Afterword Insisting on “both/and”: Artifacts of Excavating the Moral Panics of Sexuality

Excavation is hard, uncomfortable work, requiring risk and caution, patience and passion, willingness and desire to make visible and acces- sible information and insights that have been obscured and are in need of being foisted out into the open to be seen, recognized, known. The excavations of the moral panics about sexuality that comprise this book constitute an outstanding accomplishment. The editors and authors set out to stretch the scope of the “usual fare” for moral panics, inviting and convincing us to expand beyond analysis of the incessant hysteria sur- rounding teenage sexuality and the media. These chapters take us to new heights of taboo that inspire often more subtle but profoundly pervasive panics instigated by sexual bodies, sexual blood, and sexual desire, defy- ing containment and making their escape from “appropriate,” “normal,” and “moral” boundaries. Like the novel Hopscotch by Julio Cotazar, the chapters of the book within the sections “Female Desire,” “Creating Norms,” “Colonial Erotics,” “Tactical Panics,” and “Critical Panics” can (and should) be reshuffled to illuminate other analytic threads that underpin, interrupt, and/or inspire moral panics about sexuality: how certain conceits endure, how particular forms of engagement with the “healthy” are advocated or disparaged. The volume has effectively accomplished its goals, from making clear the costs of moral panics that serve to deny sexual knowledge, access to contraception, and entitlement to sexual freedoms and diversity to showing how the bodies of the mar- ginalized are made to carry the weight of cultural and social anxieties, and revealing the profound costs of the appropriation by and for moral panics of barely emergent discourses of empowerment, resistance, and autonomy.