Abstract
As a child of the 80s born into a politically conscious family, I remember how destructive the silence and language around homosexuality was. I remain both gobsmacked and dispiritingly unsurprised that the same homophobic language has ascended and recirculated with new and boringly familiar resonances. While others respond to the more blatant and harmful policies and practices emerging from these rhetorics, Ian Barnard turns their attention to sex panics, or points of crisis emerging from liberal discourses around sexual assault and sexual transgression. The chapters offer case studies that, when considered collectively, constitute an archive of sex panics including child molester panics (chap. 2), sex-trafficking panics (chap. 3), transgender panics (chap. 4), incest panics (chap. 5), panics over queer kids (chap. 6), and pedagogy panics (chap. 7). Barnard’s queer rhetorical method of analysis “moves from examining subtextual queerphobia in sex panics to unpacking the mechanisms and consequences of explicit queer phobia” (p. 7). Through careful, nuanced analysis Barnard shows how “indirection and convolution work to shore up sex panics” (p. 11) and the queerphobia that supports them.
Throughout, Barnard demonstrates the operations of these genres of sex panic through a sparkling array of contemporary examples academic, pop cultural, and legal from the late 20th and early 21st century. The consequence for Sex Panic Rhetorics is a feeling of timeliness and urgency. Cumulatively, the chapters gather force and energy via Barnard’s nuance and attention to detail. We see evidence of their thinking through the complexity of their position: they play with claims and counterclaims; they acknowledge the limitations of their evidence; and they proceed with epistemic humility that does not undercut their central argument: sex panic rhetorics are queerphobic.
The primary mechanisms through which sex panic rhetorics function is through obfuscation, erasure, and denial that anxiety over homo/heterosexual definition drives the panic. In this way, Barnard revives Sedgwick’s classic foundational arguments in her groundbreaking Epistemology of the Closet and Tendencies. For example, liberal protectionist rhetorics around queer kids manifests itself in a host of discourses around anti-bullying and the right for children to be queer. At the same time, Barnard details, this support of queer kids erases sexuality and sex. Similarly, “lip service to solidarity with trans peoples and politics can become a cover for queer sex panic” (p. 118). This is to say that liberal affirmation of trans people belies a fundamental anxiety about nonbinary gender. Trans folks are only allowed to be intelligible within recognizable gender binaries.
Underneath all this heteronormative denial and queerphobia rests the very real fact that queer and trans people exist. There is, no doubt, real material damage that comes from the rhetorical erasures Barnard details. There is, too, space to feel angry about such erasures. Nevertheless, I am reminded not of resilience but of queer and trans survival and joys that persist. Not everyone will survive and sometimes the joy is difficult. Reading through Sex Panic Rhetorics, though, I experience an underlying dark humor witnessing people try so hard to erase queerness and transness and yet continually fail. Would not it be easier, perhaps, for heteronormative antagonists to not fight so hard against queer and trans ways of life? I think so. What makes Barnard’s work useful is the way they sketch the contours of the heteronormative fight against our survival. Normativity is pernicious and effective but not entirely successful. There is hope to be had in the presence of such failure.
I offer two points of nuance for readers. First, I am a queer feminist rhetorician with progressive politics and so the body of scholarship Barnard uses feels accessible. Others unfamiliar with queer and feminist rhetorical theory are likely to have a steeper learning curve. Even so, Barnard is lucid as they are adroit; their prose is refreshing. Second, it might be helpful for readers to hold onto the fact that Barnard’s critiques of liberal politics are not the same as overt, conservative attacks on queer and trans communities. Responding to the more overt remains important. However, as Barnard writes, “[t]he problem of shifting to damage control mode is that we become only reactive, we do not expand on progressive agendas, we centralize rhetorics of hate, we become satisfied with holding the status quo intact” (p. 173). If we queers and trans people are to survive, the status quo must not hold. In Sex Panic Rhetorics, we see Barnard gathering their intellectual, critical resources to offer us new ways forward. I imagine such a world Barnard envisions for us is possible if only more people listen.
ORCID iD
Timothy Oleksiak https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6384-1275