Sex Panic Research Articles

Sex panic and robots: a critical discourse analysis of the banned Texan robotic brothel

ABSTRACT This study examines the unique relationship between panic, technology, and sexuality using a sex panic framework. Sex panic, a derivative of moral panic theory, focuses on fears related to or because of sexuality or sexual practices. Inextricably tied to emotion, sex panic events are often scripted and based on performativity. In Texas, a sex robot “testing center” attempted to open as a storefront in the suburbs of Houston. Local officials and community leaders condemned the brothel announcement. A critical discourse analysis of sixty news articles and videos, Houston City Council meeting minutes, and the subsequent city ordinances were evaluated to explore the controversy of the ultimately banned brothel. Through this analysis, prevalent discursive themes on the protection of women and children, fears about sex robot users, and concerns over how the Houston community would be viewed were found. Discursive tactics centered on creating panic around issues of rape, dehumanization, and moral standards. This study contributes to the critical scholarship on sex robots and their effects on public discourse.

Sex Panics: Queer (Counter)publics, Networking, and Sociality in Nigeria

ABSTRACT Previous studies on same-sex attractions and sexualities in general have explored various dimensions and the social and psychological implications of its existence in societies where they are rejected or accepted. While existing studies have addressed these phenomena in the broader context, this research focuses specifically on Nigeria. Recent investigations indicate that same-sex attraction is vehemently rejected in Nigerian society, both in physical and online spaces, reinforced by the enactment of the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act (SSMPA 2014) and prevalent homophobia. This implies that queer Nigerians put in efforts to ensure networking and sociality amidst these impediments. The current study examines the presence of queer Nigerians and the visibility of their sexualities as sex panic in Nigeria. It also examines the formation of queer publics and counterpublics in the country, and shedding light on the ways queer Nigerians navigate societal constraints through traditional and geosocial networking options.

“This is Not a Slippery Slope” Versus “The Queer Sex Panic is Just Beginning”: Discourse About FOSTA-SESTA in Ideologically Diverse U.S. Mass media, 2017–2023

This research analyzes mass media coverage of The Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and Stop Enabling Online Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), two landmark 2018 bills that changed how sexual content is moderated by internet service providers in the United States. Using critical discourse analysis, I compare the framing of 101 news stories about FOSTA-SESTA published in mainstream U.S. newspapers, feminist media, and LGBTQ magazines over the course of 7 years. Findings describe coverage of online sex work, online child sexual exploitation, and free speech concerns that preceded and followed the landmark ruling from 2017 to 2023. I show FOSTA-SESTA's progression as a topic of discourse during the 2020 presidential election and compare differences between coverage in ideologically diverse U.S. media. While mainstream news originally supported FOSTA-SESTA's efforts to restrict the tech industry and prevent online child sexual exploitation, alternative media tended to present skeptical arguments that supported sex workers and other marginalized communities. Journalism industry interventions are discussed.

Sex Panic and the Productive Infertility of the Freemartin.

Freemartinism is a biological phenomenon in genetically female cows born from a dizygotic twin pregnancy. Placental connections-blood and hormones between the freemartin and their male twin-generate an intersex cow unable to conceive. In this study, the freemartin emerges in a constant state of flux: between waste and use; becoming a technology and supplemented by other technologies; defined by human anxieties about gender; and a tool underscoring dominant gendered ideas about normative family life, human sex, and sexuality. It examines farmers and scientists' numerous attempts to harness the indeterminacy of the freemartin's liminal sex characteristics, and how dairy farmers transformed the freemartin into a heat detection technology, thus maximizing other cows' reproductive performance. Unabated scientific and agricultural engagement with freemartins has inspired new ways of thinking about the biological self and nonprocreative sexual pleasure on industrial farms.

Theorizing the Gay Frog

AbstractThe gay frog has taken on a surprisingly prominent role in contemporary environmental culture. Primarily associated with American shock jock Alex Jones and the so-called alt-right, fears of frogs being turned gay by hormones in water have nevertheless entered the mainstream, while gay frog memes are shared online by users from across the political spectrum. This article offers a genealogy of the gay frog, situating this recent moment in the longer history of “sex panics” over gay animals described by queer ecologists, and in the context of an ongoing backlash against feminism and trans liberation. It argues that the potency of the gay frog as alt-right symbol derives from the capacity of the frog to instantiate racialized and sexualized anxieties about border crossings. By examining the role of humor in gay frog clips and memes, this article shows how liberal mockery of Jones has inadvertently mainstreamed far-right beliefs and served to consolidate alt-right notions of victimhood. In spite of this, it argues that the comic potential of the gay frog holds promise for queer ecologists seeking to think differently about sex and nature.

Sex Panic Rhetorics, Queer Interventions

Sex Panic Rhetorics, Queer Interventions

Sex Panic; The War on Sex Offenders as Public Enemy No. 1

Sex Panic; The War on Sex Offenders as Public Enemy No. 1

Sexing the Child

Sexing the Child

The Limits of Family: Military Law and Sex Panics in Contemporary South Korea

AbstractThis article explores the limits of family in contemporary South Korea by simultaneously examining the discourses and practices of anti-LGBT protesters and the state alongside an ethnography of queer and HIV/AIDS activism. The author argues that the limits of family in Korea ought to be conceived as a problem with sex incorporating both “substance” and the practice of having sex. He explores these limits of family through a broadening understanding of family law in Korea, focusing on the anti-sodomy clause in the Military Penal Code and mandatory HIV/AIDS testing. The author contends that to broaden the concept of family law to laws such as the anti-sodomy clause and mandatory HIV/AIDS testing demonstrates the intricate and unexplored ways the Korean family is produced through military laws and regulations. This is a recursive process, for the heteronormative expectations of family members are inscribed within military law, rhetorically casting the family as a threatened body that needs protection. However, the normative experience of the family in crisis produces violence against gender and sexual minorities. The author concludes by discussing the dangerous implications of these family laws.

What the Miniskirt Reveals: Sex Panics, Women's Rights, and Pulling Teeth in Urban Uganda

What the Miniskirt Reveals: Sex Panics, Women's Rights, and Pulling Teeth in Urban Uganda

"Swimming in Poison": Reimagining Endocrine Disruption through China's Environmental Hormones

This article analyzes media responses to a 2010 Greenpeace China report titled Swimming in Poison. Among other alarming data, the report states that fish from collection points along the Yangtze River showed elevated levels of harmful "environmental hormones" (huanjing jisu), also referred to as endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs). Scholars have critiqued EDC science and activism for its heteronormative pathologizing of inter-sexuality, nonreproductive sexual activity, and impaired fertility, drawing attention to the "sex panic" at work in EDC discourse. This article shows that such sex panic is neither necessary nor universal in anxieties surrounding EDCs. Unlike media responses to EDC events in Europe and North America, Chinese news articles that followed the report did not focus on anxieties surrounding sexual transgression. Instead, media reactions focused on food safety, industrial capitalism, and the ecological scope of pollution. Based on this analysis, the author argues that the disruptive quality and analytic potential of China's environmental hormones has less to do with a defense of sexual purity or bodily integrity, and more to do with acknowledging the depths to which human and nonhuman bodies in today's China are suffused with the sometimes toxic social, economic, political, and chemical environments in which people eat, grow, and live.

"A Red Card against Sex Tourism": Sex Panics, Public Emotions, and the 2014 World Cup in Brazil

This article examines the campaigns against sex tourism and sex trafficking that have emerged with the advent of several mega-sporting events in Brazil. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Natal, one of the twelve host cities of the 2014 World Cup, it focuses on the appeal to emotions in mobilization against sex trafficking and sex tourism. Despite the recent turn to emotions in social sciences, including the role of emotions in politics, there is a dearth of study examining the intersections of emotions and moral panics. Yet expressions of disgust, anger, rage, or outrage commonly accompany moral panics issues. This article engages with how campaigns against sex tourism and sex trafficking associated with the 2014 World Cup materialize through emotional tropes iterated and reiterated in public spaces, or sex panics scripts. More specifically, this article identifies various scripts—the sexually innocent yet violated child, the bad gringo, and the enslaved woman—and points to what gives them their traction. Taken together, these emotional tropes are constitutive of an affective logic that both conflates justice with punishment and repression, and makes certain oppressive interventions and fraught alliances "feel right"—that is, publicly thinkable, possible, and acceptable.

Sex Panic and Denial

The American criminal justice system regarding sex is not just logically incoherent, it is also often morally bankrupt because it remains unexamined and poorly understood. This Article contends that there are actually common roots underlying the seemingly oppositional forces of social panic and denial, which explain why the United States has an endemic sexual violence problem. Both panic and denial reinforce the implicit, and sometimes explicit, desire to avoid substantive engagement with socially contentious issues related to sex. The use of residency restrictions and civil commitment fit the modern social goal of putting sex offenders out-of-sight and out-of-mind. Yet, those same desires also explain America’s unwillingness to believe victims of sexual violence and police failure to properly investigate criminal complaints. In this way, sex panic dovetails with sex denial—in both instances, American culture only permits a limited discussion and understanding of sex and sexual violence. The result is that our nation fails to take sex crime complaints seriously while overreacting to the few convictions that emerge from the hostile criminal justice system.

Ubi Caritas : Children and Religious Celibates

Ubi CaritasChildren and Religious Celibates Hailey Haffey (bio) It is perhaps easy to fall prey to the pop-cultural assumption that religious celibacy necessarily indicates a type of peculiarity, or "queerness," that coincides with predatory homosexuality. In April 2011, New Hampshire Republican House Majority Leader D. J. Bettencourt disparaged a critic of his proposed budget—Roman Catholic Bishop John McCormack—by calling him a "pedophile pimp who should have been led away from the State House in handcuffs with a raincoat over his head in disgrace" (Love and Ramer, 1). Bettencourt's riposte came after Bishop McCormack had spoken against the budget to a crowd of protesters, arguing, in line with Catholic teachings on social justice, that the proposal would not do enough for the poor and that "the vulnerable should take priority in our society." According to Bettencourt, however, the bishop didn't have a right to speak for the "vulnerable" and "has absolutely no moral credibility to lecture anyone" (1). A Catholic himself, Bettencourt's response to McCormack's complaint referenced McCormack's previously self-acknowledged failure to use his office adequately to protect victims during infamous sex-abuse scandals that erupted largely under the tenure of Boston's Cardinal Law in 2002. During this period, McCormack allegedly facilitated the notorious practice of dealing with abuse allegations—at least in part—by transferring suspected priests to other parishes. The New Hampshire Diocese avoided legal charges at the time in exchange for its immediate promulgation of strict policies designed to protect children and prevent similar communal failures in the future (1). By his own admission, McCormack made mistakes in his role as a clerical official responsible for preventing child abuse. And yet ten years later, his adversary Bettencourt's style of recalling such mistakes also evokes important questions about the public's automatic associations [End Page 172] of celibacy, queerness, and adult–child relationships. As can be seen with the highly quotable (and oft-quoted) tag line "pedophile pimp," contemporary media unfailingly reiterate the idea that relationships between children and religious celibates are inherently unredeemable and sexually dangerous. These violations of children's physical and psychological well-being are undeniable failures in the Church, and such abuse is the Church's institutional responsibility to mitigate. Nonetheless, I will show, it is not possible to argue statistically that religious celibates pose any more threat to children than do other adults in positions of trust (teachers, coaches, family members, to name a few). Accordingly, we must ask what is being obfuscated by culturally typecasting priests and (sometimes) nuns as predatory above other members of society. We must also differentiate between violating and helpful interactions. In this discussion of age-stratified, religious intimacy, the levels, roles, and uses of sexual awareness, on the part of both adult and child, are key. We should also consider the peculiar commonality of adult religious and children both as, ideally, celibate—according to both church rules and legal standards. Such an analysis, I will argue, reveals that valuable lessons and emotions are overshadowed and displaced by the indiscriminate use of terms associated with child sexual abuse. The project of this essay is to use assumptions like those motivating Bettencourt's critique as a call for a deeper understanding of the presumed problems between religious celibates and children, and to use the moments in celibate–child interactions to help understand the rhetorical fields surrounding these characters. First, I will look at mass-media investigations into the assumption that a vow of marriage to God actually veils a twisted taste for children. As I will show how the rhetorical strategies of "sex panics" work as red herrings that merely repeat hackneyed and simplistic assumptions about childhood, about the priesthood, and about vocations of religious celibacy in general. This is not at all to say that those who perpetuate public traumas via the secretive policies of Church authority are innocent. Rather, I want to show how any of the clergy's (or other celibates') crimes garner disproportionate attention that distracts from what can become, at times, uncommonly enriching relationships between children and religious celibates. Most critical for this chapter are significant parallels between how heteronormative adult culture treats...

Hoover's War on Gays: Exposing the fbi's “Sex Deviates” Program

Hoover's War on Gays fills an important gap in the history of the gay rights movement by providing a comprehensive account of the five-decade campaign of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (fbi) to intimidate and harass gay men, lesbians, and organizations that sought to advance their rights. Douglas M. Charles, an associate professor at Penn State University–Greater Allegheny, describes how fbi director J. Edgar Hoover's obsession with homosexuals began in 1937 with the kidnapping and murder of a young boy in Tacoma, Washington. As the fbi became involved in the hunt for a “sexual pervert,” the investigation triggered a “sex panic” that fueled public prejudice and intolerance of homosexuals. The topics of two sections of the book have garnered little attention from historians. Charles draws from fbi documents to describe Buell Dwight Huggins, who was expelled from the University of Illinois in 1940 after he was accused of soliciting a fellow student. Huggins later worked for the federal government and formed the predecessor organization of the Washington Mattachine Society in 1954. We also learn that the controversial homophile activist Edward Sagarin, under the pseudonym Donald Webster Cory, formed the short-lived Homosexuals Anonymous, which led to the formation of the Mattachine Society of New York in 1955.

『레이디 수잔』에 나타난 간통의 주제와 성 공포

『레이디 수잔』에 나타난 간통의 주제와 성 공포

Kissing a Photograph: Reproductive Panic in Kate Chopin and Thomas Hardy

Kissing a Photograph:Reproductive Panic in Kate Chopin and Thomas Hardy Arielle Zibrak (bio) The late-nineteenth-century writer Kate Chopin was fond of shocking people. It was perhaps for this reason that she kept a copy of Thomas Hardy's 1895 novel Jude the Obscure on display in her home.1 Her review of Jude, published in the St. Louis Criterion in 1897, begins with an anecdote about a polite female guest shocked to find the volume left out on a visiting-room table: "'Oh! how can you!' she exclaimed, 'with so many young people about!'"2 While this reaction clearly delights Chopin (her liberal use of exclamation points in the transcription is good evidence alone), she proceeds to trash Hardy's novel, stating outright that "the book is detestably bad" (714). Yet, in her prose, Chopin also betrays certain admiration for, or perhaps merely an uncomfortable identification with, the novel she purports to hate.3 When "one or two youngsters" ask her about the book, Chopin responds that it is "unutterably tiresome … but you might like it" (714). Indeed, her primary objection to the novel, reformulated and repeated throughout the review, is that it's incredibly boring: "ponderous … formidable … nothing alluring … the outward appearance of a Congressional Record … colorless … unpardonably dull" etc., etc. (713–14). She laments that no one was interested in the book prior to the controversy it stirred in the press, a controversy into which she, as yet another reviewer of the novel, has now entered; but under what terms? It seems rather irrelevant and late in the day to say all this about Jude the Obscure. It is only sympathy for the young person which moves me to do so. I hate to know that deceptions are being practiced upon him. He has been led to believe that the work is quite dangerous and alluring … I feel very sorry to think that he should part with so many good silver quarters and receive nothing in return but disappointment and dissolution. (715) [End Page 355] This ridiculous assertion of concern for "the young person" wasting his money on a boring novel is Chopin's satirical response to the overzealous parade of reviewers that felt compelled to damn Jude in both the English and American presses out of fear for what it might do to impressionable youths. Margaret Oliphant's notorious review in Blackwood's is a good example of this mode of criticism.4 Oliphant writes, "[T]o make [sex] the supreme incident, always in the foreground, to be discussed by young men and women, and held up before boys and girls … seems to me an outrage for which there is no justification."5 Chopin enters the debate not to defend the portrayal of sexuality in Jude, but rather to lament that the young reader who goes to the book in search of it will find little to gratify his or her curiosity. The performance of her own "outrage" at the dullness of Hardy's novel is less a gesture aimed at Hardy or Jude than it is a perverse counterstrike against reviewers who object to the "immorality" of novels that portray sexual desire. Chopin responds to the sex panic of Hardy's reviewers with an art panic of her own: our concern, she suggests, should be protecting the sanctity of children's minds from bad literature. In Sex Panic and the Punitive State (2011), Roger Lancaster outlines the social, cultural, and judicial power of sex panics from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Echoing Lee Edelman's 2004 polemic No Future, Lancaster asserts that "the constant element in successive waves of panic is the figure of the imperiled innocent child—a child whose innocence is defined in terms of his imagined sexlessness and whose protection from sex looms as an ever more urgent and exacting demand."6 This profoundly effective rhetoric is nowhere more present than in Oliphant's defamatory review. (And it is precisely this rhetoric that Chopin appropriates.) After repeatedly harping upon the dangers to young people that Jude and Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did (1895) pose, Oliphant laments the extermination of Jude and Sue's children, who...

Perversion, Terminable and Interminable: Foucault, Lacan, and <em>DSM-5</em>

Perversion, Terminable and Interminable:Foucault, Lacan, and DSM-5 H. N. Lukes (bio) In 1992, when the so-called culture wars and intrafeminist sex wars were waning in the United States and the term "queer" was hitting both the streets and academia, Emily Apter wrote the following for an entry on "perversion" in Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary: "Though certain erotic practices traditionally coded as perverse (say, lesbian sadomasochism) may continue to be classified as perverse . . . , it is none the less unclear whether gender-revisionist psychoanalysis really needs a clinical definition of perversion in its lexicon. Perhaps the term will endure most successfully as a synonym for sexual subversion."1 In this essay I discuss the curious fate of perversion, with and without its proper nomination, twenty-five years after Apter's prognosis.2 After the following general theoretical introduction, the first section charts sexual perversion through its historical synonym "paraphilia" in the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) recently revised fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). The second section investigates how and why contemporary psychoanalytically inclined sociopolitical theorists are using the term "perversion" with only oblique reference to sexuality. My tracing of this split genealogy of paraphilia and desexualized perversion informs [End Page 327] this essay's ultimate thesis that recent trends in the academic Left have come to sublimate the logics of sex panic as a reaction to a generalized panic endemic to neoliberal risk societies. Two decades after Apter's assessment, her reservation about the subversiveness of consensual lesbian sadomasochism sounds dated and almost quaint—but then so does her implicit faith in the ongoing significance of "gender-revisionist psychoanalysis" and the political stakes of sexual subversion itself. Psychoanalytic clinicians who have responded to feminist and queer revisionist mandates provide the exception to the rule of psychoanalysis's already diminishing clinical and cultural influence in the United States.3 Recent queer and feminist work in and outside of American universities has also demonstrated less interest in either supporting contemporary clinical psychoanalysis or returning to its canonical texts. Since the 1990s, American LGBT politics have increasingly deferred to legal apparatuses of state-based inclusion and assimilationist cultural representation, leaving the antinormative aspects of "queer" an increasingly unmoored political category. Meanwhile, sexual transgressions have taken up locations that do not easily read as social subversion or arrange themselves clearly around the former left/right-wing battle lines of the culture wars. Among these are our current era's witness to such disparate advents as the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise's popularization of straight bondage, dominance, sadism, and masochism (BDSM); a seeming proliferation of criminal sex offenders; and a renewed attention to rape culture that is currently focused on the institutional practices of colleges and universities themselves. In this context, it is conspicuous that some contemporary critical theorists have resurrected perversion to signify not the obvious "erotic practices traditionally coded as perverse" that Apter notes but rather the projected psyches and political platforms of those most wont to condemn these practices, including figures such as George W. Bush. This new application of perversion is the logical if unlikely end of a certain critical arc. After French feminism and Anglo-American film criticism had first delivered the theories of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to the U.S. academy in the 1970s, Slavoj Žižek and his fellow travelers as well as new English-language translations of Lacan's seminars from the late 1980s on enabled a return to Lacan that has been more attuned to broad understandings of contemporary politics and historical materialism than to specifically feminist applications. Among these newly available concepts has been Lacan's conversion of perversion from a tendency toward specific sex practices to a fundamental psychic "structure" [End Page 328] that defines the analysand's relation to the psychoanalyst, if not also to meaning and authority as such.4 If Lacan arguably refused the naturalized link between sexual minorities and moral condemnations of perversion in the culturally and historically specific imaginary, then he also refigured the pervert less as a sexy rebel than as a desperate reactionary calling on the oedipal father to complete his unfinished work of "castration...

‘Re-crisis’: Barebacking, sex panic and the logic of epidemic

Since the ‘AIDS Crisis’ of the 1980s and early 1990s, the combination of sex between men and epidemic disease has been fertile territory for the production of sex panic. This essay examines a 2007 outburst of Australian news media sex panic surrounding a case of the alleged reckless infection of persons with HIV/AIDS and the controversial practices of anal sex without condoms, or ‘barebacking’. The rhetorical inflations surrounding these sexual spectacles may be understood via a model of biopolitical governmentality that Linda Singer ( 1993 ) called ‘the logic of epidemic’. I draw on both Singer's model and work on sex panic to describe this news coverage as an instance of what I call ‘re-crisis’. ‘Re-crisis’ involves the revivification of the discourses of an earlier moment of AIDS representation in the service of new cultural and institutional modes of managing HIV/AIDS under neoliberal conditions and in the transformed contexts of HIV/AIDS ‘post crisis’, which has evolved since the advent of antiretrovirals (c. 1996).

Networks of desire: the specter of AIDS and the use of digital media in the quest for secret same-sex relations in São Paulo

This article seeks to analyze the emergence of an on-line market for love and sex partners in São Paulo, as of 1997, when the internet became commercially available in Brazil. Focusing on the first generation of digital media users, my field research looks at men who entered adolescence or adulthood during the AIDS epidemic. I analyze how the use of digital media has been molded by people's desire to dissociate themselves from the image that homosexuality acquired during the sex panic. In Brazil's largest metropolis, this use of digital media is linked to historical and cultural transformations within the realm of homosexualities, as they move under the aegis of an erotic regime based on the desire for social adjustment.