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practices of sexual misrecognition and marginalization packed into marriage as social
policy.
One could make the following charge of my revisionist sexual politics: Do I not
create another unjustified binary, between the sexual and the nonsexual? Do I simply
shift the site of “experience” from being gay or lesbian, from being queer, or from being
a “welfare mother” to being any subject sexually, and not in any other way, marginalized
or criminalized? I do, but there are three theoretical reasons why such a proposition is
provisionally acceptable.
First, by calling for economic support and just distributive arrangements that
ensure and celebrate sexual relationships and sexual autonomy, I do not posit a priori
what sexual forms of life are to be legitimated or encouraged (outside, perhaps, the
requirement of consent). Starting, as Cohen does, by resisting the normalizing sexual
imperatives of the state and the social avoids the sticky terrain of reifying or hierarchizing
sexual identity, or of mimicking heteronormative relations to achieve political rights and
social recognition. Thus we need not politick under the sign “lesbian,” for example.
(Butler 1991) Configuring politico-sexual alliance across voluntarist, ascriptive and
structural coordinates upholds the queer epistemological project of decentering the
(hetero/homo) sexual subject while still pressing “a politics of interest.” (Seidman 1996;
see also Hall 2000) Such an alliance potentially re-radicalizes rights discourse and
retrieves it from its assimilative, minoritizing tendencies. (Brown 1995)
Second, and related, while I have not adequately studied political behavior,
mobilization, and persuasion, it seems intuitively correct that some sense of shared
experience, some sense of shared injustice cultivates action. Part of this project is to
envision new alliances and commonalities, to investigate what kinds of experience-based
political action least instantiates value-laden gradations of sexualities, oppressions, and
sexual oppressions, but at once circumscribes a field of operable political contest.
Marking the experience as realities shared by those whose sex, sexuality, and sexual
practices are prohibited from expression—whether by negative imposition or inadequate
positive provisions—seems better on both counts then the grounding experience of gay
and lesbian politics, queer theory, or the supposition of (weak) intersectionality.
Convention