The Moral Panics of Sexuality

The now-infamous case of the “West Memphis Three”—three young men who faced life imprisonment after allegedly murdering three young boys in West Memphis, Arkansas in 1993—reveals the potential danger, volatility, and impact of the moral panics of sexuality. Faced with the devastation of finding three boys tied up and drowned in a nearby drainage ditch, the townspeople, police officials, and legal counsel constructed an elaborate story with all the elements of a moral panic: Satanic witchcraft, sexual torture and mutilation, and violent teenage masculinity. In reality, of course, the men faced eighteen years of imprisonment for a crime they did not commit. The so-called Satanic rituals never happened, the “sexual torture” had been committed by a group of turtles living in the ditch, and the supposedly violent men had never even spoken to the boys. The likely perpetrator, a stepfather visible in plain sight the entire time, had gone free, aided by the whirlwind of decades-long sexual panic (West of Memphis 2012). The town had, as Gayle Rubin warned, become “dangerously crazy about sexuality.”

Moral panics draw a line in the sand: between threatening and non- threatening, normal and abnormal, acceptable and unacceptable. Stanley Cohen, credited with coining the term “moral panic” in 1972, argued that a moral panic occurs when “[a] condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests” (9). We see a compelling question within Cohen’s passive articulation (that is, emergence) of how moral panics develop. Moving away from a passive definition of panic to an active one, what can be understood about the psychological and cultural mechanisms that shape individuals and the moral panics that surround them?

Moral panics about youth sexuality have heavily influenced the construction and curriculum of sexual health education, as the long and complicated history of sex ed in United States schools continues to plague political campaigns, school boards, parents, and health advo- cates (Irvine 2004; Moran 2002; Di Mauro and Joffe 2009). Since the early responses to the moral panics about venereal diseases that began in the early twentieth century, there has been a significant narrowing of the opportunities for young people to receive any type of compre- hensive sexual education. Truly, sex education has been shrouded in debate that is characterized by panic, fueled by misinformation, and cloaked in the language of morality. This chapter explores a brief his- tory of sex education in the United States, focusing specifically on the rise of Abstinence-Only Sexual Education (AOSE) as a moral panic about youth sexuality, followed by an analysis of media representations about adolescent sexual experiences presented in the popular television show Glee. This chapter examines the discontinuity between the formal curriculum young people receive through AOSE programs and the informal education they receive from popular culture references, linking those sites as relevant to the politics of how moral panics are both created and sustained. Using Glee, this chapter shows how moral panics about youth sexuality are still heavily problematic in American culture and demonstrates how popular television has the ability to both challenge and duplicate dangerous stereotypes about young people and sex.

What happens when a moral panic of sexuality morphs into a colonial panic? The discursive emergence of sexual minority rights read along- side an age-old colonial narrative of morality generates a critical lens that makes visible the structures of regulation and discipline underlying representations of colonized cultures. In other words, as gay rights have come to measure democracy and righteousness in the eyes of the global north, they have also been used to perpetuate colonial and military violence against oppressed and colonized populations in the name of morality. Thus, a moral panic becomes a colonial panic, with sexuality as its battleground. This chapter investigates how pinkwashing, or the use of gay rights as a signifier of human rights in representations of Israel/ Palestine, projects the Israeli human rights violations made against Palestinians onto the written-as-homophobic Palestinian in order to legitimize the settler colonial state of Israel. Similar to the “great irony of panic” discussed in the Introduction to this volume, this panic “direct[s] attention away from actual sources of danger,” that of colonization and occupation. Pinkwashing disavows the moral panic of queerness by fetishizing the Palestinian queer, and through a savior narrative creates a colonial panic in place of the moral panic. Thus, viewing it through Stanley Cohen’s lens of moral panic, the sexual deviant morphs into the racial deviant as morality shifts away from homophobia and towards a conservative “democratic” brand of homophilia (Cohen 1973, 9).

Sex and disability provokes moral panic. Not only does This panic not only functions to delegitimize and stigmatize the sexual agency of people with disabilities, but also incites sexualized violence against women, men, and gender-variant individuals with disabilities. I utilize narratives of sex surrogacy by disabled women and gender-variant persons as a vehicle to co-think sex and dis/ability and re-imagine possibilities therein that challenge and resist processes of uneven biopolitical incorporation by the nation-state and by the carcéral net- work apparatus more broadly. This chapter is indebted to the work of scholar-activists who are blurring the boundaries of the supposed “community/academy” binary, and whose work questions the normal- ized violences of militaristic capitalism and its inextricable relationship to disciplinary knowledge production in the corporatized, neoliberal academe. On theories of uneven biopolitical incorporation, the INCITE! Organization “stresses the importance of transcending the ‘politics of inclusion’ to actually address the concerns of women of color” (Smith et al. 2006, 3). In asking what are the conditions of possibility for the sexual agency of women and gender-variant persons with disabilities to come to fruition we must simultaneously question: what would it take to eradicate sexualized violence against women and genderqueer bodies with disabilities?

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.