A troubled world

And yet, everyday, as I have been writing this book, I have been torn with a dark hope. As the daily world news arrives, I am given a repeatedly clear vision of the devaluing of human lives across the world: the damaged and destroyed lives in the wars, violence and terrorist acts in Syria, the Ukraine, Iraq, Palestine, the Congo and elsewhere. We live in a very cruel, nasty world of dehumanization that is destroying lives for generations to come. Money, religion, nation and power (usually linked to gender and masculinity) seem to be the prime motivating forces for much of this misery and conflict. Yet, at the same time, I can also see the flourishing of human lives – in music and art, in education and care, in sport and science, in hundreds of little miracles of everyday human kindness. It is a joyous world of human creativity and caring. And this contrast will be a recurrent theme of this book. The bad news is humanity’s inhumanity to humanity. Often with the help of the state and religion, unbelievable violence and cruelty are heaped on large numbers of people. Systems of ranking, honour and status are used to brutally destroy ‘the other’. Powerful elites get away with murder, and tragic human suffering among the masses is ubiquitous. But the good news is humanity’s evolving compassion, hope and creative activism. People in the world fight back: they do not like the horrors of the world, they create new movements to resist them and they bring dreams of a better world. Cosmopolitan sexualities, and this book, form part of that dream.

Just as embodied human vulnerabilities are displayed everywhere, so too is human resilience. As I write, I hear of Meriam Ibrahim in the Sudan being sentenced to death for marrying a Christian man and committing apostasy from Islam. Following a worldwide response, her sentence was repealed and she was allowed to leave the country. A young student is gang-raped on a bus in Delhi in December 2012 and dies two weeks later; it leads to a public outcry about male violence towards women in India, where a woman is raped every 20 minutes. New social movements are born.¹ In Russia, gay men become objects of new regressive discriminatory legislation. A major campaign is organized on the Internet against this move. In the UK, the failure to deal with female genital mutilation (involving thousands of women each year) and child sexual abuse become national scandals, and public concern forces the government to act. And in Chibok, Nigeria, Boko Haram (meaning ‘non-Muslim teaching is forbidden’ and responsible for at least 10,000 deaths) kidnapped more than 250 female students as part of a widespread Islamic insurgency in northern Nigeria, professing their opposition to the education of girls and the Westernization of Nigeria. Many of the girls become so-called ‘sex slaves’. Despite both a world response and a local one (the ‘Bring Our Girls Back’ movement), as I write, this remains a very bleak story.

Only a few incidents like these get reported. They take place against the backdrop of worldwide silenced human sexual suffering, where women are regulated in multiple ways, children are abused routinely, same-sex relations are outlawed, and much more. For example, in more than 70 countries, there are laws that criminalize homosexual relations. In Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Chechnya, gay sex can lead to the death penalty. From Europe to Africa to the Americas to Asia, case after case of torture, ill-treatment, violence and discrimination against lesbians and gay men is documented. There are also very many cases of transgender rights activists – the ultimate gender outlaws – being abused across the world. And so it goes on.

A tale to tell

In this book I puzzle over some of these problems and suggest a few pathways ahead, giving my account in two major connected parts. The first part examines the transformations of our sexualities in the early decades of the twenty-first century, suggests growing variety, and then charts some of the ways we are developing to try to live with this difference. The second part examines some of the problems encountered in doing this, taking the strong stand that if we are ever to advance we have to be clear about the universal values we all need to strive for and incorporate into our everyday lives now. The ‘we’ here is a global one, not a narrow Western one, which seeks progressive change for all and not for just a few.

Chapter 1 sets the scene by locating cosmopolitanism in a humanist tradition, describing it and suggesting the many problems it brings in its wake. My critical humanism is far from being a mainstream stance taken by others who research such matters. Indeed, for some it might seem dangerously old-fashioned. So I have to spend a little time saying what it is and why I use it. Above all, I highlight human actions and positive values. Chapter 2 then suggests that in the modern world the range of global possibilities for human sexual diversity is rapidly accelerating. It outlines some of the key conditions that are bringing about these sexual transformations and claims that as most of these changes are unlikely to go away this century, we had better learn to work with them. The next chapter then proceeds to demonstrate that the notion of cosmopolitan sexualities (or cosmosexualities) is already emerging as a set of developing structures and practical everyday responses to help us handle these problems of modern diversities. But it also claims this brings many problems; so I spend some time building a framework of critical issues that we need to bear in mind all the time when thinking about cosmosexualities. If we let these critical issues fall from view, we will be in trouble.

With these problems firmly in mind, Part Two can then examine some of the grounded utopian processes that might nudge us a little closer towards developing a theory of cosmopolitan sexualities, ultimately cultivating inclusive sexualities. Inclusive sexualities are those that can embrace sexual and gender complexity and variety. Chapter 4 shows the vital need to grasp the complexity of sexual and gender cultures and the importance of bridging cultural wholes with microscopic human actions. Chapter 5 highlights the importance of regulating sexuality, the importance of norms, and the ubiquity and inevitability of conflict. Human sexualities are everywhere embroiled in contested norms, and there are subterranean traditions at work that resist dominant orders (hegemonies) in many ways. Chapter 6 thus turns to the importance of fostering a cosmopolitan imagination through narratives, dialogues, empathy and common norms. It leads to a discussion of the kinds of societies in which all this can be fostered, and I look around the world to see where such ideas are being enabled. Finally, I suggest the importance of examining what I will call grounded everyday utopias, where we can find important human values already in practice in the world now, and suggest how these provide clues for pathways to better worlds and lives for all, not just the elite few. Although it is fraught with inevitable tensions and problems, I claim we have to champion a localism that will, in the future, blend with cosmopolitanism if there is to be any hope for a better world for all people, where human sexual differences will not cause so much pain.

As far back as we can trace, the human world has been a world of sexual difference. This has been well documented, and here I bring some of the key features of this complexity together. I see human beings as irrevocably plural, vulnerable and fragile; human social worlds as intransigently ambivalent, aleatory and agonistic; and human life as obdurately dwelling in perpetual contradiction, contingency and conflict. Six central but well-known ideas shape my thinking; there is nothing particularly fancy or complicated about them.² They are the ideas of social structure, human action, relations, culture, story and contingencies. I see structures, like gender, nations and inequalities, as the deep forces that underpin human life: they work like tectonic plates and move only slowly. I see human actions, like empathy and care, as the meaningful practices through which we actively make our human worlds and make sense of them. I see relations with others – loving, hating – as the key constituents of making human order. I see cultures, like media and religions, as symbolic meanings and skills we develop to make sense of our everyday problems: they work like toolboxes of human action. Stories of all kinds and shapes are the key to these cultures: we make stories, live our lives through stories, make sense of our lives through them, even as they then exercise ‘hegemonic’ power over us.³ Stories animate human life. We live lives, including sexual lives, through stories. And ultimately, I see contingencies as the chance and drift moments of these social lives as we actively move along continuously and creatively, making life chancy, precarious and risky, but, hopefully, also always worth living.

The book invites reflections on a wide range of complicated and important issues. In it, I seek to review, revise and ultimately challenge both the reader and myself to see the ubiquity of difference, the intransigence of conflict, the inevitability of disappointment and the importance and necessity of hope. It is a small work of synthesis; it stands a little on the shoulders of giants and could not have been written without the cumulative labours and insights of many brilliant scholars, past and present. While I acknowledge many of them in a very long bibliography and endnotes, this is not meant as a work of detailed exegesis or discussion of others’ writings. My task is more formal, abstract and general, even though this does go a little against the grain. I do, however, give a little more background on the website that accompanies this book (see http://kenplummer.com/cosmosexualities). To present a full account of human sexual variety would require an encyclopedic multivolume project, and my challenge is the opposite. I am attempting a succinct and readable overview of key themes and issues. In some ways, the book is a small companion piece to my earlier studies, Telling Sexual Stories and Intimate Citizenship.

No writing is a simple view from nowhere. Approaching the age of 70, I come with a lot of baggage and many people to thank (they know who they are: I do not list them here). I am a white male gay partnered UK citizen – and this has shaped much of my life. I illuminate this in an afterword epilogue where I show how embedded a personal life is in research findings. I would like to give the view from everywhere, but this would after all be nowhere. So, try as I may to be global, I come back to my home and my roots. In truth, it cannot easily be otherwise for any writer.

An infinity of lists

Finally, a brief comment on one unusual feature of this study: the lists. A little before I started writing this book, I stumbled across Umberto Eco’s magnificent The Infinity of Lists (2009), which was inspired by an exhibition he arranged to suggest an imagery and art in awe at the complexity and infinity of all life, especially human life. Here are lists and visions of armies and martyrs, of the garden of earthly delights, of paradise, of fruits, fish and meats, of ships, of angels and demons, of the war dead, of perfumes and things, of places and cities – and on, and on, and on. Here is the ineffability of lists, their inexhaustibility, their infinity. As I delighted in the imagery of this book, I was prompted to add to his listings the infinities of sexualities. I have long sensed a difference between closed sexualities, which bundle our sexualities into a tightly restricted code, and open sexualities, which keep alive a vision of human possibilities. Lists can indicate this openness – a multitude of sexualities both experienced and awaiting experience: past, present and future. To capture a little of this, I turn in this book to the list. The list affords me the chance to briefly demonstrate a very wide range of examples, suggesting too that such examples are merely indicative. Much more could be said. Each item on a list could become its own book; each ending on a list brings its own etc. etc. etc…. The list could be extended with yet more examples, but it has to end somewhere. For a book about multiplicities, it is a good and, I think, effective little tool.

There are now a great many encyclopaedias, dictionaries and handbooks written on the wonders of the human sexual spectrum – whole libraries of millions of books in fact. The modern world brought with it a taxonomic zeal searching for order, and it was not long before this classificatory urge was applied to human sexualities in the controversial pioneering work of the early sexologists such as Krafft-Ebing, Hirschfield, Ellis and Freud at the fin de siècle. The great and persecuted Magnus Hirschfield calculated that there were 43,046,721 possible sexual types, and suggested running a ‘Department Store of Love’, ‘where everyone can purchase their favourite fetish objects and achieve complete satisfaction of their desires’.⁴ (This was, of course, before his library was closed down, his books burnt and his life destroyed.) Today, though, we can indeed click on any sex website and find that his wildest dreams have (almost) come true.

This book does not aim to get bogged down in all this detail. My challenge is to be crisp and clear, take stock of this diversity, ponder how we can live with it across the world, and look ahead. I will use the pleasure of the list as a tool to help with this and I will succeed in my task if I can demonstrate the ubiquity and global challenge of living with human sexual variety and can lay out a few pathways to move through what is surely a very troublesome sexual labyrinth. We are a long way from a better world for all, but this book hopefully makes one more small contribution to that end.