Chastity for democracy: Surplus repression and the rhetoric of sex education

ABSTRACT

Moving from opposition to participation, the Adolescent Family Life Act (1981) and the development of abstinence education marks the conservative movement's pivot to a rhetorical strategy of tolerance that enabled it to coopt the public culture of sex discourse. Working from Herbert Marcuse's theory of “surplus repression,” I argue that the New Right seized the liberationist argument for open public discourse about sexuality to sublimate libidinal desires into a national project of familial (re)productivity. The AFLA is significant in the rhetorical history of sex education because it demarcates the transition to a productive form of biopolitics that sought to manage sexuality by instrumentalizing rather than censuring bodily desire. Conservative sex talk illustrates how Eros—transgressive, creative, and erotic desires—is channeled into the discursive production of hyper-functional subjects invested in their own subjugation.

KEYWORDS:

• Surplus repression
• biopolitics
• sex education rhetoric
• Eros
• Herbert Marcuse

Acknowledgments

A version of this essay was presented at the Gender and Citizenship Conference, February 20, 2016 at Texas A&M University. The author wishes to thank Kristen E. Hoerl, Barbara Biesecker, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful criticism.

Notes

1. Quoted in Robin Jensen, Dirty Words: The Rhetoric of Public Sex Education, 1870–1924 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 10.

2. Jensen, Dirty Words, 6.

3. See Rebekah Saul, “Whatever Happened to the Adolescent Family Life Act?,” Guttmacher Report on Public Policy 1, no. 2 (1998): 5–11; and Alesha E. Doan and Jean Calterone Williams, The Politics of Virginity: Abstinence in Sex Education (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008).

4. Michel Foucault argues that in the history of ideas visible contradictions are explained as accidents, surface appearances, or aberrations of what are otherwise coherent systems of thought, or a hidden unity underlying a discourse. Foucault suggests instead that contradictions can be understood as organizing principles of a system that “constitutes the very law of its own existence.” In this case, opposing utterances about sex education are its founding law. Thus, both opponents and proponents drew from the same organizing principle to support the same fundamental statement about the danger of desire. See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971), 151.

5. Jeremiah Denton, Reauthorization of the Adolescent Family Life Demonstrations Project Act of 1981 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1984), 170.

6. See Jeffery Escoffier, “Fabulous Politics,” in The World the Sixties Made: Politics and Culture in Recent America, eds. Van Gosse and Richard R. Moser (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2008); and Steven Seidman, Embattled Eros: Sexual Politics and Ethics in Contemporary America (New York: Routedge, 1992).

7. See Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); and Janice M. Irvine, Talk about Sex: The Battles Over Sex Education in the United States (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 2004).

8. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (London, UK: Routedge, 1998), 40.

9. The text I examine consists of two U.S. senate hearings before the Subcommittee on Labor and Human Relations on April 24 and 26, 1984 (Ninety-Eighth Congress, Second Session). The hearings were called by Senator Denton to hear witness testimony from participants in the AFLA demonstration project from 1981 to 1984 and organizations involved in adoption, counseling, and sex education.

10. Elizabeth Schroeder, Sexuality Education: Past, Present, and Future (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2009).

11. See Robin E. Jensen, “Using Science to Argue for Sexual Education in U.S. Public Schools: Dr. Ella Flagg Young and the 1913 ‘Chicago Experiment,’” Science Communication 29, no. 2 (2007): 217–41; and Jeffery P. Moran, “‘Modernism gone Mad’: Sex Education Comes to Chicago, 1913,” Journal of American History 83, no. 2 (1996): 481–513.

12. Jeffery P. Moran, Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the 20th Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); and L. E. Rotskoff, “Sex in the Schools: Adolescence, Sex Education, and Social Reform,” Reviews in American History 29 (2001): 310–18.

13. John P. Elia, “School-Based Sexuality Education: A Century of Sexual and Social Control,” in Sexuality Education—Past Present and Future, Volume One—History and Information, eds. Elizabeth Schroeder and Judy Kuriansky (Westport CT: Praeger, 2009), 33–57.

14. Irvine, Talk about Sex, 18.

15. Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture (London, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015).

16. Elizabeth Schroeder and Judy Kuriansky, eds., Sexuality Education: Past, Present, and Future (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009).

17. Natalia Mehlman, “Sex Ed  …  and the Reds? Reconsidering the Anaheim Battle Over Sex Education, 1962–1969,” History of Education Quarterly 47, no. 2 (2007): 203–32.

18. Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 333.

19. Including but not limited to the Americans United for Life, Christian Coalition, Concerned Women for America, Eagle Forum, Family of the Americas Foundation, Focus on the Family, and National Right to Life Crusade. See also Janice M. Irvine, Disorders of Desire: Sexuality and Gender in Modern American Sexology (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2005).

20. Seidman, Embattled Eros, 7.

21. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2009).

22. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 (New York: Random House, 1978).

23. Barbara Biesecker, “Michel Foucault and the Question of Rhetoric,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 25, no. 4 (1992): 353.

24. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 11.

25. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 136. See also Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1977); and The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978—1979 (New York: Picador, 2010).

26. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 136.

27. Stuart Murray, “Thanatopolitics: On the Use of Death for Mobilizing Political Life,” Polygraph: An International Journal of Politics and Culture 18 (2006): 204.

28. For instance, Foucault argues that “the endeavor, begun in the eighteenth century, to rationalize the problems presented to governmental practice by the phenomena characteristic of a group of living human beings constituted as a population: health, sanitation, birthrate, longevity, race,” See Michel Foucault, The Essential Foucault, eds. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (New York: The New Press, 2003), 202.

29. Ronald W. Greene, Malthusian Worlds: U.S. Leadership and the Governing of the Population Crisis (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), 4.

30. Greene, Malthusian Worlds, 17.

31. See Stuart Murray, “Hegel's Pathology of Recognition: A Biopolitical Fable,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 48, no. 4 (2015): 443–72.

32. Greene, Malthusian Worlds, 4.

33. Greene, Malthusian Worlds, 58.

34. Gilles Deleuze and FeÌlix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1977).

35. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 106, 108.

36. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 106.

37. Christine J. Gardner, Making Chastity Sexy: The Rhetoric of Evangelical Abstinence Campaigns (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

38. Marcuse, Eros, 15.

39. Marcuse, Eros, 38.

40. Mark Cobb, “Diatribes and Distortions: Marcuse's Academic Reputation,” in Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader, ed. John Abromeit, 163–187 (New York: Routledge, 2004), 180.

41. Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Emancipation: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Volume Five: Herbert Marcuse Collected Papers (New York: Routledge, 2010), 54.

42. Marcuse, Eros, xlii.

43. This phrase appears in Marcuse's unpublished manuscript “Obsolescence of Psychoanalysis” prepared for a presentation at the 1963 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. Quoted in Kellner and Pierce, Philosophy, 56.

44. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 12.

45. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 88.

46. See Casey Ryan Kelly, “‘We Are Not Free’: The Meaning of <Freedom> in American Indian Resistance to President Johnson's War on Poverty,” Communication Quarterly 62, no. 4 (2014): 455–73.

47. I am guided by Lisa M. Gring-Pemble's observation that the Congressional record provides rhetorical critics with a “means of gaining insight into the rhetorical processes by which social policy is formulated.” Congressional testimony is particularly illustrative of how biopolitical control is rhetorically enacted. Lisa M. Gring-Pemble, “‘Are We Going to Now Govern by Anecdote?’: Rhetorical Constructions of Welfare Recipients in Congressional Hearings, Debates, and Legislation, 1992–1996,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 87, no. 4 (2001): 342; See also Zornitsa Keremidchieva, “The Congressional Debates on the 19th Amendment: Jurisdictional Rhetoric and the Assemblage of the U.S. Body Politic,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 99, no. 1 (2013): 51–73.

48. Philip Wander, “The Third Persona: An Ideological Turn in Rhetorical Theory,” Central States Speech Journal 35, no. 4 (1984): 197–216.

49. Mercedes Wilson, Reauthorization of the Adolescent Family Life Demonstrations Project Act of 1981 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1984), 192.

50. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 129.

51. Denton, Reauthorization, 65.

52. Wilson, Reauthorization, 192–93.

53. Michael C. McGee argues that the Constitutional phrases “we, the people” does not refer to an already existing public, but rhetorically calls into being a constructed vision of the nation. Hence, “we, the families,” does not refer to a family demographic but instead creates a subject position for the audience to inhabit. See Michael C. McGee, “In Search of ‘the People’: A Rhetorical Alternative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 61, no. 3 (1975): 235–49.

54. Denton, Reauthorization, 2.

55. Denton, Reauthorization, 2.

56. Denton, Reauthorization, 2.

57. Assistant Secretary for Health and Human Services.

58. Assistant Secretary for Population Affairs.

59. Edward Brandt and Marjory Mecklenburg, Reauthorization of the Adolescent Family Life Demonstrations Project Act of 1981 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1984), 7.

60. Mary William Sullivan, Reauthorization of the Adolescent Family Life Demonstrations Project Act of 1981 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1984), 37–38.

61. Sullivan, Reauthorization, 38.

62. Sullivan, Reauthorization, 38.

63. Here, freedom functions ideographically, as a politically resonate term in American public discourse that warrants actions and cultivates ideological identification. See Michael Calvin McGee, “The ‘Ideograph’: A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66, no. 1 (1980): 1–16.

64. See Jane Gerhard, Desiring Revolution: Second-Wave Feminism and the Rewriting of Twentieth-Century American Sexual Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

65. Terrance Olson, Reauthorization of the Adolescent Family Life Demonstrations Project Act of 1981 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1984), 68.

66. Wilson, Reauthorization, 194–95.

67. Wilson, Reauthorization, 195.

68. Wilson, Reauthorization, 196.

69. Wilson, Reauthorization, 195.

70. Wilson, Reauthorization, 196.

71. Margarita Fernandez-Mattei, Reauthorization of the Adolescent Family Life Demonstrations Project Act of 1981 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1984), 228. Fernandex-Mattei testified on behalf of the Coalition of Hispanic Mental Health and Human Service Organization.

72. Olson, Reauthorization, 71.

73. Olson, Reauthorization, 71.

74. Olson, Reauthorization, 71.

75. Olson, Reauthorization, 67.

76. Denton, Reauthorization, 49.

77. Denton, Reauthorizing, 170.

78. Denton, Reauthorizing, 49.

79. Mildred Jefferson, Reauthorization of the Adolescent Family Life Demonstrations Project Act of 1981 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1984), 174.

80. Jefferson, Reauthorizing, 174.

81. Jefferson, Reauthorizing, 174.

82. Jefferson, Reauthorizing, 170.

83. Jefferson, Reauthorizing, 174, 170.

84. Denton, Reauthorizing, 170.

85. Wander, “The Third Persona.”

86. Jefferson, Reauthorizing, 172. Emphasis mine.

87. Denton, Reauthorizing, 171.

88. Jefferson, Reauthorizing, 171.

89. Denton, Reauthorizing, 171.

90. See William Saletan, “The GOP Argument for Defunding Planned Parenthood Is Incoherent,” Slate, September 30, 2015, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/09/the_gop_s_argument_for_defunding_planned_parenthood_makes_no_sense.html.

91. For scientific studies on the ineffectiveness of abstinence education see Hannah Bruckner and Peter Bearman, “After the Promise: The STD Consequences of Adolescent Virginity Pledges,” Journal of Adolescent Health 36, no. 4 (2005): 271–78.

92. See Tara Culp-Ressler, “5 Offensive Analogies Abstinence-Only Lessons Use To Tell Teens Sex Makes Them Dirty,” ThinkProgress, April 7, 2014, http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014/04/07/3423582/abstinence-only-dirty-analogies/. Anna Wolfe, “Mississippi Sex Education Efforts Still Limited,” accessed December 30, 2015, http://www.jacksonfreepress.com/news/2015/feb/25/mississippi-sex-education-efforts-still-limited/.

93. Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2009).

94. Andy Kopsa, “Obama's Evangelical Gravy Train,” The Nation, July 8, 2014, http://www.thenation.com/article/obamas-evangelical-gravy-train/

95. Barbara Ehernreich, “Opportunities in Abstinence Training,” The Nation, August 1, 2007 http://www.thenation.com/article/opportunities-abstinence-training/