Janet Jakobsen’s The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics centers around a seemingly simple question: “Why are gender and sexuality such riveting public policy concerns in the United States?” (1). A commonsense answer to this question is “because religion”: “Religion drives values, values are about sex, and sex is worth fighting over” (5). Jakobsen worries that “a world of possibility is lost” in the repetition of this answer (10). Each chapter of the book focuses on a variant of this answer as it relates to dominant progress narratives in the US: “Because Religion” (chapter 1), “Because Morality, Because Materiality” (chapter 2), “Because the Social” (chapter 3), and “Because Stasis” (chapter 4). By examining these narratives across popular, academic, and legal discourses, Jakobsen seeks to trace their effects on political imaginations and to open up possibilities for “nonproductive, nonnormative, disjunctive, and potentially perverse practices” (28).
Because The Sex Obsession tracks prevalent stories about sex, Jakobsen revisits political and social materials that may be familiar to many readers: the Moynihan Report, welfare and immigration policies from the Clinton through Trump administrations, and recent Supreme Court rulings. The familiarity of these materials within American public culture makes her book ideal for graduate and upper-level undergraduate classrooms. Even more promising is the book’s “theoretical promiscuity,” which allows Jakobsen to glean fresh analytical tools from these well-known examples (29).
Perhaps the most important analytical tool that Jakobsen develops in this book is her account of how hegemonic power is maintained through “mobility for stasis” (3). The outworking of this dynamic is powerfully demonstrated in her fourth chapter, which focuses on US Supreme Court rulings on same-sex marriage in 2013 and 2015. Departing from the tendency to situate these rulings within a national progress narrative, Jakobsen reads these two cases in conversation with contemporaneous rulings. She explains how the Court maintains a progress narrative by isolating political issues and highlighting their mobility along a single temporal line. While aspects of social change are brought to the fore, the mobility of this narrative renders social hierarchies more stable.
For example, in 2014, when the Court ruled that religious freedom allows certain corporations (such as Hobby Lobby) to deny employees contraception coverage, the Court assured Americans that its dismissal of questions of gender equality would not undercut its protections against racial discrimination. In the same week as the Court’s widely celebrated victory for same-sex marriage in 2015, the Court justified ending federal oversight of the 1965 Voting Rights Act by framing racism as a thing of the past. The clarity of Jakobsen’s analysis of the entanglement of mobility, stasis, and progress narratives makes the book an invaluable resource for both academic and activist efforts.
Scholars working at the intersections of religion, capitalism, and sexuality will be interested in Jakobsen’s compelling theorization of productive (in)coherence. For example, narratives about the emergence of neoliberalism often rely on a division between economy/culture. Such narratives assume that economic concerns drive culture, material values determine moral values, and so forth. Yet Jakobsen contends that there is no coherent division between economy/culture or materiality/morality. Moreover, such tidy divisions ignore the “kaleidoscopic patterns of interrelation” of race, class, gender, sexuality, and religion (70). Instead, Jakobsen explains that economic and cultural values in neoliberalism are mutually constituted through their mobility: “Dominative values—racism, sexism, homophobia, nationalism, Christian supersessionism—may work for capitalism, but they also make capitalism work the way it does” (83). Because such values are deeply intertwined in ways that shift, their “power is produced and maintained not in spite of incoherence, but through incoherence” (94).
While these dynamics of mobility and (in)coherence may be productive operations that sustain hegemonic power, Jakobsen reminds readers that these shifting dynamics also open up alternatives: “The lack of causal necessity means that the world could be otherwise” (83). Jakobsen’s conclusion develops what she, building on José Esteban Muñoz, describes as “perverse possibility for a melancholy utopia” (174). Jakobsen’s queer utopianism parses the political potential of certain kinds of universal claims like CeCe McDonald’s assertion that “prisons cannot be made safe for anybody” (162). Such claims constitute a melancholy utopianism in the way that they combine both hope and impossibility. Disability studies’ notions of universal access and universal design exemplify the “enabling paradoxes” of this perverse utopianism. Universal access and design demand “remaking the world so that it works best as it can for everyone” while also attending to the impossibility of universal design and accessibility (167). Thus, any strategies for remaking the world will “require...doing different—and potentially contradictory—things” (182). This distinguishes the universal claims of McDonald or disability activists from those based on liberal ideals of progress that reduce “disjunctive reality into unity” (162).
Jakobsen crucially reflects on the risks of utopian projects—their ubiquitous tendency to ossify into an exclusionary sociality—while also insisting that there is, of course, no “pure realm of justice” separable “from an impure capitalism” (176). I would be eager for her to further develop the negativities of the (im)possibility of utopian politics—its negative affects, social antagonisms, and contradictions. This might bring Jakobsen into conversation with Muñoz’s thinking on “a queer politics of the incommensurable” (“Race, Sex, and the Incommensurate: Gary Fischer with Eve Sedgwick,” Reading Sedgwick, Duke University Press, 2019). I certainly hope that Jakobsen’s perverse provocations on utopian (im)possibilities will inspire further work. Feminist and queer scholarship in religious studies will undoubtedly benefit immensely from Jakobsen’s kaleidoscopic approach to what sex and religion have to contribute to the project of imagining and materializing alternative worlds.
Wendy Mallette is an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Oklahoma.
Wendy Mallette
Date Of Review:
October 8, 2022