.
Saoirse’s above comment is very much on point. Oppressions are regenerated through their “everydayness” which can accumulate towards extreme expressions, but after that dies down, there’s always tomorrow and the next day.
ulises276/2 said
Questioning:
I think there should be socially proscribed limits to appropriate sexuality, just as there are in all societies. The question is what are those limits going to be, and how would they be regulated. I think they should be regulated socially, in the same way that sexuality is mainly regulated today. But I don’t see the repression of homosexuality as in any way on the same level as a general social proscription on a sexuality of domination and cruelty. In other words, I think the latter is correct and the former very incorrect, and I don’t see them as equivalent. I also don’t know enough about BDSM to say to what extent there is a distinction between playing out domination and humiliation, and to what extent this playing out is in fact simply domination and humiliation.
Just because people get wired into a particular form of sexuality doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be viewed negatively. All sexualities develop along similar accidental lines, and are not simple conscious choices, but the fact that this relates to pedophiles doesn’t then mean that society shouldn’t have a proscription on pedophilia. I’m not saying that BDSM is the same as pedophilia, there are clear differences between the actions of consenting adults and pedophilia. But my point here is that social limits on sexuality are a necessary part of the landscape, we cannot have an anything goes attitude, even if this doesn’t mean we are knocking on bedroom doors to hunt down deviance. I also don’t believe that such social limits are immutable and for all time, as our current period shows.
So again, where are the limits? I think consent as the benchmark is an overly simplistic answer, as consent itself is very problematic. For instance my upstairs neighbor abuses his girlfriend, sometimes she’s telling him how much she loves him as it’s happening. When the police show up she stands by her man. Does she consent? The extent to which this kind of problem carries over into the bedroom is why I don’t think consent is a fully satisfactory line to draw in matters of sexuality. And I do believe that a relationship like the one I reference is pathological. Moreover, it can be deadly.
In this respect the BDSM issue is a canard, as most humiliation and cruelty in human sexual relations does not happen when people put on leather, but is built into social and sexual relations on a much deeper and harder to uncover level. In general I don’t think that the playing out of humiliation and domination is something that should be encouraged by communists, in the bedroom or otherwise. That people will continue to do it, and that there are places where the line on what is humiliation and domination blurs, should not then mean that anything goes in terms of the way in which society views sexuality at large.
Also, I question to what extent we should have this attitude that the State has no role to play here. At least in our current context we can take the example of the recent raid on the polygamists in Texas. The State is set to put over 400 children into foster care (a potentially miserable experience that I myself have shared), and the question is whether this is correct or not. I’m not sure. The kind of abuse said to have occurred in that sect requires drastic action to end it, but State intervention of this kind simply creates new problems for these kids. Or to use my prior example of domestic abuse, I would go up there myself and stop them, if I could. I have confronted my neighbor on the issue before, but ultimately, while surrounded by an entire neighborhood which pretends it’s not happening, where we are all atomized and waiting for someone else to do something, the intervention of the police is the best you are going to get.
I would also recall the ways in which the Communist Party led in creating women’s organizations in places like China and Russia to fight against domestic abuse. There is a particular story in Fanshen (I believe) in which such a women’s organization provides mob justice against an abusive husband. I don’t think that was wrong, and I think that such things are in fact the business of communists. I think it is also a different kind of State intervention, to the extent that the Party and the State are the same thing, which is now a contested idea. It is different than direct police intervention, it is the community policing themselves, and yet it wouldn’t have happened without the CP helping to organize people.
So in general I don’t think I have any easy answers to a lot of these issues, but I’m definitely interested in developing new ways of thinking about them, and in doing so I don’t think that we should accept “consent” and “no state intervention” without interrogation. In fact, this would simply be to take sides with liberals in the current culture wars. It would not be moving us towards a conception of a revolution in sexual relations. I think we can set the bar higher, and trying to think through and practice a sexuality of intimacy and kindness is a good place to start.
redFlags said
One of the most enduring, if misunderstood, insights of the 1960s was that the “personal is political”, and… by extension that we don’t simply need to “liberate” our already existing desires, that “desire” itself is not the issue and is itself something we shouldn’t approach as a simple fact.
Power, domination and male right – including women’s active participation in their own socially subordinate roles – are not simply grist for puritanical judgment. They are plain facts. Dworkin’s observation that liberal right was the codification of already existing social hierarchies is to the point, if her solutions were outlandish. Not seeing a way to get beyond male domination in heterosexual relationships, she early on advocated the identity of sex (as it exists, in a world defined by patriarchy) with the act of male domination and ended up in a surreal, widely unpopular position of female “nationalism” or separatism. The idea of men and women struggling for and building egalitarian, mutual relations was impossible under the rigid categorical terms she set as the way of it.
I don’t think we want to go there, and there’s a way that this actually dovetails with explicitly reactionary social pressures to regulate and surpress sex. It feeds into the shame economy, where men view their own “beast” nature as a “sin” or in the secular world of the left as “sexist” and women feel the need to choose between a mercenary hyper-sexuality or to de-sexualize themselves in order to have personhood and not be reduced to sexual objects.
This shows the limitations of liberal notions of sexual liberty, the exhaustion of our culture really, that on their own terms leave us veering between myopic liberatarianism and repressive, regressive notions of sex itself as the problem.
Let me throw out what may be a provocative idea: I don’t think political parties really have any business telling people how to fuck, beyond regulating commercial transactions. Pornography and prostitution have nothing to do with liberty, as they are fundamentally about the commodification of women as a group, and are as raw as it gets when it comes to commodity fetishism… where the person is literally reduced to the fetish of sex (reading here as “power”). Nobody has the right to buy and sell another person, and there is something wrong when liberation-minded people uphold commodity relations as the definition of liberty.
But… beyond struggling against the socialization of patriarchy, when it comes to the desires and wants of people – how can anyone see a political party or state regulating consenusal behavior in a way that isn’t far, far worse than anything two consenting people do with each other?
Could not fetishistic behavior be viewed as a form of sexual harm reduction, where power relations are made explicit, fetishized, negotiated and kept theatrical rather than simply actual? Is not the rise of BDSM sexual culture directly related to how egalitarian relationships have already become? This is not some simple “male right” – but an erotic negotiation between consenting people? Hardly the selling of children, feudal marriage or even the dull monotony of male imposition/female acquiesence.
What is more “dominating”? A couple that likes to whatever you think is most degrading… or having the state use people’s desires to jail, persecute, humiliate or otherwise regulate consensual, intimate and non-commercial activity?
Who said sex must simply be kind and loving? Since when? And why? Is not love an activity elastic enough to handle more than some missionary position parody? Are not people allowed to engage in a variety of erotic creation beyond simply mimicing reproductive sex we no longer have for the most part?
The more we get away from sexual repression/fixation – the more people will actually have sex instead of fetishizing it and talking about it all the goddamn time.
When sex is separated from reproduction, as it largely is in our culture – that is where the “perversion” begins. Just like cooking food changes its character, and people end up producing taste sensations unimaginable to those without fire – so too is the sexual future “queer” whether it’s “gay” or not.
Mike E said
[note this comment has been reposted as its own thread]
ulises276/2 said
I think Salo is very didactic and polemical. I really don’t think that it glorifies or encourages the kind of sadism that it displays, rather I think that it is an exposition of the underlying dynamics of bourgeois sexuality and power structures, and that it has to use extremity and a distanced matter-of-fact view, in order to hammer the point home more clearly. I think it is accurate. And I think it is one of the only things I’ve ever seen that can be called anti-porn. It is radically not erotic. It is radically not an example of the commodification of sex.
Maybe you could be more explicit about what in Salo reinforces bourgeois norms, Zerohour. For me, Salo unveils bourgeois norms for the first time. It is an indictment, explicitly, not only of fascism and excess, but of the commodification of sex in our own age. And by explicit, I mean this was Pasolini’s stated objective. The fact that one winces through a viewing of Salo, is entirely the point. And the question is implicitly asked, how can you not wince at the society that recreates Salo a hundred times over exactly in those everyday experiences.
Of course, as a work of art it is open to MANY interpretations. I’m just arguing for one in particular. As for comparisons to other “shock films” or gore fest flicks, I think that is how people trained in our contemporary society are going to view Salo. It is shocking, but shock film has just recently hit the mainstream, and for those who come at Salo from that perspective it will be logical to lump it in with that genre. But I think that the movie only really makes sense from a communist perspective, and from the particular perspective of Italian communism and then Pasolini’s own particular ideas regarding sex and sexuality. In other words, you can watch the film and just see the shocking aspects, or you can watch it as a polemic against fascism and capitalism and see why the shocking elements are there.
Iris said
In terms of particular sexual fetishes of degradation and humiliation (of which there are many), I always thought of it in this way: these things occur in in a social context, and bear analysis–from the people involved in them too. And these fetishes seem to require adults seeking one another out, and may exemplify an unusually high level of consent, though I may be wrong.
I think there is scientific evidence that when the brain develops a hard-wire (or least a powerful expectation of reward–orgasm–for certain stimuli–violence? leather? frosting?) for something, you can’t really switch it off. Does a culture that eroticizes violence hardwire people for oppressive sexual relations? Probably–can they be turned off, or reasoned away in a person’s lifetime? Probably not. I think it is important not to transfer an aura of ’sinfulness’ to adult sexual behavior. I guess I have always linked, in my studies of gender, the minimizing of gender (or promotion of androgyny) and liberation from oppressive sexual interactions.
The increasing liberation of women, the breakdown of human isolation and atomization, the separation of reproduction from sex, the de-emphasis of polarized genders and hetero-normativity, and the dismantling of commodification of the body–I sort of assume, maybe incorrectly, that as these things happen, what we find culturally arousing or pleasurable will change. So, as the above progressive turns occur, intimate sexual acts will reflect this progression…however: is it necessary to make intense forays into ‘the bedroom’ to make the above progress in the first place? Why is there ‘a bedroom’ that is so sanctified in our (christian influenced) culture? Is our own cultural view of sex making it seem like an intensely off hands topic in ways it is not in other communities around the world? I ask these questions because I sometimes find myself questioning my own visceral reactionsAnd of course, I don’t think there should be bedroom police.
I may be lacing too many assumptions of progress and not enough of the difficulties of practice here…
Just thinking out loud…
Iris said
the second to last line should read:
“I ask these questions because I sometimes find myself questioning my own visceral reactions to supposed bedroom probes, analysis, etc, because of my own conceptions of privacy in regard to sex, particularly in relation to a certain cultural squeamishness, and also a fear of judgment–a lovely hand me down from Christianity.”
Was that a BA sentence or what! Look at those clauses go!
redFlags said
In the late sixties, there was a (socially shocking) proclamation that female orgasms were not mainly (or solely) vaginal (as freudianism and much conventional wisdom said) — but that the clitoris was a center of female sexual pleasure. It is hard to imagine today (forty years later) how controversial that was, and how much that observation was unknown in society.
Careful Mike, that almost sounds like Reich or Marcuse in its insistence on the quality of orgasm!
Im gay and communist, so what??? said
Whether this is true or not, so what???? As a gay person who supports the historical events unfolding in Nepal, I hardly think the most pressing question right now is how gay and lesbians Nepalese are being treated. In the early stages of the Cuban revolution such attitudes also existed and they were later corrected. I think such “worthwhile reporting” should be viewed for what it is, bourgeois liberal commentary.
Thank you,
I am gay and communist (anonymous)
Jimmy Higgins said
The most commonsensical and materialist approach to thinking about the CPN(M) stance on the question of, let’s say, non-binary sexualities (Nepal has a rather impressive range of practices/groups) that I have seen came in an email Norwegian Maoist Tron Øgrim sent me just before his death. I reprint it here from a longer piece on Tron at Fire on the Mountain.
Here’s what Tron emailed me in response, accompanying the most useful of the articles he had forwarded to Leftist Trainspotters:
I post some material below.
First, here, my thoughts.
I dunno about the Maobadi, but I’d GUESS
a) That the Maobadi has never had this high on their radar (just like every other party in Nepal).
b) So I’d expect that the party would be chock full of traditional and spontaneous prejudice, just like the western commie and socdem movements 30-40 years ago.
I’d also expect that there are milieus IN and AROUND the M, who are totally opposed, modern, secular and influenced by the modern western gay liberation and left movement.
c) It is very easy for western journalists to come there and describe stupid statements – and even brutal acts against gays, which would not surprise me as the big and undisciplined Maobadi movement has hotheads who have been beating up more or less everybody else, except for tourists! – as results of “the party line”
Not taking into account what I guess may be the case -.
+ This is an expression of general social prejudices in Nepal
+ This is NOT a “line” as the Maobadi (I guess) has very LITTLE line on this.)
(Take this story of the two lesbian lovers alleged to have been held in a Maobadi camp. This may be true (or it may be different: These girls may have been “recruited” and just happened to have been lesbians – which is not very nice either. Or something else. However, even if this story IS true, I’d be very surprised if this has been discussed and decided on a high policy level in the CPN(M).)
Of course, I may be wrong on this.
d) I don’t believe in journalism which prettifies “left crimes and errors”. Like Mao said: Soviet farts stink, too!
I do, however, believe in nuanced journalism who try to describe it like it is.
If there’s two sides on this q (or more!) – to get that clear.
AND, very important: WHICH WAY DOES IT GO? Developments?
To the better or worse?
My 50 øre.
All the best -
cto
gangbox said
“Whether this is true or not, so what???? As a gay person who supports the historical events unfolding in Nepal, I hardly think the most pressing question right now is how gay and lesbians Nepalese are being treated.”
Im gay and communist, so what???,
I’m quite sure that LGBT Nepalis would sharply disagree with you on that, cause getting jacked up by the cops (or YCL militia or whatever) and knocked upside the head with a nightstick HURTS, no matter what the supposed ideology of those cops is!!!!!
Mike E said
Gangbox:
You are assuming (once again) that people’s views on events and movements are determined simply and mainly by what might happen to them personally. (It reminds me of the TV news “We’re sure viewers are wondering how that affects them. well, here is the important part….”)
It’s a question of stand and worldoutlook: If you approach everything from self, then verdicts on complex matters are easy, and the views of other people can be quickly pegged ridiculous — after all, the matters are clear “It is all about what’s best for me.” (My “personal” attachment to machismo, my personal unwillingness to adjust sexual norms to the emerging morality and mores of a revolutionary movement, my expectations of whether this or that policy affects me in this or that way.)
Undoubtedly many people have been trained to view politics this way, and many people view the world this way without specific “training” (i.e. spontaneous views are spontaneously the dominant views). And undoubtedly this particular form of narrow “what about me?” approach is PARTICULARLY widespread in the U.S. (where it sometimes has the feel of “is there any other way to view anything?” and where any other view is portrayed as sinister and even “totalitarian” in its threat to self, and selfishness.)
But, in fact the point (and orientation) asserted by “gay and communist” is rather important: You have to look at a revolution from the overall (not simply from the self out) — and from that larger view, this controversy (though significant to pin down) is not the most pressing question around the revolution in Nepal. Clearly be best hope for everyone there (including people determined to challenge the horrific sexual norms of feudalism) is continuing Maoist revolution.
think about the implications of the ongoing “what’s about me?” approach to macro-events:
Because of the inevitably complexity, instability, war and huge risk involved in any real revolution, the “what about me?” logic would lead people to say “not for me” — it would lead people to flee the country (and the struggle) the moment shit hit the fan.
Also let’s not ignore Jimmy Higgin’s point (actually Tron’s point) that there is little evidence the CPNM has any developed position on these matters. the Maoists in Nepal are a very large movement, in a very fragmented feudal country, where a very radical and controversial politics has been fought for, precisely on the cutting edge questions of women’s liberation. What this means for wider gender controversies (including the historical issues of “third sex”) remain to be seen.
Jimmy Higgins said
Just a comment to broaden Tron’s point a bit. In a revolutionary situation (or one of dual power, which one could argue has been the case in Nepal for some years now), all kinds of pre-existing but seemingly “new” contradictions jump up which aren’t necessarily accounted for in the Party Program. Social forces are thrown into motion which have been quiescent or barely visible.
For instance, had the Maobadi, or even traditional bourgeois Nepalese parties for that matter, grasped the scale and depth of the “Madhesi question” (to use old school lingo) and addressed it in a more timely fashion, forces within the Indian ruling class might have had a harder time making inroads in the lowlands and the election results would certainly have looked a bit different.
How the reds handle such contradictions as they suddenly come to the fore is a real test of their fitness to rule. It seems to me, half a world away to be sure, that the CPN(M) has done an impressive job so far.
Jimmy Higgins said
Just a comment to broaden Tron’s point a bit. In a revolutionary situation (or one of dual power, which one could argue has been the case in Nepal for some years now), all kinds of pre-existing but seemingly “new” contradictions jump up which aren’t necessarily accounted for in the Party Program. Social forces are thrown into motion which have been quiescent or barely visible.
For instance, had the Maobadi, or even traditional bourgeois Nepalese parties for that matter, grasped the scale and depth of the “Madhesi question” (to use old school lingo) and addressed it in a more timely fashion, forces within the Indian ruling class might have had a harder time making inroads in the lowlands and the election results would certainly have looked a bit different.
How the reds handle such contradictions as they suddenly come to the fore is a real test of their fitness to rule. It seems to me, half a world away to be sure, that the CPN(M) has done an impressive job so far.
hegemonik said
I think a number of things need to be pointed out here, just for the sake of clarity:
I’m surprised nobody’s mentioned this, but in doing some research on this subject, the pre-Maoist law in Nepal is unequivocally against homosexuality — and all “unnatural” sex acts. The enforcement of such law has been, within the past decade, a matter of whoever happened to be in charge that week.
As others have noted, there’s never really been a set statement of line by the CPN(M) on this question. Heavies of both the military and political end of things have made statements, but nothing to my knowledge.
As such, I would say that the critique/criticism of the CPN(M) is confirmedly not that they’re in the reactionary camp on this question. I would say, however, that the CPN(M) has exhibited a certain lukewarm willingness to “go along to get along” and *that* is how this should be phrased. Not as if the CPN(M) were this sole force bashing gay people, but that as a force that has brought together the dispossessed and marginalized of Nepalese society, the CPN(M) is peculiar in not having attempted to work out a proper line on this.
As Saoirse has pointed out, Nepal is dealing with an altogether different construction of gender and sexuality. I would point to this as showing the necessity of having some cultural relativism — that is, understanding that for Nepal in this area, the forecast says that transgender people (of various stripes, including those who are defined as a third-sex now) are going to have an easier (if it can be called “easy” at all) time than what we conceive of us as gay men.
But while cultural relativism may tell us something about how things go on, I don’t think this excuses a political relativism. Most pointedly: I’m a bit afraid that Western fascination with the relative freedom from mandatory sex-gender expression in South and Southeast Asia tends to cover up how societies there tend to have their own unique forms of patriarchy and homophobia. In Indonesia, for example, MTF transgender people (”waria”) are quite visible (in fact, parties of all stripes save the right-wing Islamists were courting them politically in the 2004 election there). But homosexuality still remains stigmatized, and I don’t even know if FTM transgender people are even recognized in society.
It remains that the role of communists is to lead, and even do so against reactionary tides. Struggle remains the motor of progress. It’s my hope that the CPN(M) will make strides, and will avoid what is sure to be a temptation after their electoral win to settle for the easy path.
Oleg Torbasow said
You are not quite exact here. It could not be the body of the Communist party. It was the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, i.e. state, not Party’s body.
It was interesting that the famous promoters of this interdiction were the national commissioner of internal affairs Henrih Yagoda and the national commissioner of justice Nikolay Krylenko. Both have been exposed as corruptionists (and the search at Yagoda’s home discovered pornographic images besides a numerous luxury goods) and executed for death only two years later. Unfortunately, the law promoted by them wasn’t cancelled at that time.
On Nepal. I think that though their upsetting homophobic approach Nepal Maoists are rather feminist force so their victory will bring some gain for LGBT too. Moreover I hope CPN(M) will develop itself.