Emancipation and Equality: A Critical Genealogy

Abstract

I have been suggesting that the deployment of the language of sexual emancipation and gender equality to dismiss Muslim claims for recognition as full members of the nation-states of Western Europe in which so many have now for so long resided, needs to be read not simply as Islamophobia (which it certainly is), but has a larger resonance. The substitution of sexual desire for abstract reasoning replaces the workings of the mind with the materiality of the body, the abstract individual becomes a pulsating, lusty person. But if that substitution seems to bring the social into the realm of politics (as the language of emancipation and equality suggests), it does not. Rather, it introduces another universal human quality (the sex drive, sexual identities) that is understood to be pre-social, and whose satisfaction is neither a relative matter (defined historically or culturally) nor an issue open to contest. There is only one route to satisfaction: the one said to prevail in the modern secular democracies of the West— even if in those countries what counts as satisfaction has taken many different and even contradictory forms. But contradiction is eliminated when the West is compared to the East, the Christian secular to the Muslim religious. When emancipation and equality are taken to be synonymous and defined as expressions of a universal individual sexual desire, they are no different from formal political equality. Here we can return to a version of Marx’s critique: they are instruments for the perpetuation of the subordination and inequality of disadvantaged minority populations, for their continued marginalization in the socalled democracies of the West. Those of us committed to the realization of some form of sexual democracy—to the notion that many forms of sexual practice are acceptable, indeed normal-- need to attend to this critical genealogy. The question I leave you with is how to wrest that notion from the contexts in which it is being deployed to achieve ends we not only disagree with, but deplore.