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• 1 2021-05-04T10:56:21-07:00 1982 Conference on Sexuality 7 Queer and Trans Politics plain 2021-06-30T13:41:47-07:00 Of all of Barnard’s Scholar and Feminist Conferences, perhaps the most controversial and well-known is the Scholar and Feminist IX: Towards a Politics of Sexuality, hosted in 1982. The conference focused on sex as a site of pleasure and choice as well as oppression and danger, exposing the foggy duality which had been the basis for rifts and heated disagreements within the feminist movement. Since topics around unfeminist or exploitative sex practices dominated the discourse in the mainstream feminist movement at the time, the 9th S&F conference decided to focus on exploring ideas which positioned sexuality as a site of pleasure in spite of, or in face of danger. The group Women Against Pornography (WAP) picketed outside Barnard Hall with leaflets, T-Shirts, and signs, as they felt the conference catered to misogynistic, violent portrayals of sexuality that perpetuated harm against women, and for feeling that their positions were not represented in the conference. This picket, a feminist organization protesting a feminist conference, symbolically and literally depicted the clashing ideologies and fracturing within the mainstream feminist movement of what would eventually come to be known as the Feminist Sex Wars.
  
  Years before the Scholar and Feminist hosted the Conference on Sexuality, questions around sex and its potential for harm and pleasure were unfolding within the second wave feminist movement. Since much of second wave feminism dealt with analyzing power relations between the sexes, sex came to naturally fall under the feminist critique. Radical feminists analyzed the ways in which sex had been weaponized against the female body in order to enforce women’s subordination. The porn industry came under fire for celebrating, normalizing, and profiting off of sexual violence against women, and for its statistical correlation to real-world instances of sexual violence. Feminists sought to analyze sex and stamp out sexual practices deemed exploitative and oppressive so that a new, feminist sexuality offering the promise of true sexual liberation might replace it. However, their efforts to push towards an ideal sexuality were coupled with slandering, shaming, and vilifying women who fell beyond this ideal. Women who engaged in butch-femme relationships, S/M sexual practices, and lesbian or feminist-created pornography, were labeled “unfeminist,” “politically incorrect,” and “oppressive.” Many women were ridiculed, excommunicated, and silenced from feminist publications, groups, and other mediums within the movement. At the height of feminist critique and analysis of sexual violence and exploitation, another faction of the feminist movement struggled to claim the right to sexual expression and exploration. Thus set the tone for the tumultuous and controversial Conference on Sexuality.
  
  The blurred lines between sex and violence were noted throughout the conference as well as in the conference’s Diary, a supplemental booklet full of the conference planning notes. The Diary acknowledged both the WAP and the pro-sex perspectives, noting, “This dual focus is important, we think, for to speak only of pleasure and gratification ignores the patriarchal structure in which women act, yet to talk only of sexual violence and oppression ignores women’s experiences with sexual agency and choice and unwittingly increases the sexual terror and despair in which women live.” In addition to exploring the meaning and effects of pornography, sex safety vs. sex adventure, butch-femme relationships, male and female sexual nature, and politically correct /politically incorrect sexual practices, the conference and corresponding diary touched on many other controversial and unconventional topics such female spectatorship in film, language, psychoanalysis, prostitution, and childhood. Speakers and feminists at the conference included prominent figures such as Hortense Spillers, Kate Millett, Esther Newton, Gayle Rubin, Joan Nestle, Dorothy Allison, and Barbara Kruger. 
  
  The controversial conference not only got the attention of WAP, but of Barnard College and the conference’s donors. The President’s office and Barnard administration confiscated and censored the Diary, and only agreed to its publication on the condition that it remove all mentions of Barnard College and its affiliation with the conference in all official capacity. The Helena Rubinstein Foundation, the Scholar and Feminist Conferences’ major donor responsible for over half of its funding, threatened to pull out financial support. Many thought the 9th Scholar and Feminist conference would be the last, and the Center’s leadership seriously prepared for 1982 as the final year. Nevertheless, forty years later, the S&F conferences still hold strong. Yet the controversial nature of the conference, the political infighting that insued, and near demise hold important messages and insights for the modern feminist movement in its quest for liberation.