Appreciation,admiration and affection

Abstract

As you get older, a couple of things happen – the probability of your own dying increases, and so too does that of friends. So, recently there have been the deaths of some very good friends and colleagues.

As you get older, a couple of things happen – the probability of your own dying increases, and so too does that of friends. So, recently there have been the deaths of some very good friends and colleagues – David Morgan, Marina Blagojević Hughson, Wendy Parkin and David Jackson – all of whom in very different ways wrote on or around sexuality and social life … and now Ken.

Continuing with age, and I hadn’t really considered this before now, but we were more less the same academic generation, and with a somewhat similar trajectory. Looking back, I now see I identified with and looked up to him, perhaps even tried to emulate him, in certain ways. Ken joined the Essex Department in 1975, a year after I joined Bradford; and he became Head of Department and co-organized the British Sociological Association conference in 1993, the same year I became HoD at Bradford, before co-organizing the 1997 BSA conference.

Ken was a huge bubbly presence; aptly named, he knew a lot. I’ve no idea when we met, but it was probably at a British Sociological Association conference in the early or mid-1980s, probably at a session on sexuality. However, my first two clear memories were at a meeting of the inaugural meeting of the Editorial advisory board of the Critical Studies on Men and Masculinities book series in the late 1980s, and then in 1991 examining Tim Edwards’ PhD which Ken had supervised as one of the first UK social science PhDs on AIDS and gay men.

One of Ken’s many contributions was the nurturing of PhDs on very different aspects of the sociology of sexuality, and beyond, and getting them to completion in good shape. I ended up examining three more, Pauline Fuller, Simon Hardy and Alistair MacDougall, and they were all special occasions to meet Ken and colleagues. Those three are, however, just a few of that whole generation of Ken-sexuality-postdocs now scattered throughout the world, most of whom continue to do further inspiring work. He has passed on a huge legacy through these many PhDs on sexuality, especially but far from only on gay sexuality (see: https://essexsociologyalumni.com/other-stuff/ph-ds-and-m-phils-awarded/). At the same time, Ken was an excellent examiner, as testified to me by Malcolm Cowburn when recounting his own PhD examination experience with Ken as external examiner – that is, a very positive experience, both generous and rigorous, on child sexual abuse offenders, and the complex ethics involved in researching them.

Ken combined a love of sociology and a love of life, and a commitment both to critical academic thoroughness and scholarly insight, and to politics, personal politics, and what used to be called Gay Liberation, and then to the shifting area that has become LGBTIQA + studies or more simply, if not quite accurately, Sexuality Studies. This journal, The Journal, was and is all about those combinations, and making those communities on sexualities in such profound and important ways that are really hard to overstate – how did we manage before? From all of this, his personal practice, dare I say his service his accomplishments, he was the kind of academic who engendered not only appreciation and admiration, but also affection.

He also told some touchingly funny stories, for example, about teaching, especially the new First Year Sociology students (a course he took over in 1988, establishing a new course that ran long-term), whether beginning a lecture with mathematical equations and symbols, and seeing how long before they started shuffling, or beginning the lecture from the back of the lecture theatre, and so on. Ethnomethodology and benign garfinkling in action. He could also be mischievous, even in some unexpected situations – in his own obituary of Mary McIntosh, he wrote: ‘[she] adopted, first, functionalist ideas stressing the inter-relatedness and workings of the different parts of a society; and then Marxist economic ones (there is really only a small – but major ideological – step between them)’ (Plummer, 2013).

His texts, his work and his writing were, for me, one of the inspirations for developing what have come to be called ‘Critical Studies on Men and Masculinities’. He wrote critically, reflectively and most tellingly in a way that was understandable, educational and stimulating – against the unfortunate fashion that values obscurity and unclarity, as if that means cleverness. He wrote clearly and directly. The books stand out, from Sexual Stigma, Telling Sexual Stories, Modern Homosexualities and Cosmopolitan Sexualities, to the ‘more general’ and global sociologies and critical humanisms. I was also very much drawn to his various methodological texts.

Just one example, now less consulted than it deserves, and that I used over several years, was the Sociological Review article with Anna Faraday on ‘Doing Life Histories’, specifically in doing sex research, and examining various problems arising, categorized as: social science, technical, ethical and political, and personal (Faraday and Plummer, 1979). Following discussion of how the Glaser and Straus method of exploration and theory generation was found wanting, the authors moved onto a second method, with these sentences which stick in my mind: ‘The second method is perhaps best described as Ad Hoc Fumbling Around. It does not work with any rigorous conception of generating theory or generating sensitizing concepts. It involves focussing on whole areas, e.g. transvestism, sado-masochism, paedophilia, and thinking widely about a range of problems associated with that area’ (p. 785). The article, along with extracts from Telling Sexual Stories, namely, ‘Making stories happen’ and ‘The shifting stories of late modernity’, was key reading for several courses on ‘Researching Difficult and Powerful Issues’ or similar, in the late 1990s when I moved to Finland. I found these to be very good teaching texts, and personally part of a shift to another country and ‘culture’. The focus of these texts was clearly much about sexuality, but was also much more inclusive, in all senses, putting that into full sociological and critical humanist contextualization, and sparking thoughts for other sociological projects and puzzles. Ad hoc fumbling around is not to be dismissed, needs to be taken more seriously.

Last time I saw Ken was in Linköping, Sweden, in 2014. He was on the doctoral examination committee of three persons, as is the Swedish system, for the PhD of the Turkish scholar, activist and now NGO leader, Alp Biricik. I asked Alp whom he would ideally like on the committee; of course, the first name was Ken’s. The thesis, A Walk on Istiklal Street: Dissident Sexual Geographies, Politics and Citizenship in Istanbul, a study of three generations of gay and trans men, was publicly ‘defended’ in Gender Studies at Linköping University on 27th March. And the visit, with his partner, Everard, was a special pleasure, even while Ken complained, in his amusing way, why is the ‘opponent’, in this case, Brian Heaphy, being paid a fee, although the committee members were not, that is, apart from the travel, hotel and some days’ hospitality. I explained it’s meant to avoid corruption, as it’s the committee that decides the outcome of the PhD examination in Sweden, not the opponent who just does all the work. Laughs ensued.

The titles of Ken chose also spoke volumes, for example: ‘Dialogues of Hope for a Better World’ for his short presentation at the Essex Sociology Department’s 50th Anniversary Conference in June 2015; and ‘Making the Person Matter’ in the linked anniversary book, Imaginations: Fifty Years of Essex Sociology, that he, no doubt lovingly, edited (Plummer, 2014). Thankfully, he was not fully Foucault-ed. Ken summed up both himself and sociology in the first and last lines of his own ‘A Poetic for Sociology: The Haunting of Social Things’ (Plummer, n.d), when he wrote: first,

“We live the social electric.

The air we breathe is social.

The tiny things and the major things.

The social haunting of life in vast time and space.

The social is natural and the natural is social.”

And, last,

“Haunted by doubt, love and hope”.

Do read the whole poem. Thanks, Ken.