Publication Information: Book Title: God Forbid: Religion and Sex in American Public Life. Contributors: Kathleen M. Sands - editor. Publisher: Oxford University Press. Place of Publication: Oxford. Publication Year: 2000.

W hat are "family values"? Invocations of "family values" have become virtually ubiquitous in mainstream U.S. political discourse, so much so that their meaning has become "common sense." There is apparently no need for anyone to specify what is meant by the term and from its various and sundry uses it can mean anything and everything. Such elasticity and elusiveness in meaning is often the case with powerful symbols, and the political power of "family values" was more than evident in the Republican victories in the 1994 congressional elections. Although this historically important victory was not followed by the election of a Republican in the presidential elections of 1996, it did bring about a Republican control of Congress that signaled the denouement of both the New Deal and Great Society programs as frameworks for federal government in the United States Moreover, much of the rhetoric of the 1994 victory was taken up by candidates across the political spectrum, such that in the 1996 elections "family values" was espoused by both political parties.

Talk about "family values" often takes place through the invocation of the "traditional" family. But when did this family, the one named "traditional," exist? All kinds of authors, including Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique ( 1963), the book that supposedly opened the path to the second wave of feminism, assume that it was the 1950s. ¹ Women stayed home. They cared for the home, and the husband, and the children. Women were housewives . . . in the suburbs. This picture of 1950s "tradition" is also somewhat mobile, however. In Bob Doles acceptance speech at the 1996 Republican Convention, it is transposed to Depression-era rural Kansas. The relative affluence of Betty Friedan and the women with whom she

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went to college is assumed to be a form of life so traditional as to go for working people as well. The extended and complex families that made possible rural life as well as urban working life and even life in urban poverty ² disappear in favor of a nuclear family enclosed within the particular walls of single-family property ownership. Thus, the "traditional" family has a virtual existence and yet its invocation has quite definitive material effects, providing the impetus, for example, for the 1996 "welfare reform" bill.

Similarly, in the 1994 elections, talk of "family values" was a primary discursive fund for the campaigns. Interestingly, the document that proved to be a stroke of political genius during the campaign, the "Contract with America," was afterward paired with a sibling, the "Contract with the American Family." The relationship between these two documents can tell us much about the workings of "family values" in contemporary U.S. politics.

On the face of it, the documents themselves are not particularly illuminating in terms of a coherent explanation of "family values." The "Contract with the American Family" includes initiatives like an end to public funding for PBS. Now, why exactly is this a "family value"? Granting even that the families in question are the white, middle-class, Christian nuclear families in conservative political discourse like Bob Dole's, Sesame Street seems ultimately more valuable to families than the violent schlock of commercial cartoons, particularly given Dole's apparently deeply held objection to violent cultural production á là his attack on Time Warner with regard to rap music.

I would suggest, however, that it may be precisely the incoherence of the position articulated by Dole that makes it work so effectively. The need for the two "Contracts" to be separate from each other, even as they are interrelated, may indicate a type of relation in which the loose networking of potentially contradictory terms works to strengthen rather than weaken the network as a whole. Specifically, the articulation of a conservative fiscal agenda geared to end "big government" in the "Contract with America" and a conservative social agenda, which might, in fact, intensify government regulation of social relations, including sexual relations, in the "Contract with American Family" allows the potentially uneasy or even incoherent alliance between economic and social conservatives to function effectively.

"Family values" works so powerfully because it condenses both social and conceptual relations, thus, making it a particularly polyvalent and potent symbol. Each of the terms is packed with a number of meanings, and, thus, the best way to understand the workings (if not the meanings) of "family values" is to consider the complexities condensed within each of the terms and elaborated by their conjunction. In particular, by giving "values" the appellation "family," it is possible to invoke "religion" without having to name it as such. As Robert Baird argues, after the enlightenment, talk about "values" becomes a primary way of talking about "religion." ³ Because religious "values" can be a set of reasonable principles, it can make sense to continue to talk about religion "within the limits of reason alone." In the contemporary U.S. context, beyond the obvious organizational ties between political advocates of family values and Christian-identified political groups, the terms "family" and "values" can, in precisely this manner, invoke (without naming) "religion." Thus, talk of family values engages the complex relationship between the re-

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ligious and the secular, between myths of "America" as a secular and also as a specifically "Christian" nation.

Talk that conjoins "family" and "values" also contributes to a reworking of the relationship(s) among the economy, the state, and the American "nation." Under current economic conditions, the state's role has become complicated because it must now embody a transnational form of American-ness, American only insofar as transnational corporations are also U.S. corporations. Thus, interestingly, the U.S. government is sometimes seen as operating in a manner that is "un-American." In this climate, the "family" is being constructed as a site that, if it is made to embody American "values," can also embody the nation.

Thinking about the meaning of "family," of "values," and of the conjunction between them can tell us a great deal about contemporary politics. Why has "family" been taken up as such a central site of specifically public (rather than private) concern? And why has the concern for "family" been so closely tied to sexual regulation, to, for example, anti-homosexual activism, and to major shifts in federal programming like "welfare reform" articulated through concern about "unwed" or "teenage" mothers (both codes for young, poor women of color)? What prompted the contemporary focus on "values"? Why does having "values" imply conservative sexuality, such that for America to have "values" the government should be dedicated to, for example, the "defense of marriage"?

Because of the acceptance of "family values" as somehow expressive of "common sense," the question of why and how social movements become invested in sexual regulation is rarely asked. Yet, historically, the contemporary, "nuclear," form of "family" that is touted as definitive of "values" has not always been the norm, nor have social movements always been invested in the particular forms of sexual regulation that are articulated in contemporary American politics. Assumptions about Christianity are part of what fuels the idea that Christian-identified political movements, at least, should be concerned with sexual regulation. And yet, in the complex history of Christianity, both the importance and the forms of sexual regulation have varied extensively. ⁴ Even when a Christian interest in sexual regulation isn't assumed, the explanations of its contemporary political force are not fully adequate. One frequently offered theory is a variation on the claim that the process of secularization in the modern period, particularly the disestablishment of religion in modern democracies, has led the areas of social life over which religion can lay claim to be increasingly restricted to the private sphere of domestic or family relations. ⁵ While this explanation has some persuasive aspects, it also seems to give short shrift to the ways in which sexual regulation is a public activity. The issue is not simply the contradictions of a public that supposedly "values" a right to privacy and free expression, while sodomy is criminalized and censorship around sexual images rife. Rather, religion has been reasserted as a specifically public phenomenon through discourses of sexual regulation. Out of that move to (re)publicize religion a number of public policy issues have become directly linked to sexual regulation.

Yet, it is not always conservative political movements that are concerned with either "values" or sexual regulation. Talk of "values" has become a very popular word in feminist and lesbian ethics in the past decade, precisely as a contrast to the discourse of "norms" that is often perceived to be irrevocably implicated in discipli-

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nary practices. "Values" are thought to open up a positive ethics of the good that can undercut the connection between ethics and normativity. Thus, in Lesbian Ethics, ⁶ Sarah Hoagland discards norms in favor of an ethics based on the creation of "new value" in the hope of disengaging from a dominant "ethics of control," specifically male control of women and lesbians. Obviously, however, in its rightwing usage, "family" is attached to "values" in order to reinstate the connections between "values" and the norms of heterosexuality and gender dominance.

This struggle over the potentially progressive or conservative meaning of "values" has taken up a complicated relation to sexual regulation within feminist movement itself. Within the second-wave feminist movement, some of the most vociferous and difficult arguments have been over what relationship feminism should have to sexual regulation. Second-wave feminists very early on focused on sexuality as one of the sites of women's oppression. They became specifically concerned with two main issues: (1) the ways in which legitimated sexual relations in church- and state-sanctioned marriage establish a sexual division of labor and structure patriarchal domination; and (2) the ways in which male sexual violence against women, both within and outside of marriage, works to subdue and contain women who might resist patriarchy. This analysis of sexuality as a conduit of domination led to feminist resistance along two main tracks: (1) a focus on liberating women's sexuality from male dominance, often through a focus on women's sexual autonomy and pursuit of their own pleasures; and (2) efforts to put an end to sexual violence against women. Each of these tracks has a potentially regulative aspect to it ⁷ that may have been present from the beginning, but in the late 1970s and through the first half of the 1980s the relative breadth of early tactics began to solidify into a strong focus on sexual regulation in campaigns against pornography, butch-femme and sadomasochistic sexual practices. Eventually feminist analyses of and activism around issues of sexuality polarized into what became known as "the sex wars" between sides that were often articulated as an opposition between "anti-violence" and "pro-sex" movements. ⁸ These two poles, addressing the potential "pleasures and dangers" ⁹ of women's sexuality, were sometimes conceptualized as mutually relevant, but the shift toward regulation split them into opposing topics.

Why did this shift toward sexual regulation occur at this moment in feminist movement? Like religious conservatism, feminism has always had an investment in sexuality, but at this specific historical moment, that investment became intensely focused on regulation. Thus, I'm interested in revisiting the "sex wars," not to rehash old oppositions but to raise some questions about how the opposition between the potentially interrelated issues of pro-sex and anti-violence was created and why "sex" became an issue of "war" in feminism.

Thinking through the historical example of why feminist movement became invested in sexual regulation may also open the door to a broader explanation of how sexual regulation works in contemporary U.S. politics for conservative movements. By inserting an analysis of feminist concerns with sexuality into an analysis of the conjunction between "family" and "values," I hope to interrupt the reduction of "values" to the appellation "family" and open new questions for progressive social movements about their own investments in a politics of sexuality.

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The question that makes a study of the feminist "sex wars" of the late 1970s and early 1980s relevant to an analysis of contemporary sexual regulation as promoted by conservative Christian groups is: Why did a shift away from diverse and complex responses toward the issues implicated in women's sexuality and toward sexual regulation occur at this moment in feminist movement? A number of theories have been suggested. ¹⁰ In her history of second-wave feminism, Daring to Be Bad, Alice Echols suggests that pornography served as an issue that could potentially unite a women's movement whose fragmentation along the lines of dominant social division -- race, class, and sexuality -- was becoming apparent. ¹¹ If there were one issue that all women faced it was sexual violence, and thus the fight against pornography could transcend women's (potentially fragmenting) "differences." This scenario demonstrates the workings of a political theory that emphasizes the necessity of unification and understands alliances as transcending, rather than working through, differences. Thus, the regulatory aspect of the movement came to the fore as differences among women were recognized by the predominantly white feminist groups whose history Echols portrays. Audre Lorde offers an alternative, although related, perspective on this question. Lorde questions whether the entire fight that was the "sex wars" was, in fact, a displacement from the issues of difference and domination that white feminists hoped to transcend: "When sadomasochism gets presented on center stage as a conflict in the feminist movement, I ask what conflicts are not being presented?" ¹² Particularly when read in conjunction with Echols's critique, Lorde's question raises the broader issue of why the "sex wars" erupted at a specific moment in feminist movement. In particular, these claims suggest that feminist movement was at this time enacting its own family drama, the drama of sisterhood. In this drama sexuality was not just a random "displacement" from issues of race and class (and note that this example reverses the classic Freudian displacement where "sex" is what is displaced). Rather sex became "hot" specifically as a conduit for regulating gender, race, and class relations without having to address directly the potentially explosive issues of difference or fragmentation, thereby maintaining the domestic fiction of unified sisterhood.

How can the regulation of "sex" work to regulate other forms of social relations, particularly relations that are imagined along the lines of "kinship" like sisterhood? To state, for example, that the "sex wars" took place within a context of racism is not simply to alert us to white supremacy, but also to the fact that discourses of sex are (in this context) always already racialized. In this context women of color are already characterized as both "sexually deviant" and as "sheer sexuality," as nothing but their sexuality (hence literally as embodying deviance and nothing else). A discourse is, thereby, established in which efforts to control "sexuality" are also efforts to control women of color (who are nothing but sexuality) and these efforts constitute a reaction in which women of color must deny (their) sexuality in order to resist this control. ¹³ Thus, internal regulation of sexual relations among white women may serve simultaneously to establish a racial border that defines who is in the feminist "family." The ever-vigilant focus on this internal regulation limits discursive production around kinship relations that cross the racial border, in this case "sister-

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hood" that includes either the discussion of the connections between race and sexuality or the production of cross-racial alliances. ¹⁴

Internal sexual regulation can also reinforce class hierarchy, hence the focus in the "sex wars" on class-coded practices such as butch-femme. Working-class women's perspectives were frequently excluded from these debates, and class as a category of analysis that might challenge the structure of debate or the focus on sexuality was most frequently ignored. Very few of the contributions to anthologies like Take Back the Night, Coming to Power, or Against Sadomasochism even mention class or present a detailed analysis of class in relation to sexuality and fewer still bring together issues of race and class in relation to sexuality. ¹⁵ These exclusions led writers like Dorothy Allison, ¹⁶ Joan Nestle, ¹⁷ Cherríe Moraga, and Amber Hollibaugh ¹⁸ to point to the ways in which debates over "sexuality" can also reproduce dominative class politics. For example, each of these writers mentions the connection between dominant middle-class values of purity and disembodiedness and arguments against butch-femme or s/m (sadomasochism). As Moraga and Amber Hollibaugh note, ¹⁹ the criticisms of butch-femme in the early 1980s anthologies tend to ignore the historical emergence of these identities within communities of lesbians of color and white working-class lesbians. Moraga and Hollibaugh argue that butch-femine relationships come under attack because of their obvious interest in sex, an interest that is construed as low class. ²⁰ John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman ²¹ note that middle-class lesbians often found the erotic energy of the bar (the site of visible butch-femme cultures) threatening. ²² Lapovsky and Davis present a more complicated picture of the relations between working-class and middle-class lesbians in the 1950s, but they are clear that the question of "sexual style" was closely tied to the elaboration of class-based discourses. ²³

Just as the "sex wars" could displace anxieties over race and class differences, they could serve to displace the challenge of lesbian sexualities to dominant feminist movement. Lesbians have historically held a complicated place within feminist movement. Heterosexism and homophobia were recurrent issues within feminist movement, ²⁴ but as Paula Webster suggests, "Lesbians were [also] asked to carry the banner of 'good sex,'" meaning that they would have to "leave their more complex feelings at the door." ²⁵ Yet, once again the ties between carrying the banner of "good sex" and race/class relations must be kept in mind, since within a context of race and class stratified discourse, separating good girls from bad along the lines of sexuality could also distinguish good girls from "degenerate races" ²⁶ and "low class individuals." And, as Mosse points out within the racialized discourse of degeneracy, it is frequently incest that causes "mongrelization," thereby, implying that sex within the feminist family of sisters must be only the most pure to avert the slide into degeneracy.

Thus, the underlying forces that drive sexual regulation may not be about "sex" per se. Rather, sexual regulation can provide an effective site for the regulation of both individual and social bodies, and in so doing it works to regulate social relations along the lines of gender, race, sex, and class. This argument has a number of implications. Analyses of sexual regulation will only be useful if placed in the broader context of multiple social relations, and, similarly, politics that resist sexual regulation will only be effective if they also address this broader context. Thus, it is

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not surprising that despite its hopes, the anti-pornography movement did not succeed in either transcending race and class barriers or even in unifying feminists in opposition to pornography. The focus on unity instead produced even greater divisions. This implies the need for alliances across social divisions as well as organizing that directly addresses issues of sexuality. In particular, in developing a radical politics of sexuality it is important to question the ways in which norms of "whiteness" or "middle-class" status can be implicitly established as the center of "sexuality." As Hortense Spillers points out, talk of sexuality, even radical sexuality, can simply work to (re)produce "culture in its dominative mode."

What can this analysis of feminist movement tell us about Conservative Christian-identified political movements that are, when taken at face value, the polar opposites of secular feminist movements? Indeed Christian-identified conservative political groups have in part formed both their identity and their political power through opposition to feminist issues like reproductive rights and freedoms. I would suggest, however, that "family" operates as a condensation of multiple social relations in much the same way that "sisterhood" did for feminist movements.

In her article, "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality," Gayle Rubin argues that sex has become weighted with "an excess of signification." ²⁷ Thus, Rubin poses the question of why it is that "sex" can come to carry all kinds of different meanings. It can, for example, come to be a paradigmatic marker of "values" in general. In "Thinking Sex" Rubin is shifting her own analysis away from the question of her earlier work in the "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex." ²⁸ In this earlier article, Rubin argues by using Claude Lévi-Strauss's analysis of kinship relations that (hetero)sexuality is fundamentally about exchange relations among men in which women are the items exchanged. Rubin shifted her analysis, in part, because she wanted to show some of the limits of a feminist theory that tended to conflate gender and sexuality. ²⁹ lnsofar as feminist theory made all sexuality about gender relations, it thus couldn't fully explain, for example, the social struggles over various sexual minorities. Rubin is interested in asserting the need to analyze "sex" as a specific axis of experience and political struggle that is related to, but not the same as, "gender." This article has often been taken as a foundation for a "lesbian and gay" or "queer" studies that is also related to, but autonomous from, feminist or women's studies. ³⁰

In her 1994 article, "Against Proper Objects," Judith Butler argues that it may be time to reconsider the relationship between these two axes. In particular, Butler argues for a reconsideration of kinship relations that has become less commonplace in various theoretical fields given historical shifts away from kinship as the encompassing site of either gender or sexuality and intellectual shifts from the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss to post-structuralist theories, particularly the theories of sexuality offered by Michel Foucault. Foucault has argued that "sexuality" as a discourse of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is deployed in contrast with, but also on the basis of, the deployment of alliance through kinship and law. Foucault writes:

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If the deployment of alliance is firmly tied to the economy due to the role it can play in the transmission or circulation of wealth, the deployment of sexuality is linked to the economy through numerous and subtle relays, the main one of which, however, is the body -- the body that produces and consumes. In a word, the deployment of alliance is attuned to a homeostasis of the social body, which it has the function of maintaining; whence its privileged link with the law; whence too the fact that the important phase for it is "reproduction." The deployment of sexuality has its reason for being, not in reproducing itself, but in proliferating, innovating, annexing, creating, and penetrating bodies in an increasingly detailed way, and in controlling populations in an increasingly comprehensive way. . . . It is not exact to say that the deployment of sexuality supplanted the deployment of alliance. One can imagine that one day it will have replaced it. But as things stand at present, while it does tend to cover up the deployment of alliance, it has neither obliterated the latter nor rendered it useless. Moreover, historically it was around and on the basis of the deployment of alliance that the deployment of sexuality was constructed. ³¹

The question that Foucault leaves open is the specific workings of systems of kinship and alliance that may be covered up, but are neither obliterated, nor rendered useless, by sexuality. This question is particularly important for understanding the relations between gender and sexuality. Rethinking this connection offers the opportunity to reconsider the tangle of relations between individual bodies that produce and consume and are incited and effected in so doing by the discourse of sexuality and the ways in which those bodies are still tied alliances and kinship through both law and economics. Butler makes the important point that "to claim that [sexuality and kinship] ought to be thought in relation to one another is not to claim that sexuality ought to remain restricted within the terms of kinship; on the contrary, it is only to claim that the attempt to contain sexuality within the domain of legitimate kinship is supported by moralizing and pathologizing discourses and institutions." ³² Thus, if we are to understand the stakes in debates over "family values" it is important to think about how regulating sexuality is entangled with maintaining something that might be called "legitimate kinship."

Foucault is making an important distinction between the productive, but nonetheless still disciplinary, mechanisms of incitement that form the discourse of "sexuality" and the repressive enforcement of sexual regulation through kinship relations. The disciplinary discourse of sexuality is not the same as sexual regulation. Foucault argues that sexuality is deployed through interconnected micro-level incitements of desire. Thus, desire itself is what leads the body to participate in the disciplines of sexuality. For example, women who participate in the disciplines of beauty often do so out of a sense of social enforcement, but they also often do so out of a sense of desire, of wanting to be beautiful, of enjoying the pleasures of shopping or the rituals of a daily regime. These incitements of desire are not the regulations of social prohibition, although they may be intertwined with such prohibitions, just as there are sanctions for women who do not desire and refuse to participate in the requirements of beauty; nor are they, like kinship, established through law. It is the force of law that is entailed in the focus on "legitimacy." Sexuality does have the potential to escape the restraints of the law, but the work done by

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"family values" is precisely to enforce a relation between sexuality and kinship through the regulatory language of values. The very need to assert "family values" as a defining discourse of sexual regulation in U.S. politics demonstrates that sexuality has to some extent escaped from the definitional discipline of kinship, but this disarticulation is by no means fully accomplished: hence the political struggle.

For the Christian-identified radical right (hereafter referred to as the "Right") this political struggle is an attempt to enclose the modern discourse of "sexuality" within legitimate kinship. ³³ The Right undertakes this project through a discourse of "return," a return to conservative sexual values, a return of "America" to its "Christian roots." If Foucault is correct, however, the Right is actually trying to establish a new regime in which the modern discourse of sexuality as it has been distinguished from kinship is enclosed within a particular form of kinship -- nuclear family life. This "family" is named as "traditional" but is actually most relevant in the post-World War II economic situation. The stakes for progressive social movements in the battles over family values are in Butler's terms not over "kinship . . . [as] identified with any of its positive forms," but over kinship as "a site of redefinition which can move beyond patrilineality, compulsory heterosexuality, and the symbolic overdetermination of biology." ³⁴ Thus, for the various sides in this conflict, the stakes are over how to establish a new relation between kinship and sexuality in the postmodern situation, including the postmodern economic situation. Finally, because "sexuality" as analyzed by Foucault is itself a discourse of productive regulation, Rubin's hope in developing a radical theory of "sex" is not simply to establish a "sexuality beyond kinship," ³⁵ but to establish the possibility of "sex" that is not determined by either "sexuality" or "kinship," that is rather open to various "bodies and plessures." ³⁶

Foucault's advice for where to begin an analysis of alliance and sexuality thus remains a useful starting point for working out the specific stakes of family values: bodies, both individual and social. Because bodies literally are the site of intersection for various social relations -- gender, race class, as well as sexuality -- sexual regulation can carry the stakes for these various relations and the social differentiations upon which they depend. The differences and dominations that mark gender, race, and class relation frequently operate by denying this intersection and separating bodies from each other. The regulation of sexuality allows for these intersections to mobilize without being named. Thus, regulating sexuality becomes a means of regulating a number of social relations.

Enclosing sexuality within kinship allows for a multi-axis regulation that is one of the ways in which sexuality becomes weighted with excessive meanings. If legitimate kinship defines legitimate sexuality and is restricted to the "traditional" (nuclear) "family," then the possibilities for a sexual desire outside of dominating social relations can be strictly regulated. The patriarchal gender relations of "traditional" marriage can be articulated not as male domination, but as "values." The early second-wave feminist concerns about the structures of both marriage and sexuality can, thus, be simultaneously undercut. In this sense, the anti-feminist and the antihomosexual agenda of the Right are directly linked, and both are condensed into talk about "family values."

"Family values" then becomes a means of publicly regulating much more than

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what goes on in private. In fact, "family" operates as the center of a matrix that regulates the broad set of social relations that differentiate and define the "public." For example, historically in the United States, race relations have been established through a complicated conjunction of sexuality and kinship. Kinship supposedly establishes racial identity in a relatively straightforward manner, but historically this assumption of direct kinship-racial relation has been complicated by sexual and kinship relations across racial borders that are both induced and actively denied. Abdul R. JanMohamed's analysis of sexuality "on/of the racial border" begins to chart some of these complexities by rejoining the white family drama of father, mother, and child with its "open secret" of kinship across racial borders in the history of the United States. ³⁷ "Sexuality on/of the racial border" is structured by and structures a series of kinship relations that require a double form of sexual regulation. Legal regulation within the white community ensures kinship relations that reinforce internal gender and class hierarchies, thus creating appropriate families and continuing family control of property. The racial border is sexualized, just as sex is always racialized -- in other words, legitimated sex between white men and white women creates "whiteness," while non-legitimate sex across the border is denied, in both the sense of being silenced and of being restricted. Given this racialization, regulating sex becomes a way of both creating and maintaining the power dynamics of race.

JanMohamed points out that historically, within this system, racism is maintained by white patriarchs' ability to cross this border and forcibly "appropriate" women's sexuality, while denying or punishing any other form of border-crossing; hence, the strong legal (and extra-legal in the form of lynching) penalties for crossracial sex that were rarely if ever applied to white men's rape of black women. The border allows for the denial of kinship between, for example, white and black children of the patriarch. Crossings of the racial border become "open secrets" that cannot be openly discussed because to do so would "undermine the socio-political impermeability of that border" and force the admission that race relations lie at the heart of the (supposedly race-less) white family, ³⁸ and thus also at the heart of "family values."

On this reading, race is, in fact, central to the gender dominance that "family values" so obviously articulates. The control of white women within the confines of legitimacy and through the "threatening protection" ³⁹ of the lynching narrative and the violent control of African-American women through cross-racial rape are equally central to this family drama and its "values." Thus, as Susan Fraiman points out, rather than creating an "interracial fraternity" among men, the cross-racial structure of gender dominance connotes "a struggle to preserve racial hierarchies among men which does not exclude so much as rely upon the feminine as a switching point." ⁴⁰ Thus, the obvious gender regulation of a "family values" that calls for particular gender roles is also productive of racial hierarchies even without so naming them.

Similarly with class: if, as Foucault argues, alliance is deployed in the service of property and inheritance, as alliance and sexuality become related in a complicated fashion in the modern period, sexuality is tied to the economy in multiple ways. Beyond the ways in which the discourse of sexuality constitutes a body that as

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producer and consumer is tied to and disciplined by economic relations, the continuation of alliance relations implies that inheritance and property are still connected to marriage, family, and sex. Moreover, when modern narratives of class mobility beyond the inheritance structure becomes possible, the category of "respectability," ⁴¹ where respectability means first and foremost sexual respectability, becomes the ordering discourse of that mobility. Thus, respectability becomes the category that ties alliance and sexuality together, so that legitimate sexuality can still be tied to the law and the distribution of property. "Family values" is, then, a new articulation of respectability as a reassertion of legitimacy and kinship in relation to a sexuality oriented to production and consumption. In the terms of "family values," sexual "orientation" becomes so important because while sexuality may be part of the marketplace, producing bodies that both want to labor as producers and participate in the market as consumers, the category of the "family" needs to mediate the value and values of this sexuality in terms of legitimacy. ⁴²

Mosse also connects the establishment of middle-class more of respectability primarily to the project of modern nation-building. Interestingly, then, in Benedict Anderson's ⁴³ ( 1991) trifold analogy of "kinship," "religion," and "nationalism" as levels of identity so naturalized that everyone "has" one, the religious, specifically Christian, discourse of "family values" works to reinstate Christianity as the regulating discourse of not just family, but also nation. Sexuality is often taken to mark the moral health of the "nation" as a modern social unit, but the connection between "sex" and the "nation" is often simply assumed. Didi Herman has, for example, identified this type of assumption in right-wing congressman William Dannemeyer's 1989 book, Shadow in the Land: Homosexuality in America. Dannemeyer writes that "the United States is surrendering" to the homosexual threat to "our civilization" such that '"we don't even know we've been conquered." ⁴⁴ A loss of "sexual values" is, thus, tied to a loss of the American nation itself. This connection between values and nation allows talk that conjoins family and values to operate as a site for reworking nationalism under conditions of the transnationalization of capital. Thus, as Foucault suggests, uses of the body and of sex become tied to issues of the economy through a number of circuits in the complex relation of alliance and sexuality. Individual bodies (and their sex) are implicated in the economy as producers, consumers, and as symbols of relations between national and social bodies.

Here, then, we see some of the stakes for the Right in claiming that threats to "family values" are also threats to the nation, if not all of Western civilization. If kinship structures are part and parcel of gender, race, class, and national structures of domination, then efforts to regulate sexuality by keeping it within the confines of legitimate kinship are also efforts to regulate gender, race, class, and nation. This broad regulation of social relations explains what is meant by "family values" and how "sex" becomes burdened with overrepresentation through the discourses of both alliance and sexuality. Within this framework, the seemingly hyperbolic claims of Christian ministers, among others, that homosexuality can end "Western civilization as we know it" make sense. For example, William Bennett argues in the right-wing Christian videotape "Gay Rights, Special Rights" that all civilizations must reject homosexuality for the purpose of maintaining reproduction. Given the

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fact that underpopulation is not a contemporary problem or even a threat, such claims are nonsensical when taken at face value (unless one believes that if homosexuality is allowed at all, the vast majority will choose it, something Bennett would certainly want to deny). For those on the Christian-identified political Right, however, if sex becomes a site for (re)Christianizing America, then homosexuals would threaten Christian religious identity, the national identity of the United States, and the tie between Christianity and "America."

For radical social movements, particularly those concerned with a radical politics of "sex," the stakes are about the possibilities of creating spaces for bodies that are not overdetermined by the disciplinary mechanisms of either sexuality or alliance. In his later work, Foucault hopes, as does Rubin, to remove sex from both of these discourses. As Foucault says:

For centuries we have been convinced that between our ethics, our personal ethics, our everyday life, and the great political and social and economic structures, there were analytical relations, and that we couldn't change anything, for instance, in our sex life or our family life, without ruining our economy, our democracy, and so on. I think we have to get rid of this idea of an analytical or necessary link between ethics and other social or economic or political structures. ⁴⁵

Simply asserting the autonomy of sex does not make it so. Butler makes the point about elaborating the relationship between radical sexuality and feminist movement is precisely to take into account the ways in which "psyches bear" the "traces of kinship." ⁴⁶ Moreover, a feminist analysis suggests that it is women's bodies, in particular, that can become the conduits for the various relations and dominations circuited through sexuality and enacted as sexual regulation. The economic relations of sexuality and alliance are particularly inscriptive for women's bodies because other avenues of economic and social relation are more restrictive for women. Hence the Right's simultaneous investment in antifeminist issues is a means of reinforcing the tie between sex and the economy. If we are to share in the various hopes named by Rubin, Foucault, and Butler for sex as a "practice of freedom," we must understand how the Right constructs the relationship between economic value and the discourse of "family values." This relation can be further explored through an analysis of the two "Contracts" -- with America and the American family.

So, what does this analysis tell us about the Christian-identified radical Right and why we are currently seeing such vociferous efforts to regulate and control sexuality in the name of "family values"? The preceding analysis suggests that the campaign for family values is not just about regulating "homosexuality." Naming the "American dream" with the tag "family values" is fundamentally about ending (the dream of the Great Society as established by the social movements of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. What we are seeing today is not just right-wing backlash against the greater visibility of lesbians and gays, nor the necessary outcome of a conservative

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Christian theology (after all, the Catholic Alliance, auxiliary to the Christian Coalition, and the Catholic Bishops actually disagree on a number of issues). ⁴⁷ Rather, the current campaign is part and parcel of efforts to make sexual respectability and "traditional" family structure into discourses that can regulate race and class relations, thus reinforcing efforts to gut the civil rights and social welfare bills of the 1960s and, finally, reasserting Christianity as the defining discourse of the nation.

If the discourse of "family values" is an effort to regulate a broad number of social relations, then resistance is likely to be most effective by making the connections among the various aspects of the right-wing agenda. Making such connections would, for example, place the "Contract with the American Family" in the context of the larger political and particularly economic agenda of the "Contract with America." The two contracts were self-consciously split by Republican Party strategists so that the "Contract with America" could be pitched as fiscal policy and, therefore, as socially "moderate," while the "Contract with the American Family" is pitched as presenting social issues. Thus, the split between the two Contracts opens possibilities for managing the potential contradictions between fiscal and social conservatives, a politically important task given that the alliance between them provides the political power of contemporary conservative politics. Because the two contracts are divided, fiscal conservatives can support the balanced budget, tax cuts (primarily in the capital gains tax), and small business incentives without having to actively identify with an agenda focused on religious expression, school choice, restrictions on abortion, and anti-pornography legislation. Similarly, social conservatives can support these latter measures while distancing themselves from complete freedom of the market, which might produce pornography because it "sells." The explanation, then, for the fiscal and social conservative alliance is not that they are the "same," but that they work together. In fact, the disjunction between them is precisely why they "work." To be allied is not to come to a consensus, to agree, but to work in and through and to depend upon "differences." The "Contract with America" and the "Contract with the American Family" are two separate documents because their separation enables them to speak to different sites in the political landscape, while their connection enables conservative dominance.

In the preamble to the "Contract with America," the two sides of this conservative agenda are placed side by side in a promise to bring about a change that would "be the end of government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public's money. [This change] can be the beginning of a Congress that respects the values and shares the faith of the American family." In the middle of each Contract are crucial points that provide the links to solidify the alliance. The middle of the "Contract with America" promises "an anti-crime package . . . to keep people secure in their neighborhoods and kids safe in their schools" and "The Family Reinforcement Act" and "American Dream Restoration Act," to give tax cuts that "reinforce the central role of families in American society." Similarly, the middle of the "Contract with the American Family" promises a "Family-Friendly Tax Policy" and measures to "Punish Criminals, Not Victims." The differences between the two Contracts are, however, also critical to their working together.

The first legislative initiative of each Contract expresses its main point. In the "Contract with America," it is "The Fiscal Responsibility Act," promising a balanced

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budget and line-item veto "to restore fiscal responsibility to an out-of-control Congress, requiring them to live under the same budget constraints as families and businesses." In the "Contract with the American Family," it is the "Religious Equality Amendment" to "restore" "voluntary, student- and citizen-initiated" religious expression in "non-compulsory settings such as courthouse lawns, high school graduation ceremonies, and sports events."

These separate but connected agendas of the political Right articulate a connection between economic value and moral or religious values. The "Contract with America" places family values in the context of economic reforms that would allow for more corporate freedom in the operation of the marketplace, strengthen "flexibility" in corporate regulation, place limits on punitive damages and product liability in lawsuits, and provide for specifically private insurance for elder care. These reforms are tied with a reassertion of U.S. nationalism through the military, a reassertion that is addressed to contemporary economic conditions under which capital has become fundamentally transnational. "The National Security Restoration Act" would not allow U.S. troops to be under United Nations command and would "restore" military funding "to strengthen our national defense and maintain our credibility around the world." Here the tie between military "credibility" and U.S. credit in the (international) market asserts the importance of U.S. nationalism despite the transnationalization of capitalism. Under these conditions, the state's role as a central site of nationalism has become complicated because it must now embody a transnational form of American-ness, American only insofar as transnational corporations are also U.S. corporations. The working alliance with the other side of the conservative agenda as articulated in the "Contract with the American Family" can, however, help to manage this contradiction by reworking the relationship(s) among the economy, the state, and the American "nation." In this climate, the "family" is being constructed as a site that can come to embody the nation precisely because, under the discourse of family values, it embodies "American" values. Thus, in the "Contract with the American Family," the United Nations is mentioned under provisions "protecting parental rights." The Christian Coalition explains its opposition to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child as follows:

The Coalition urges Congress to reject the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child because it interferes with the parent-child relationship, threatens the sovereignty of U.S. law, and elevates as "rights" such dubious provisions as access to television and mass media. ⁴⁸

To protect the sanctity of the "American family" from threats by supranational politics and (international) mass culture is also to protect "the sovereignty of U.S. law."

The "Contract with the American Family" further manages the contradictions of a "free" market that could undercut "American" sovereignty or more accurately dominance, by placing "freedom" in a religious context. The Contract connects religious "freedom" to a set of conservative moral values, named "family." The connection between religion and "family values" is based on the assumption that without appropriate and public "religion," moral values are not sustained either. Thus, the relationship between value and values is further complicated by the relation between the "religious" and the presumably "secular" in American life. Beyond the

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obvious ties between political advocates of family values and Christian-identified political groups, the terms "family" and "values" can invoke religion even when religion is not specifically named. Thus, talk of family values engages the complex relationship between the religious and the secular, between myths of "America" as a secular and also as a specifically "Christian" nation. The split between the secular and the religious as it developed in the modern period was often articulated as about establishing a site of "freedom" from religious "dogma." This freedom from religion included economic freedom from ecclesiastical authority, instituting the market as a site of economic activity outside of the oversight of the church. ⁴⁹ Once the market is established as a secular realm, however, religious values continue to be invoked to temper the socially corrosive effects of the market. Moreover, in their reformed Protestant form, religious values can also be invoked to provide the moral incentive for participation in the market in the form of a "work ethic." As with the attempt to place sexuality within the confines of legitimate kinship, part of the struggle waged by the Christian Right through the assertion of values is to place market "freedom" within the context of Reformed Protestantism. The Christian Coalition has, in fact, had difficulty in its attempt to form Catholic and Jewish alliances precisely because the values that the Christian Coalition names as "Christian" or as "religious" are a particular version of Protestantism.

This connection between market-Reformed Protestantism and the "secular" has important implications for how both religious freedom and religious pluralism are understood and enacted. If "values" is a secular site at which various "religious" traditions might be articulated, then either the differences or the similarities among traditions might be made prominent. The effort to make the secular a site that articulates, without naming, market-reformed Protestant "values" is an effort to erase potential differences. Thus, making market-Reformed Protestant "values" the quintessentially "American" values is to make them the publicly acceptable articulation of all "religions." In referring to "religious" expression in relation to "courthouse lawns, high school graduation ceremonies, and sports events," the "Contract with the American Family" is naming sites for lawsuits that have prevented specifically Christian expression, without making this Christian content explicit or without referring directly to lawsuits that have been brought by offended Jews or Muslims who felt that American public sites should not be marked as specifically Christian.

Not only must "family values" be placed in its context as Christian, the unnamed version of Christianity -- market-Reformed Protestantism -- invoked by "family values" enables the working alliance between conservative economics (value) and conservative social programs (values). Thus, the split between the two Contracts that enables some people to identify with only one side or the other of the conservative program is linked together through the connection between (economic) value and (religious) values.

This working alliance between the two Contracts allows the Right to pursue an agenda of gender, race, class, and sexual regulation without ever having to name it as such. For example, despite the Right's seemingly incessant focus on homosexuality, often the first issue named in fundraising letters for conservative organizations like the Family Research Council, the Christian Coalition's talking points on the "Contract with the American Family," do not mention homosexuality at all. The

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Christian Coalition does enumerate the points in the Contract that would "restore respect for human life" and restrict pornography, but women and homosexuals are nowhere mentioned as the targets of such initiatives. Moreover, welfare cuts, arguably the most extensive and effective of the social regulatory measures, are not mentioned in the "Contract with the American Family." According to the division between the two documents, cutting welfare is primarily a fiscal act that has some social effects but is not really relevant to the protection and promotion of the "American family." Rather welfare cuts promote "personal responsibility," the individual responsibility to act within the confines of the free market.

This reading of the broad context invoked by the simple phrase "family values" has important implications for social movements that work to resist sexual regulation. If social movements, like the Right or even certain strands of feminist movement, turn to sexual regulation in order to regulate a number of social relations, and if "family values" connects Protestant moral values to a program of economic value, then resistance to these discourses requires a similarly broad-based response. My suggestion is that Christian-identified, right-wing discourses in favor of sexual regulation, particularly the discourse of "family values," be read and responded to as not simply about sex. Anti-homophobic movements, for example, would do well not to isolate talk about family values as if it is simply homophobic or heterosexist discourse. Moreover, replicating the discourse of "family" within the context of "lesbian and gay" politics in a bid for inclusion in dominant cultural and social structures can also replicate the various social hierarchies condensed within the symbol of "family values." Similarly, feminist movements need to take care that their own concerns about sexuality not be articulated as singularly about gender relations, rather than as about the intersection of a network of social relations. "Family values" provided the legitimating discourse for both the Defense of Marriage Act and the welfare reform bill in the summer of 1996. This connection did not, however, materialize an alliance between advocates of "gay rights" and of "welfare rights," and the resistance to each bill on its own was ineffective.

The division between "moderate" fiscal conservatives and more radical social conservatives is, however, accepted by many dominant "lesbian and gay rights" groups, including the Human Rights Campaign (formerly the Human Rights Campaign Fund), which made a donation to Bob Dole's campaign in order to empower "moderate" republicans over "conservatives." This strategy was undertaken in the name of creating a "broader" lesbian and gay movement, meaning one that extends beyond the radical Left. My analysis of "family values" indicates, however, that the effort to broaden the movement to include Bob Dole also effectively narrows it to exclude potential allies while leaving intact the conservative alliance. By accepting the claim that the conservative fiscal agenda is not relevant to social issues like lesbian and gay rights, anti-homophobic movements come to speak mainly for those white, middle-class men of privilege who are just like Bob Dole, "but for" being gay, while they exclude all those queer bodies that are regulated by budget cutting

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and welfare reform as well as by "homophobia." If, however, the Human Rights Campaign wants to create a "broader" movement, it would need to hold conservative politicians responsible for both sides of the conservative agenda. The "Contract with America" and the "Contract with the American Family" work precisely by presenting their agenda as separate issues, and then holding the agenda together through a discourse like "family values." If "family values" can legitimate sexual regulation through both fiscal and social legislation, through both "welfare reform" and bans on "gay marriage," then attempting to address social issues of sexual regulation, while ignoring its fiscal component, is unlikely to dislodge the current dominance of "family values" in any meaningful way. Taking on "family values" in its various permutations would broaden "lesbian and gay" movement well beyond a single-issue focus on "homosexuality." More importantly, such breadth of analysis and agenda would clarify the stakes for queers as well as straights in the entire rightwing agenda, showing how "family values" provides the punitive discourses about women, poverty, race, and sexuality that short-circuit counter-claims for economic and racial, as well as sexual, justice.

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Commission on Pornography in 1986. Similarly, the 1982 Feminist IX Conference, "Towards a Politics of Sexuality," held at Barnard College, intended initially to be a broadly-based discussion of various aspects of women's sexuality along the lines of both "pleasure and danger," became instead a pitched battle where some feminists sought to regulate the presence of others, particularly the potential participation of members of the Lesbian Sex Mafia. Thus, movements against pornography and lesbian butch-femme and s/m practices became part of an intense move toward sexual regulation.

9. Carole S. Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger. Exploring Female Sexuality, 2d ed., with a new introduction by the editor ( London: Pandora Press, 1992; originally published 1984).

10. Some theorists argue that the turn toward a strict anti-pornography campaign was a response to the intractability of male violence. Early activists often felt that if the problem of male violence was exposed, the code of silence around rape and incest broken, then male sexual violence could not be sustained, or at least not sustained at such horrific levels or with such prevalence. By the late 1970s, a decade into these efforts, it was apparent that much more was required. Pornography became the visible, commercialized, and potentially containable expression of this deeper problem.

11. Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975 ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Echols states, By invoking traditional ideas about women's sexuality and manipulating women's anger at pornography, anti-pornography feminists hoped to unify the movement and expand its base. For them pornography was the issue that could transcend race, class, age, sexual preference, and even ideology (289).

12. Lorde continues, "Is this whole question of s/m sex in the lesbian community perhaps being used to draw attention and energies away from other more pressing and immediately life-threatening issues facing us women in this racist, conservative and repressive period." While Lorde is responding specifically to the increasingly visible pro-s/m movement, a positioning indicative of her role in the anti-pornography movement, her critique can be read as a criticism of the "sex wars" in general since the focus on s/m is maintained as much by anti-pornography and anti-s/m struggles as by sex radical defenders and practitioners of s/m. In Robin Ruth Linden et al., eds., Against Sadomasochism: A Radical Feminist Analysis ( San Francisco: Frog in the Well, 1982), 68.

13. Evelyn Hammonds, "Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality," differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6, nos. 2-3 ( Summer-Fall 1994): 126-39.

14. These problems have led later theorists to argue that the very structure of the "sex wars" was racist. In her review essay "Feminism and Sexuality in the 1980s," B. Ruby Rich notes that "the ethnocentrism of the sexuality debates remains acute . . . in terms of a sexuality constructed to exclude the experiences and perspectives of so many women of color" ( Feminist Studies. 12 [ 1986] 525-63, 869). In Coming to Power for example, there are no lesbian of color contributors (see Samois, Coming to Power. Writings and Graphics on Lesbian S/M [ Boston: Alyson Publications, 1987; Originally published in 1981, repr. in 1982]). As Lisa Walker notes, within this type of dominative cultural production, when women of color aren't directly excluded, "[they] become essentialized as authentic subaltern identities" ( Lisa M. Walker , "How to Recognize a Lesbian: The Cultural Politics of Looking Like What You Are," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18, no. 4 [ 1993]: 869). This essentialism reinforces white domination as positions established by women of color are invoked by white women in order to claim the "other side" is inherently racist, while challenges by women of color to the categories or structure of debate are obviated. See also Jackie Goldsby, "Queen for 307 Days: Looking B(l)ack at Vanessa Williams and the Sex Wars," in Sisters, Sexperts, and Queers: Beyond the Lesbian Nation, ed. Arlene Stein ( New York: Plume, 1993).

15. Laura Lederer, ed., Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography ( New York: William Morrow, 1980); Samois, Coming to Power.

For example, in "Racism and Sado-masochism: A Conversation with Two Black Lesbians," Darlene R. Pagano opens her interview with Karen Sims and Rose Mason by making direct connections between a white, working-class position and that of black lesbians: "When I first started trying to answer of the sadomasochism arguments, I was with other workingclass women, and we said, 'Can you imagine trying to talk about this at home?' . . . And when I went to my Third World friends and said, 'Would you like to be included in this book we're trying to get together?' a couple women when this was first coming up said, 'That's not my issue whatsoever, that's for white people to deal with.'" This mention of class, effectively appropriated into race, is the only reference to class in Linden et al., Against Sadomasochism (99). In Take Back the Night, class is rarely mentioned; when it is, it is to point to another example of the way pornography eroticizes power relationships. In this text, class is almost always tacked on to examples that invoke racism or anti-Semitism (37). In Coming to Power, there is not much overt mention of class; at one point in an interview, Chris asks: "Do you want to talk any about class and sex?" Sharon initially responds by saying no, but then goes on to talk about how it is one more thing that she and her lover have in common -- they are both working-class dykes and that makes them comfortable (55). They go on: "That we're both big and strong had something to do with being working class. And physicalness, being more physical. Bear: The only big women that I've been lovers with have been working class. I think I'm attracted more to working class women, partly because of the verbal thing, being able to communicate" (60). While they don't explicitly connect class to the critique of s/m, their argument about physicality seems to lead in that direction.

16. In Vance, Pleasure and Danger, 103-114.

17. In Ann Snitow et al., eds., Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality ( New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 468-70.

18. Ibid., 394-405.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid.

21. John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America ( New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 291.

22. Sue Ellen Case also notes that as lesbians moved up the economic ladder, they tended to forgo role-playing, a move that may, in fact, be connected to passing: to achieve class privilege, one must not be visibly lesbian. In Henry Abelove, David Halperin, and Michele Aina Barale, eds., The Gay and Lesbian Studies Reader ( New York: Routledge, 1993).

23. Elizabeth Lapovsky and Madeline Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community ( New York: Routledge, 1993).

24. J ill Johnston, Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution ( New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973).

25. In Vance, Pleasure and Danger, 386.

26. George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe ( Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).

27. In Vance, Pleasure and Danger, 279.

28. Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," in Toward an Anthropology of Women ed. Rayna R. Reiter ( New York: Monthly Review, 1975), 157-210.

29. See Rubin's interview with Judith Butler, "More Gender Trouble: Feminism Meets Queer Theory," differences, 6, nos. 2-3 (Summer-Fall 1994): 27-62, for a description of Rubin's understanding of the relationship between the two articles.

30. "Thinking Sex" is, for example, the first article in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Butler, however, wants to emphasize the relationship between "Thinking Sex" and a

concept of sexual minorities that is not fully encompassed by "lesbian and gay," thus marking the import of "Thinking Sex" as extending, at least to "queer," as well as "feminist" studies. See Judith Butler, "Against Proper Objects," differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6, nos. 2-3 ( Summer-Fall, 1994): 1-26.

31. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley ( New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 106-7.

32. Butler, "Against Proper Objects,"15.

33. I use the term "Christian-identified radical right" to avoid a series of analytic reductions in terms like the "religious right." The reductive nature of such appellations tends to the claims of the Right -- that to be religious is to be Christian is to be a right-wing Christian. While "Christian-identified radical right" may be a more accurate phrase, it is also cumbersome. Thus, I also use the shorthand version of the "Right."

34. Butler, "Against Proper Objects,"14.

35. Ibid.

36. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 159.

37. Abdul R. JanMohamed, "Sexuality on/of the Racial Border: Foucault, Wright, and the Articulation of 'Racialized Sexuality,'" in Discourses of Sexuality: From Aristotle to AIDS, ed. Domna Stanton ( Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 94-116.

38. Ibid., 104.

39. Minnie Bruce Pratt, "Identity: Skin Blood Heart," in Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism, Elly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Barbara Smith (Brooklyn: Long Haul Press, 1984).

40. Susan Fraiman, "Geometries of Race and Gender: Eve Sedgwick, Spike Less, Charlayne Hunter-Gault," Feminist Studies 20, no. 1 ( Spring 1994): 67-84, 76.

41. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality.

42. See Gayatri Spivak "Scatter Speculations on the Question of Value" for an explication of the affective investments in labor, of the ways in which the body desires to "consume the affect of labor itself," thus constituting labor as "affectively necessary" (in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics [ New York: Metheun, 1988], 162).

43. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities ( London: Verso, 1991; originally published in 1983).

44. Didi Herman, The Antigay Agenda: Orthodox Vision and the Christian Right ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 63-64.

45. Foucault, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Robinow ( New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 350.

46. Butler, "Against Proper Objects,"15.

47. New York Times, 5 November 1995, Sec.

48. Christian Coalition News Release, 17 May 1995.

49. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 328.