After Sexology

Is sexology over? What does one do with its history, at once a seemingly remote relic and a persistent logic of biopolitics today? “Sexology and Its Afterlives” begins from the premise that the history of sexology lives in the infrastructures of the present. Locating the afterlives of sexology in material and aesthetic form, this introduction to the special issue engages the largely unmarked detritus of a disaggregated sexological project, whose components have found renewed life in the biopolitical apparatus. The contributors to this issue identify not only familiar sites of sexological persistence (the sex-segregated public toilet) but also less immediately obvious ones (the Moynihan report, redlining, the army base) as executing the unfinished business of the sexological project. This breadth of sexological diffusion makes its analysis a necessarily interdisciplinary prospect, and the contributors call on disability studies, trans studies, Black studies, women-of-color feminism, visual culture, and the history of sexuality, generating emergent concepts, including crip-of-color critique (Kim), binary-abolitionist praxis (Stryker), a “trans-mad” aesthetic (Crawford), and a shift toward expressivity as a framework (Musser). Across the issue, newly imagined sites of collective politics come into view as a payoff for working through the stalled-out imaginaries of sexological binarisms.

Zippin’ Up My Boots, Going Back to My Routes

This discussion essay on Hazel V. Carby’s Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands considers the contrasting ways the dominant society and the people of the African diaspora approach and regard research into family histories. Beginning with reflections on the somewhat dreaded though seemingly benign question, “Where are you from?,” the essay explores the shortcomings and racial biases of popular genealogical websites, contrasting these with the deeply and profoundly nuanced ways Carby’s book tackles fundamental questions, shortcomings, and difficulties in endeavors to trace ancestry. Along the way, the essay references Alex Haley’s Roots and then takes up the Moynihan Report and Maury Povich’s daytime TV show, Maury, both of which, the author asserts, reflect the pathology of depicting the black father as absent and deviant. The essay concludes with considerations of an inevitably settled yet nevertheless creatively fertile “mixed upness” of the creation of African diaspora family histories.

“My Daddy…He Was a Good Man”: Gendered Genealogies and Memories of Enslaved Fatherhood in America’s Antebellum South

While the last few years have witnessed an upsurge of studies into enslaved motherhood in the antebellum American South, the role of the enslaved father remains largely trapped within a paradigm of enforced absenteeism from an unstable and insecure familial unit. The origins of this lie in the racist assumptions of the infamous “Moynihan Report” of 1965, read backwards into slavery itself. Consequently, the historiographical trajectory of work on enslaved men has drawn out the performative aspects of their masculinity in almost every area of their lives except that of fatherhood. This has produced an image of individualistic masculinity, separate from the familial role that many enslaved men managed to sustain and, as a result, productive of a disjointed and gendered genealogy of slavery and its legacy. This paper assesses the extent to which this fractured genealogy actually represents the former slaves’ worldview. By examining a selection of interviews conducted by the Federal Writers’ Project under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s (the WPA Narratives), this paper explores formers slaves’ memories of their enslaved fathers and the significance of the voluntary paternal presence in their life stories. It concludes that the role of the black father was of greater significance than so far recognised by the genealogical narratives that emerged from the slave communities of the Antebellum South.

The Economics of Disconnected Adults and Unstable Families

This chapter demonstrates the ways in which harsh economic forces have undermined the stability of American families. The fragile families that the 1965 Moynihan Report identified as a phenomenon limited to poor, urban African American families in the next two decades spread to the underclass of all races as economic inequality and insecurity expanded in the United States. Since then, as economic restructuring has increasingly decimated the job opportunities of the working class, their families too have become destabilized. The end result is that marriage rates have plummeted among poor and working-class families, while rates of divorce and nonmarital births have skyrocketed. American families are now the most unstable in the world, at considerable cost to the well-being of adults and, particularly, children. While some commentators, including J. D. Vance, have argued that the problems of the poor and working class derive from cultural rather than economic sources, clear analysis shows the roots of these problems are firmly planted in the economic domain.

The Only American Community Where Men Call Each Other “Brother” When They Meet: Redefining Brotherhood and Sisterhood in the 1960s

This chapter describes activists who rejected the idea of a crisis in African American family life. In response to the Moynihan Report of 1965, many African Americans rejected claims about the weakness of family life, offering the strength and creativity embodied in adaptable family definitions. At the same time, many African Americans began using the terms “brother” and “sister” not as arguments about racial integration but to refer to the shared experiences of African American men and women.

Building the Blame

Chapter 4 explores the fate of the idea of a culture of poverty, tracing how it went from an idea articulated mostly by liberals for ostensibly liberal reasons to being a popular idea on the neoconservative right. It particularly explores how Daniel Patrick Moynihan contributed to this conservative version of the culture of poverty by his refusal to recognize the problems with the Moynihan Report and his engagement with neoconservative outlets and authors. Critiques of the culture of poverty articulated by leftists and civil rights activists are also explored, contrasting their emphases to that of Moynihan and other liberals and neoconservatives. The work of Edward Banfield is presented as the culmination of an idea which, while it originally tried to justify helping the black poor, ultimately ended up assisting a reactionary turn against them. The chapter argues, however, that this potential was built into the culture of poverty idea as articulated by liberalism, embedded as it was in racial capitalism. As it concludes, racial liberalism is liberal racism.

A Culture of Poverty

Chapter 3 traces the history of the idea of a culture of poverty while unpacking its racist content. Of particular importance is Daniel Patrick Moynihan and his report on the black family, known as the Moynihan Report. Chapter 3 explores how Moynihan distilled various tropes and memes in articulating a theory of black poverty that placed the primary blame on the supposed pathologies of the black family and community. Chapter 3 also explains the background of that idea and how the various versions of it differed, looking at the writing and work of Oscar Lewis, Michael Harrington, and Kenneth Clark among others. Also emphasized is how the culture of poverty idea allowed liberals to sidestep the issue of the role of capitalism and the market in black poverty, making it very effective for maintaining racial capitalism even during the height of the challenge from below the civil rights movement presented.