Review of Diane Richardson's Rethinking Sexuality

Diane Richardson, Rethinking Sexuality. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2000. 176+ix pages. 18.99pounds.

This book in detail scans through almost all the debates that feminism, queer theory and citizenship have had in relation to sexuality. The originality of the book lies in its stringing together of various strands from feminism, citizenship and theories of sexuality. The aim as is stated in the book is to examine the new ways of understanding sexuality and ‘sexual politics’ that are emerging, through a critical awareness of some of the major theoretical and political debates in the last thirty years. The book focuses on the rethinking of sexuality around the three themes of heterosexuality, citizenship and AIDS. Rethinking sexuality, as the book is well aware, is a larger project than the focus one gets here. The purpose of examining citizenship and AIDS language though not made clear, the relationship between feminism and queer theory is a concern well brought out. The book draws its examples largely from Britain and the USA for its arguments and focuses essentially on feminisms in the west.

Chapter 1 in part 1, of this well-chapterised book, attempts to identify theoretical histories of sexuality, highlight continuities, as well as differences, in past and present understandings. This effort is made from the theoretical location of dissatisfaction with prevalent social constructionist understandings of sexuality. The argument of the chapter is to theorize heterosexuality. This can be read as an alternative effort to accomplish complex understandings of sexuality to ‘simplistic’ social constructionist understandings. While the lack of theorization of heterosexuality is traced in feminism and queer theory, the queering of the sexual is reversed to shift attention to theorizing the heterosexual. However it remains a puzzle as to why in a section called Sexual/social worlds and in some subsequent parts of the book the author has to engage precisely in tracing sexuality as a social construct while she has deemed it simplistic. In an attempt to theorize heterosexuality the public and private boundaries are effectively examined. Chapter 2 traces the sexual politics and social changes about sexuality in recent queer theory. In this context the author identifies and discusses three key areas: assimilation versus transgression, essentialism versus fluidity and space as is encoded in the public/private binary. Chapter 3 strings together queer theory and feminism, through an examination of the often-expressed oppositional terms in which they relate, the opposition being stark especially with radical feminism. Richardson here discusses new feminisms and argues about the need to theorize the representations of feminisms themselves. She maps the consistent (mis)representations of radical feminism and cautions that we may lose a complex history of feminism in the typifying and classified (mis)representations of feminism. A deeper analysis would have required not merely an adjudging of representations as misrepresentations but to ask as to why such representations would repeatedly occur. The representations by feminists belonging to different types of feminism tend to look upon radical feminism in a stereotypical manner, this can be seen as a certain disjunct or incommensurability. To speculate on the incommensurability would have implications for the histories of both queer theory and feminism and would require as the author suggests for history an examination of the conceptual underpinnings, also perhaps an elaboration on the relationship between theory and practice, knowledge and politics.

Part 2 of the book is called Sexual citizenship. Chapter 4 sets out to connect citizenship and sexuality differently from the traditional and dominant model of citizenship as a set of civil, political and social rights. This and even more recent theories of citizenship, for Richardson are based on a politics of assimilation and toleration. The public-private divide is seen by her as an exclusionary that the state cashes on effectively. It is argued in the light of feminists’ overemphasis on the relationship between the personal and the political that the divide needs to be made fluid so as to displace some of the state’s control mechanisms and benefit conceptually. The chapter draws from numerous instances of court judgements (mostly from the US and the UK) to say that heterosexuality is still a necessary basis for full citizenship. Chapter 5 details the extending of the relationship between citizenship and sexuality by looking at the feminist engagements with the question of sexual/intimate citizenship. Chapter 6 draws attention to the crucial aspect of citizenship: sexual rights. Here are some of the interesting points of the book where the complexities involved in theorizing sexual rights are talked about. The characterization of sexual rights in terms of conduct-based rights claims and identity-based rights claims is rich in its elaboration.

Part 3 is divided into 3 chapters. Chapter 7 looks at the question of feminism and the challenge of AIDS and seeks to speculate as to why AIDS was not indeed politicized by feminists as it was by queer groups. For feminists, the questions of sexuality were questions even before the AIDS movements took ground. This and the initial belief that only men can contract AIDS it is speculated must have lead to a lack of feminist theorization or politics with regard to AIDS and women. Chapter 8 deals with the task of gendering AIDS and with the invisibilization of women in the AIDS discourse. The invisibilisation, it is argued, is related to the ‘good woman’ and ‘bad woman’ representations of women. Surely pregnancy, family responsibilities, dependants complicate the AIDS situation for women in different ways than it does for men. The myths about men and women, whether heterosexual or homosexual in the AIDS discourse is chalked out in a following section. The last and 9^th chapter relates in a worthwhile effort sexuality and identity to talk about risk groups. This is discussed in terms of three phases in conjunction with medical notions of risk and assessments: ‘High-Risk’ women, Lesbians are safe and Assessing women’s actual risk.

The writing style of the book although clear, engages too much in a summarization of previous debates making it rather difficult to see what the author’s critical contribution is. What the book misses out is on locating its own arguments in terms of what prompts its attempts to make the connections that are made. This book’s significance lies in the connections made on an ‘inter-movement’ level, where conceptually the preoccupations of each are examined in conjunction.

Published in Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 12:1 (2005), p 129-131.