The History of Sexuality and Intimacy Revisited

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The History of Sexuality and Intimacy Revisited

• Jeffrey Weeks
• Researching Socio-Cultural Change
• Research Methods Festival, Oxford
• 3 July 2008

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The Importance of Being Historical

• We live history and are in the midst of a
  living history
• Analysis of recent socio-cultural change is
  done by people who have and are living it
• One persons reflexivity is another persons
  bias or ideological fixation
• Sexuality and intimacy subject to the most
  observable and dramatic change
• But a uniquely contested history

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Traps and Pitfalls

• The temptations of whiggery
• From repression to light
• Problems with liberationism
• The perils of progressivism
• Declinism and its discontents
• The myth of a golden age
• A broken society
• The social deficit
• Nothing has really changed
• Feminist pessimism
• Queer critiques
• Neo-liberalism

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The Historical Problem

• Understanding the great transition
• Overdetermination of the past and present
• Understanding the different languages and
  meanings of the past, and the multiple languages
  of the present
• Whose history?
• Key moments
• The proliferation of sexual stories

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Fateful Moments

• Disrupting the narrative
• Times when events come together in such a way
  that an individual stands, as it were, at a
  crossroads in his (sic) existence There are, of
  course, fateful moments in the history of
  collectives as well as in the lives of
  individuals. They are phases at which things are
  wrenched out of joint, where a given state of
  affairs is suddenly altered by a few key events
  (Giddens 1991 113).

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Example 1 The Wolfenden Moment

• Chasing the perverse post-Imperial blues
• Redefining the private and the public
• The Wolfenden strategy consent and
  control
• The late 1960s the permissive moment
• Acting as if..
• Everyday experiments

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Example 2 The Thatcher Moment

• Victorian values and their limitation
• Economic individualism and social conservatism
• Individualization, individualism, individuality
• New forms of social capital
• Thatcherisms failure the case of section 28
• The unfinished revolution
• Well grubbed, old mole

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Example 3 Liberalism by Stealth

• Sex reform under New Labour
• Live and let love
• Responding to the zeitgeist
• New families
• Civil partnerships and communitarianism
• A very British compromise
• Myths of neo-liberalism
• New taxonomies of regulation and recognition

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Thinking about past, present and future

• Expect the unexpected anticipate unintended
  consequences
• Assume that sexuality and intimate life will
  remain the focus of division and conflict
• Agency and the grass roots revolution
• The democratisation of sexual and intimate life