1. In their book Intimate Matters, D’Emilio and Freedman argue that sex has often “served as a
powerful symbolic issue whose impact extends far beyond the erotic.” In other words, sex
often been used (as we have noted) as a means to gain or maintain power or social control
across a number of ideological axes that intersect with sex but extend “far beyond it”. Why
and in what ways has sexuality and sexual practices historically been a “powerful symbolic
issue” in the political and cultural landscape of America and what would you point to as some
of the most significant social consequences of its prominence? You can focus on any
particular period or set of circumstances or social tensions (across different periods) from the
beginning of the course through the present (for example, the Comstock Laws, the White
Slavery panic, the regulation of prostitution/sex workers, reproductive rights battles,
miscegenation laws, changes in marriage ideals, the impact of popular culture and/or media
censorship, anti-LGBTQ laws and LGBTQ activism, the impact of AIDS, the “porn wars,” the
Thomas/Hill hearings; the Clinton/Lewinsky affair, sex/abstinence education conflicts).
2. The “sexual liberation(s)” of the 1960s and 1970s have had a powerful impact on American
society and have provoked an equally strong reaction. Focusing on one or two of these
major social changes (for example: feminism, gay/lesbian movements, freedom of
expression/the counterculture, the mainstreaming of porn, the advent of the pill, the
elimination of laws against miscegenation/interracial relationships, sex education, a more
sexually explicit and commodified culture, etc), describe and discuss their social impact, as
you perceive it from course readings, as well as the challenges, limitations, and “backlash”
its proponents encountered as social conservativism became more mainstream between the
1980s and 2010s. How did these movements transform, adapt, or lose strength? Note: In
making your argument, you may want to note how challenges and conflicts from within
various movements themselves also affected their social impact. You may also want to
mention more recent changes that you may see regarding this topic (perhaps in relation to
the rise of social media and/or the social movements of the 2010s that we have discussed in
class), although these should not be the focus of your essay, which should be historical.
3. At the beginning of this course, we read Eve Sedgwick’s discussion of the variety of sexual
practices that exist (“Axiom #1”), which underlined the pervasiveness of sexual difference
among people and how these extend beyond any fixed set of binary definitions
(masculine/feminine, heterosexual/homosexual, male/female, victim/slut). In our studies, we
have cited many varieties of sexual identities and practices in America that have challenge
our society’s still dominantly white-defined, middle-class, highly gendered, cis-centric, binary
sexual culture. By focusing on one to three such identities and practices (for example: the
experience of non-white, working class, immigrant, queer/LGBTQA+,
transgender/transsexual, intersex persons, sex workers, etc.) make an argument for the
ways in which they complicate and/or enrich our knowledge of American society and sexual
history. What aspects of our society and culture do we better understand because of these
“deviations” and what do they reveal about the challenges to sexual norms, inclusiveness
and expression that have and continue to exist?
