Lust Regressions

In their polemical Hatred of Sex, Oliver Davis (a professor in French studies at the University of Warwick, known primarily as a scholar of Jacques Rancière) and Tim Dean (a prominent voice in psychoanalytic queer theory, author of the essential Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking) diagnose a universal “hatred of sex,” whose symptoms they identify in a litany of fields: queer theory, gender studies, intersectionality, affect theory, attachment theory, ego psychology, traumatology, the #MeToo movement, satanic panic, and QAnon. Their understanding of “hatred of sex” is analogical to what Rancière calls “hatred of democracy”: the constitutive tension of the simultaneously ordering and disordering forces of democracy. Davis and Dean argue that psychoanalytic theories of sex show us that sexual pleasure is similarly occupied by contrary “centripetal and centrifugal” forces. “Sex disorders us” (20), they write, following in the footsteps of Leo Bersani's reframing of Laplanche's ébranlement (shattering). Sex creates unbinding pleasures, whose “intensity approaches the borderline between pleasure and something that remains unrecognizable as pleasure to the ego, which is, after all, a quintessentially bound form. . . . The human ego . . . hates sex once it reaches maximal intensity” (28).In this, Hatred of Sex is not far from well-trodden ground either in queer theory's antisocial thesis or specifically in Dean's oeuvre. But the work of this first chapter is mostly the foundation for Davis and Dean's jeremiad against the contemporary state of queer theory (chapter 2), feminist activism (chapter 3), ego psychology (chapters 3 and 4), and trauma discourse (chapter 4). As part of University of Nebraska Press's Provocations series, Hatred of Sex often leans on controversial claims about identity, difference, and minoritarian academic fields with less-than-ideal evidence and analysis.This is especially true in their chapter lamenting queer theory's contemporary distaste for analysis of sex. As a scholar of pornography and sexual cultures, I am sympathetic to the claim that queer theory should not lose focus on sex and sexual pleasure. But Davis and Dean blame their sense of the desexualization of queer theory on the specter of “intersectionality,” which they argue “redescribe[s]” sex “in terms of gender and race, categories with which the neoliberal university, despite its myriad hierarchies and exclusions, is considerably more comfortable” (47). This is a surprising claim, as it is largely out of step with what many (especially in Black studies) have shown about the antagonisms of the neoliberal university to racial and gender difference (see, e.g., Ferguson 2012; Moten and Harvey 2013; Doyle 2015; Kelly 2016). But their claim is also meant as a larger theoretical critique: sex and “the conflicted pleasures of human bodies” become “harder to see” when they are analyzed through the lens of gender and race (xiv). In this claim, Hatred of Sex reveals a wide discrediting of scholarship on sex and sexual pleasure coming from queer of color critique, feminist theory/women's studies, and trans studies. Even though these scholars have written in depth about the way gender and race inform the dimensions of pleasure and vice versa (see, e.g., Shimizu 2007; Sharpe 2010; Bettcher 2014; Nash 2014), Davis and Dean effectively push these works away by insisting that sexuality “operates at the level of the unconscious in a way that gender, race, and class do not” (77).1As evidence for their field-wide claim about the state of queer theory, they point to a small and idiosyncratic group of works: the “What's Queer About Queer Studies Now?” special issue of Social Text (2005), the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's turn to affect theory, and Roderick Ferguson's One-Dimensional Queer (2018). Surprisingly, their brief list of “valuable” scholars who “think the politics of race without allowing the urgency of racial injustice to obscure the difficulties of sex” (72) is not only longer than their list of antagonists but is perhaps a more representative picture of queer theory today: Kathryn Bond Stockton, Darieck Scott, Nguyen Tan Hoang, Mary C. Foltz, and Avgi Saketopolou. Thus, the problem Davis and Dean identify—that queer theory has abandoned speaking about sex because of its devotion to the “juridical imaginary” (64) of Crenshaw's intersectionality—seems speciously evidenced.2Part of the issue here is what is meant by “sex” and what is meant by “identity.” Davis and Dean continually restate that when they talk about “sex” and “identity,” they do so in the psychoanalytic sense. In this, they are right that “sex” in the psychoanalytic sense is antagonistic to “identity” in the psychoanalytic sense. But the works that they primarily critique are simply not using “sex” or “identity” in their psychoanalytic senses but rather in sociopolitical senses that do find sex and identity to be compossible. In this, Hatred of Sex can be said to be begging the question, in the original sense of that phrase. The accusation that queer theory does not talk sufficiently about sex because it is too focused on identity denies those writings that analyze how identity affects sex (and vice versa) precisely because what Davis and Dean mean by “sex” is limited to “those aspects of sex which have no truck with identity” (64). I do not mean that this is a problem for any psychoanalytically informed theory of sex. Indeed, Lee Edelman's recent Bad Education (2023) rigorously takes up writing in Black and feminist studies and reveals the way that what those fields discuss as their particular negative Other (the Black in Afropessimism, the Woman in sexual difference feminism) coheres really well with the Lacanian sense of “sex” as the “nothing.” Davis and Dean's account avoids this kind of cross-framework thinking with forms of difference and leans instead on a closed-circuit polemic.In their third and fourth chapters, Davis and Dean turn to the history and enduring effects of ego psychology, particularly in the lineage of attachment theory and traumatology. They provide well-structured critiques of the work of John Bowlby and Judith Herman especially, focusing particularly on how Bowlby's attachment theory and Herman's traumatology intersect with structures of governance and the idea of “security” in the neoliberal state. Their work in these chapters, especially their historically informed accounts of the clinical practices of these two schools, is where the book is strongest. But as with other sections of Hatred of Sex, Davis and Dean make some risky jumps from their accounts of the clinic to increasingly vague complaints about contemporary political phenomena. They accuse attachment theory of laying the ground for the #MeToo movement and QAnon, both of which they see as forms of populist “sexual victimology” (the former entangling itself with governance, the other manically disregarding it) (93, 149). They argue that the #MeToo movement constantly “recode[s] benign sexual inappropriateness as abuse” (129). But Davis and Dean never truly define what “benign sexual inappropriateness” would mean. The only explanation they give of the term is in a footnote: “For a host of examples of benign sexual inappropriateness, see Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue” (166).While Davis and Dean's insights into how ego psychology's conservative revisions of Freudian insights on sexuality are useful, their conclusions on the state of queer theory and feminism are at best undertheorized and at worst rather reactionary. Davis and Dean's statements that “thinking instead [of sex] about race and gender enhances academics’ political credibility and institutional authority” (57) or that “[rape] is comparatively easy to discuss, in the sense that we all oppose rape, just as we all oppose racial and gender discrimination” (64) signal a real disconnect with the contemporary work and lived experience of academics of color, queer of color critique, and feminist studies of rape. Hatred of Sex may be ultimately most useful as an artifact of the difficulties that a certain lineage of psychoanalytic queer theory encounters as it is experienced as increasingly conservative in the contemporary shifts of queer thought.