Strategies for Sexual Subversion: Informing the Future of Sexualities Research and Activism

Abstract

In this paper, I review, analyze, and evaluate the myriad ways early canonical and more recent high-profile scholarship in the field of sexualities envision a liberatory sexual politics and the most fruitful modes of achieving it. Due to theorists’ diverging interpretations of the causes and forms of sexual oppression as well as their differing visions of liberated sexuality, I find that prescriptions for dismantling the “ethnosexual regime” (Nagel 2000) vary widely. The strategies suggested by scholars can be categorized into: 1) radical lesbian-feminist separatism, 2) identity politics, 3) the redeployment of gender, which encompasses trans and intersex bodies, gender play (e.g., butch-femme, drag, and shifting constructions of masculinity), and non-binary identities, 4) micro-level individual and interpersonal solutions, 5) changes in educational institutions, and 6) sexualities research itself. I conclude by making suggestions for sociologists who seek to further theorize and effect the subversion of normative systems of sexuality.