Christian Klesse - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Christian Klesse
Canadian Journal of Sociology, Mar 31, 2018
M imi Schippers's book is an important contribution to the new critical scholarship on consensual... more M imi Schippers's book is an important contribution to the new critical scholarship on consensual non-monogamy and polyamory. Schippers's framework fuses feminist, queer and critical race theory to analyse the intersecting regimes of normativity that shape contemporary representations of non-monogamous and polyamorous sexualities. Schippers works with a polyqueer methodology that draws on popular culture (namely literature and film), blogs, activist literature and autoethnographic writing. Schippers's focus is primarily-although not exclusively-on triangulated non-monogamies, and she is particularly interested in the polyqueer and transgressive potential WMM constellations, i.e. configurations that involve one woman and two men, including group sex practices. Being both theoretically ambitious and methodologically innovative, this book is an important contribution to gender and sexuality studies, critical race studies, cultural studies, literary studies and film studies. The argument that monogamy, monormativity, and compulsive monogamy are integral and constitutive parts of hegemonic regimes of sexual normalcy, runs through the whole text. Schippers argues that gender and queer studies have paid insufficient attention to mononormativity (i.e. the privileging and the naturalisation of monogamous couple bonds). Existing theorisations of mononormativity tend to diminish the centrality of compulsory monogamy in contemporary regimes of power around sexuality, by either conflating it with heteronormativity or considering it to be a mere element integral to the latter. Moreover, Schippers highlights the important role that mononormativity plays in underpinning gender and race privileges. She suggests that consensually nonmonogamous intimacies or sexualities are repressed, tabooed or erased, because they carry the potential to trouble and destabilise hegemonic masculinities along the axes of race, class and sexuality. Chapter one explores the gender politics at the heart of the common scandalisation of intimate scenarios in which a woman may have sex with the best friend of her (male) partner. The naturalisation of jealousy, a discourse of male rivalry and the vilification of the figure of the 'cheat
Routledge eBooks, Nov 1, 2020
The critique of monogamy has been a pervasive feature of feminist debates on gender, power, and s... more The critique of monogamy has been a pervasive feature of feminist debates on gender, power, and sexuality since the nineteenth century. Different currents within feminist theorising and activism have tackled the oppressive effects of cultures of sex, intimacy, and kinship that render monogamy a normative feature within women's lives. Rejections of monogamy were voiced from within Marxist and anarchist feminism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in existentialist feminism in the post-World War II years, and in various strands of radical feminism, lesbian feminism, and bisexual feminism since the late 1960s, unfolding in a complex genealogy that extends to contemporary queer-feminist positions. This work has developed different foci, ranging from critiques of capitalist gender relations and the division of labour over attempts to reshape female subjectivity to hetero-patriarchal constructions of love and the family. Some of this work has also been motivated by sexual liberationist ideas or identity political agendas (for example, as in radical feminist, lesbian feminist, or bifeminist movements). Despite important differences, I suggest that all these lineages are interconnected and held together by common threads of discourse. One of the unifying features of feminist anti-monogamy has been the common concern with women's erotic autonomy. Yet how the concept of autonomy has been filled with meaning depends profoundly on the backdrop of the respective wider social movement agendas. While I have documented the breadth of this genealogy of feminist antimonogamy critiques elsewhere (Klesse, 2018), I focus here specifically on bifeminist refutations of monogamy, concentrating primarily on work published in the United States and United Kingdom in the 1980s and 1990s, with the aim of highlighting arguments that have influenced more recent bisexual and queer feminist discussions on the topic. Through the analysis of some key texts, I show that bifeminist critiques of this period have shared some of the core assumptions prevalent within other identity-related feminist currents (such as lesbian feminism and heterosexual feminism), while endorsing a bifeminist standpoint and advocating a distinctly bifeminist
UCL Press eBooks, Mar 8, 2021
XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018), Jul 18, 2018
Sexualities, Apr 26, 2023
Ken Plummer’s life work has had a major impact on the development of the sociology of sexuality. ... more Ken Plummer’s life work has had a major impact on the development of the sociology of sexuality. While being firmly rooted in and committed to the traditions of pragmatism and symbolic interactionism – which chimes nicely with his philosophical stance of critical humanism – Ken Plummer openly engaged in a critical dialogue with many theoretical perspectives. This renders his work a rich resource for researchers working on sexualities from within different paradigms. This paper engages in a critical appraisal of some of Plummer’s most significant concepts through autobiographical reflection on my personal experience of working with Ken Plummer as a PhD student, further tracing the influence his work has had on my own writing on consensual non-monogamies, LGBTQIA + activism and queer film festivals. Using autoethnography and memory work, the essay highlights the powerful potential residing in Plummer’s path-breaking contributions to social constructionism (script theory and narrative power), methodology (personal documents), narrative sociology (sexual stories), critical humanism (dialogical ethics and cosmopolitan sexualities) and political sociology (intra-movement conflict, intimate citizenship, counterpublics and age standpoints). The essay argues that these ideas – and Plummer’s overall legacy as a scholar and theorist – bear a strong significance for future research in sexuality studies.
The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, Feb 15, 2007
Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung, Feb 22, 2017
Christian Klesse a Michel Foucaults "Sexualität und Wahrheit" hat mein eigenes Schreiben, Forsche... more Christian Klesse a Michel Foucaults "Sexualität und Wahrheit" hat mein eigenes Schreiben, Forschen und Lehren zum Thema Sexualität stark beeinflusst. Dank dem diesem Text innewohnenden beharrlichen Drängen, hinter die Dinge zu schauen und sich nicht mit der Armseligkeit und Gewalttätigkeit der gegebenen Geschlechter-und Sexualitätsordnung abzufinden, motivieren die drei Bände, über den Erwerb historischen Wissens hinaus kritische Fragen zu stellen. Dies sind Fragen, die sich wiederum als Teil einer Suchbewegung verstehen lassen, neue (und gerechtere) Formen des Seins zu entwickeln, also herauszutreten aus der Unmöglichkeit des Unmittelbaren, historisch Übermittelten. Meines Erachtens begründet die Kritik Foucaults eine kulturrevolutionäre Perspektive, ohne einem Autoritarismus in Namen der Kollektivität oder im Sinne eines absoluten Wahrheitsbegriffes anheim zu fallen. Die Kritik des Sexualitätsdiskurses in "Der Wille zum Wissen" (1977) hat mir unter anderem geholfen, ein umfassenderes Verständnis von Heteronormativität zu entwickeln, das ich in meinem Buch "The Spectre of Promiscuity. Gay Male and Bisexual Non-monogamies and Polyamories" (2007) beschrieben habe. Foucaults Kritik des Sexualitätsdispostivs impliziert einen Heteronormativitätsbegiff, der über die Kontrolle der geschlechtlichen Objektwahl (z.B. durch eine Naturalisierung der Heterosexualität oder eine Stigmatisierung lesbisschwuler, ‚fluider' oder queerer Identitäten oder Begehrensdynamiken) hinausgeht, um auch Normen hinsichtlich der Emotionalität, Beziehungsgestaltung, Konstellation, Körperpräsentation, kulturellen Positionierung, aber auch des Berührungs-oder Begehrensstiles kritisch zu erfassen. Das bedeutet, dass beispielsweise auch Mononormativität (die Privilegierung monogamer Paar-und Familienformationen), die Geringschätzung von BDSM und anderen nicht-koitalen Leidenschaften, die Pathologisierung von Trans*-Körperlichkeit und-Sexualität, sowie die sterotype Konstruktion ‚ethnisierter' Sexualität und Intimität als Bestandteile spezifischer Regime der Heteronormativität gedeutet werden können. Heteronormativität ist somit kein monolithisches Machtverhältnis, sondern ein Punkt kondensierter Machterfahrung in einem
The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, Feb 15, 2007
Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung, Jun 1, 2023
Anthem Press eBooks, Jul 5, 2022
The Sociological Review, May 1, 2005
debates. Irvine argues that national advocacy organisations have scripted public conversation on ... more debates. Irvine argues that national advocacy organisations have scripted public conversation on sex education through ‘rhetorical frames which organise ambivalence, confusion and anxieties into tidy sound bites designed for mass mobilisation’ (p. 8). At first, this sounds unlikely given the very different local contexts for conflicts over sex education. At the risk of reinforcing stereotypes, one might imagine a different story being told about a Californian school’s (sex positive? non heterosexist?) sexuality education programme than about that of a school in the ‘Bible belt’ where one of the conflicts is over the teaching of creationism as opposed to evolution. However, Irvine argues that despite the particularities of grassroots politics, there is a ‘nationalizing influence on local public arguments about sexuality’ (p. 3). Talk About Sex offers a detailed study of the politics of persuasion. For me, both the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ were very interesting. The book is structured historically with many of the chapters (with titles like ‘Redefining Sex, 1964’; ‘Days of Rage’; ‘Born-Again Sexual Politics’; ‘Victims, Villains and Neighbors’; ‘Doing it with Words’; ‘The Passion of Culture Wars’; ‘The Politics of Aversion’ and finally, ‘If Asked, Don’t Tell’) providing a good read on their own and making, I imagine, a valuable contribution to the study of the cultural politics of each decade. The endnotes take up a full 60 pages, with references included in these rather than in a Bibliography.
SAGE Publications Ltd eBooks, Oct 17, 2014
Wiley-Blackwell Publishing eBooks, 2010
Culture, Health & Sexuality, 2012
Canadian Journal of Sociology, Mar 31, 2018
M imi Schippers's book is an important contribution to the new critical scholarship on consensual... more M imi Schippers's book is an important contribution to the new critical scholarship on consensual non-monogamy and polyamory. Schippers's framework fuses feminist, queer and critical race theory to analyse the intersecting regimes of normativity that shape contemporary representations of non-monogamous and polyamorous sexualities. Schippers works with a polyqueer methodology that draws on popular culture (namely literature and film), blogs, activist literature and autoethnographic writing. Schippers's focus is primarily-although not exclusively-on triangulated non-monogamies, and she is particularly interested in the polyqueer and transgressive potential WMM constellations, i.e. configurations that involve one woman and two men, including group sex practices. Being both theoretically ambitious and methodologically innovative, this book is an important contribution to gender and sexuality studies, critical race studies, cultural studies, literary studies and film studies. The argument that monogamy, monormativity, and compulsive monogamy are integral and constitutive parts of hegemonic regimes of sexual normalcy, runs through the whole text. Schippers argues that gender and queer studies have paid insufficient attention to mononormativity (i.e. the privileging and the naturalisation of monogamous couple bonds). Existing theorisations of mononormativity tend to diminish the centrality of compulsory monogamy in contemporary regimes of power around sexuality, by either conflating it with heteronormativity or considering it to be a mere element integral to the latter. Moreover, Schippers highlights the important role that mononormativity plays in underpinning gender and race privileges. She suggests that consensually nonmonogamous intimacies or sexualities are repressed, tabooed or erased, because they carry the potential to trouble and destabilise hegemonic masculinities along the axes of race, class and sexuality. Chapter one explores the gender politics at the heart of the common scandalisation of intimate scenarios in which a woman may have sex with the best friend of her (male) partner. The naturalisation of jealousy, a discourse of male rivalry and the vilification of the figure of the 'cheat
Routledge eBooks, Nov 1, 2020
The critique of monogamy has been a pervasive feature of feminist debates on gender, power, and s... more The critique of monogamy has been a pervasive feature of feminist debates on gender, power, and sexuality since the nineteenth century. Different currents within feminist theorising and activism have tackled the oppressive effects of cultures of sex, intimacy, and kinship that render monogamy a normative feature within women's lives. Rejections of monogamy were voiced from within Marxist and anarchist feminism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in existentialist feminism in the post-World War II years, and in various strands of radical feminism, lesbian feminism, and bisexual feminism since the late 1960s, unfolding in a complex genealogy that extends to contemporary queer-feminist positions. This work has developed different foci, ranging from critiques of capitalist gender relations and the division of labour over attempts to reshape female subjectivity to hetero-patriarchal constructions of love and the family. Some of this work has also been motivated by sexual liberationist ideas or identity political agendas (for example, as in radical feminist, lesbian feminist, or bifeminist movements). Despite important differences, I suggest that all these lineages are interconnected and held together by common threads of discourse. One of the unifying features of feminist anti-monogamy has been the common concern with women's erotic autonomy. Yet how the concept of autonomy has been filled with meaning depends profoundly on the backdrop of the respective wider social movement agendas. While I have documented the breadth of this genealogy of feminist antimonogamy critiques elsewhere (Klesse, 2018), I focus here specifically on bifeminist refutations of monogamy, concentrating primarily on work published in the United States and United Kingdom in the 1980s and 1990s, with the aim of highlighting arguments that have influenced more recent bisexual and queer feminist discussions on the topic. Through the analysis of some key texts, I show that bifeminist critiques of this period have shared some of the core assumptions prevalent within other identity-related feminist currents (such as lesbian feminism and heterosexual feminism), while endorsing a bifeminist standpoint and advocating a distinctly bifeminist
UCL Press eBooks, Mar 8, 2021
XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018), Jul 18, 2018
Sexualities, Apr 26, 2023
Ken Plummer’s life work has had a major impact on the development of the sociology of sexuality. ... more Ken Plummer’s life work has had a major impact on the development of the sociology of sexuality. While being firmly rooted in and committed to the traditions of pragmatism and symbolic interactionism – which chimes nicely with his philosophical stance of critical humanism – Ken Plummer openly engaged in a critical dialogue with many theoretical perspectives. This renders his work a rich resource for researchers working on sexualities from within different paradigms. This paper engages in a critical appraisal of some of Plummer’s most significant concepts through autobiographical reflection on my personal experience of working with Ken Plummer as a PhD student, further tracing the influence his work has had on my own writing on consensual non-monogamies, LGBTQIA + activism and queer film festivals. Using autoethnography and memory work, the essay highlights the powerful potential residing in Plummer’s path-breaking contributions to social constructionism (script theory and narrative power), methodology (personal documents), narrative sociology (sexual stories), critical humanism (dialogical ethics and cosmopolitan sexualities) and political sociology (intra-movement conflict, intimate citizenship, counterpublics and age standpoints). The essay argues that these ideas – and Plummer’s overall legacy as a scholar and theorist – bear a strong significance for future research in sexuality studies.
The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, Feb 15, 2007
Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung, Feb 22, 2017
Christian Klesse a Michel Foucaults "Sexualität und Wahrheit" hat mein eigenes Schreiben, Forsche... more Christian Klesse a Michel Foucaults "Sexualität und Wahrheit" hat mein eigenes Schreiben, Forschen und Lehren zum Thema Sexualität stark beeinflusst. Dank dem diesem Text innewohnenden beharrlichen Drängen, hinter die Dinge zu schauen und sich nicht mit der Armseligkeit und Gewalttätigkeit der gegebenen Geschlechter-und Sexualitätsordnung abzufinden, motivieren die drei Bände, über den Erwerb historischen Wissens hinaus kritische Fragen zu stellen. Dies sind Fragen, die sich wiederum als Teil einer Suchbewegung verstehen lassen, neue (und gerechtere) Formen des Seins zu entwickeln, also herauszutreten aus der Unmöglichkeit des Unmittelbaren, historisch Übermittelten. Meines Erachtens begründet die Kritik Foucaults eine kulturrevolutionäre Perspektive, ohne einem Autoritarismus in Namen der Kollektivität oder im Sinne eines absoluten Wahrheitsbegriffes anheim zu fallen. Die Kritik des Sexualitätsdiskurses in "Der Wille zum Wissen" (1977) hat mir unter anderem geholfen, ein umfassenderes Verständnis von Heteronormativität zu entwickeln, das ich in meinem Buch "The Spectre of Promiscuity. Gay Male and Bisexual Non-monogamies and Polyamories" (2007) beschrieben habe. Foucaults Kritik des Sexualitätsdispostivs impliziert einen Heteronormativitätsbegiff, der über die Kontrolle der geschlechtlichen Objektwahl (z.B. durch eine Naturalisierung der Heterosexualität oder eine Stigmatisierung lesbisschwuler, ‚fluider' oder queerer Identitäten oder Begehrensdynamiken) hinausgeht, um auch Normen hinsichtlich der Emotionalität, Beziehungsgestaltung, Konstellation, Körperpräsentation, kulturellen Positionierung, aber auch des Berührungs-oder Begehrensstiles kritisch zu erfassen. Das bedeutet, dass beispielsweise auch Mononormativität (die Privilegierung monogamer Paar-und Familienformationen), die Geringschätzung von BDSM und anderen nicht-koitalen Leidenschaften, die Pathologisierung von Trans*-Körperlichkeit und-Sexualität, sowie die sterotype Konstruktion ‚ethnisierter' Sexualität und Intimität als Bestandteile spezifischer Regime der Heteronormativität gedeutet werden können. Heteronormativität ist somit kein monolithisches Machtverhältnis, sondern ein Punkt kondensierter Machterfahrung in einem
The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, Feb 15, 2007
Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung, Jun 1, 2023
Anthem Press eBooks, Jul 5, 2022
The Sociological Review, May 1, 2005
debates. Irvine argues that national advocacy organisations have scripted public conversation on ... more debates. Irvine argues that national advocacy organisations have scripted public conversation on sex education through ‘rhetorical frames which organise ambivalence, confusion and anxieties into tidy sound bites designed for mass mobilisation’ (p. 8). At first, this sounds unlikely given the very different local contexts for conflicts over sex education. At the risk of reinforcing stereotypes, one might imagine a different story being told about a Californian school’s (sex positive? non heterosexist?) sexuality education programme than about that of a school in the ‘Bible belt’ where one of the conflicts is over the teaching of creationism as opposed to evolution. However, Irvine argues that despite the particularities of grassroots politics, there is a ‘nationalizing influence on local public arguments about sexuality’ (p. 3). Talk About Sex offers a detailed study of the politics of persuasion. For me, both the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ were very interesting. The book is structured historically with many of the chapters (with titles like ‘Redefining Sex, 1964’; ‘Days of Rage’; ‘Born-Again Sexual Politics’; ‘Victims, Villains and Neighbors’; ‘Doing it with Words’; ‘The Passion of Culture Wars’; ‘The Politics of Aversion’ and finally, ‘If Asked, Don’t Tell’) providing a good read on their own and making, I imagine, a valuable contribution to the study of the cultural politics of each decade. The endnotes take up a full 60 pages, with references included in these rather than in a Bibliography.
SAGE Publications Ltd eBooks, Oct 17, 2014
Wiley-Blackwell Publishing eBooks, 2010
Culture, Health & Sexuality, 2012