For many of us who study the history of sexualities, and who teach about the shifting sexual morality plays that shape U.S. culture and politics, the current “scandal” surrounding the ex-Dean of the Whitman School does not lie in his individual actions.  The scandal rests in the actions of a university administration trying to avoid brand damage by publicly sacrificing the Dean on the altar of heteronormative sexual ‘morality.’ For readers unfamiliar with several decades of scholarship analyzing heteronormativity—the regulation of sexual practices and identities by a powerful fiction of ‘normal’ relations, modeled on heterosexist, racialized images of sexual morality and transgression—the accusation here is quite straightforward: by summarily firing a respected and successful Dean [see Daily Orange 8/30/2016] less than 24 hours after he was charged with a misdemeanor for soliciting paid sex work, the university displays happy ignorance of scholarly and ethical questions re: contested histories of criminalized sexual activities and intimate desires.

Would this SU administration applaud, in 1964, the firing of a university employee in Maryland who engaged in the illegal activity of miscegenation, i.e. marrying or having sexual relations across criminalized white-black racial lines? Would this administration cheerfully support the expulsion of a university employee in Michigan in 2002 who broke state laws against sodomy that criminalized forms of gay male sex?  Would this administration in 2016 try to destroy the career of a tenured SU faculty member who, while earning her Ph.D., worked for one of the few unionized sex clubs in the U.S., in a city with a mobilized campaign to de-criminalize prostitution? (The global movement to de-criminalize sex work is supported by the World Health Organization, Amnesty International, U.N. AIDS, and Human Rights Watch.)

Fast Forward? Or Zealously Backward toward good old Cold War formations of who’s allowed to privately do whatever he wants, and who will pay a public price in the sordid theaters of sexual moralism and sacrificial shaming.

Jackie Orr

Associate Professor of Sociology

Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs