Workshop: Diversity and Transformation Sexual orientation

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Workshop Diversity and TransformationSexual
orientation

• Socialisation in the academy as microcosm of
  society rights, choice and identity
• Robert J. Balfour

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Todays discussion

• This talk moves from
• the broad conceptions of community, and self in
  terms of community,
• democracy,
• citizenship,
• rights, and with reference to the university
  context
• the extent to which rights provide for choices in
  terms of freedom of identity (of which one
  component is sexuality).

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Mapping what about us/ me/ them?

• What is a minority?
• To which minority community do I belong?
• To which majority community do I belong?
• Religion, gender, race, class.
• Which minorities are powerful? Which are less
  powerful?
• Concepts for diversity as part of
  transformation
• Law and Human Rights citizen and alien
• Post-Colonialism and Feminism subject-position
  and sub-altern.
• Sociology class and community.

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Community is an imaginative act...

• Benedict Anderson (2006) described what it means
  to create, and be part of, an imagined community
  
• regardless of the actual inequality and
  exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation
  is always conceived as a deep, horizontal
  comradeship.
• (2006, 6-7).
• Community involves imagining and action
• Belonging
• Excluding
• Protecting

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How democracies have (not) workedas failures of
imagination...!

• Democracy has been variously defined throughout
  history as either the benevolent rule of a few,
  to popular or mob rule. Democracies have seldom
  embraced the notion of absolute equality for all
  persons. Common examples of this include
• The exclusion of sectors (like slave populations)
  from rights to self ownership, marriage,
  association
• Exclusions of classes of the population from
  suffrage on the basis of property or taxation
• Exclusions have also been extended to persons of
  colour in South Africa prior to 1994
• Further exclusions have sometimes applied in
  terms of gender, for example in 19th Century
  Imperial England.

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Democracy is contested....

• Contestation derives from struggles for power,
  between privileged and less privileged groups.
• Three arguments
• First, the term democracy suffers from
  vagueness and overexposure. Too rarely defined or
  qualified, democracy is relentlessly deployed
  in a variety of contexts, cultures, and states.
  At times, it seems as if it can be made to fit
  any argument or outcome including arguments to
  exclude sectors of a population. (Robson 2007,
  409).

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Democracy and the sexual....

• Second, the term sexual is similarly
  problematical. There exist important divergences
  regarding what constitutes the sexual or
  sexual behaviour.
• Further, even if we could agree on boundaries so
  that all situations could be confidently labelled
  either sexual or not sexual, doubt would
  remain.
• Is sexuality a desirable freedom vital to a
  democracy? (Robson 2007, 409).

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And finally, Sexuality and State...

• Lastly, the relationship between sexuality and
  democracy may seem more obscure than vital.
• Yet the democratic state, like other state forms,
  seeks to associate itself with certain forms of
  sexual arrangements (marriage, family and values
  like loyalty, fidelity, community).
• This association implicates specific organs of
  the state, including the judiciary, in struggles
  to assess on what terms to exercise control
  (Robson 2007).

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The Constitution, rights and dignity?

• In Africa, researchers Bratton, Mattes, and
  Gyimah-Boadi found that South Africans were much
  more likely than other nationalities to be able
  to offer multiple definitions of democracy
• The purpose of most democracies is
• to protect the rights of citizens.
• Hannah Arendt defines citizenship
• as the right of citizens to rights.
• People judge the quality of a democracy in terms
  of its ability to secure the basic economic and
  social rights for a minimally decent human life.

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The Constitution and freedom...

• The attempt to define sexual freedom is as
  vexing as characterizing democracy.
• Example 1
• The requirement of two raises several important
  concerns, based as it is on the dyad-model of
  coupling that extends into marriage and
  anxieties around polygamy. Perhaps even less
  understandable is distress regarding solitary
  sexual activities, as exhibited by recent cases
  in the United States upholding criminal
  prohibitions of the distribution of sex toys,
  except by medical prescription (Robson 2007,
  415).

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The Constitution and freedom...

• Example 2
• The neo-liberal extension of protection for
  sexual acts only to adults is also disquieting,
  although we have long been accustomed to laws
  based on a capacity to contract.
• These laws impose a bright-line rule based upon a
  persons age the ability to vote is a good
  example. Yet if we compare the voting age of 18
  in South Africa and the United States to the age
  of sexual consent in those nations, there is
  dissonance.

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Contrariness and Constitutions....

• Thus, in South Africa
• despite the identification of the disparity in
  age of consent laws for heterosexual and
  homosexual acts as inconsistent with the
  then-interim Constitution (version 1994)..
• .the criminal law continues to prohibit
  same-gender acts with persons under the age of
  19, while prohibiting opposite-gender acts only
  with persons under the age of 16 .

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Knowing what we do....(not)

• In South Africa presently
• the anomalous situation exists that one could be
  criminally punished for having sexual relations
  with a same- sex partner aged 18
• although one could enter into a lawful marriage
  with her or him.
• The formulation of sexual freedom exposes the
  difficulties of demarcating it.
• In SA the State is passive. It is not charged
  with actively promoting sexual freedom, except
  when bounded by the concept of harm (Robson 2007,
  417).

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Demarcating the norm sex love...

• Prostitution - a test case on sex The judgment
  of Constitutional Court Judges ORegan and
  Sachs
• central to the character of prostitution is that
  it is indiscriminate and loveless. The prostitute
  is not nurturing relationships or taking
  life-affirming decisions about birth, marriage or
  family.
• The ideal of a minority protection clause depends
  for its credibility on society defining what is
  acceptable for a minority to exist thus normal
  society defines what is normal in its sphere of
  allowable difference.

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My Constitutionfor my values?

• ...the heterosexual definition of marriage is the
  lifelong union between a man and a woman.
• the definition is confused with the belief that
  marriage is a religious (theocratic) institution
  (rather than a secular, civil arrangement). In SA
  it is defined constitutionally as a secular
  matter.
• thus an overwhelming majority of religious
  institutions right from the beginning of the
  struggle for same-sex marriage in South Africa
  (and elsewhere) vehemently opposed it. The
  Constitution mediates value systems (Barnard
  2007, 509).

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Can Secularism have Values...?

• Secularism is perceived wrongly as value-free,
  material, and thus amoral
• Universities socialise us into knowledge, but
  also into values (awareness/ action).
• Knowledge without values is dangerous. The danger
  of totalitarianism (Arendt 1973)
• it seeks the destruction of private life. The
  success of totalitarianism depends on the concept
  of isolationit is isolation that serves as the
  precursor to loneliness, and it is loneliness
  that provides the fertile breeding ground for
  terror (Example, the Holocaust).

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Autonomy, identity and values...

• Appiah in The Ethics of Identity (2005, 45) and
  Cosmopolitanism (2006) argues
• thatconceptions of autonomy (as
• a key feature of identity) are based on
• a false binary of self and other and
• distinctions made between full or
• partial autonomy of the agent do not
• cohere (2005, 52).
• Appiah draws upon psycho-social theory of
  identity associated with the work of Erikson and
  Gouldner stating that ideas (and values) shape
  the way people conceive of themselves and their
  projects (their choices) (2005, 66).

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Autonomy, choice and identity?

• In South Africa we live in a liberal democracy.
• Liberalism typically favours the idea that
  individuals ought to have the autonomy of choice
  in terms of their identities. Dimensions of
  identity may not be entirely constructed and are
  not constituted out of will or desire.
• Example
• A gay man or a black woman do not choose their
  desires and, thus according to Appiah, there are
  parts of identity which are not merely a matter
  of individual choice.

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Rights, identity and protection from society.

• The South African State contained and still
  contains within it structural forms rights to
  favour and protection (for example, affirmative
  action, the preference for poor, the protection
  of women and children) .
• Appiah argues that the need for such measures
  arises from the fact that the simple right to
  human dignity is not sufficient protection in a
  State where a group or individual might still be
  attacked on the basis of not conforming to a
  group (Appiah 2005, 109).

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University passive or active agent?

• Jacques Rancière argues that
• the rights of (people) and of the
• citizen are the rights of those who
• make them a reality. They were
• won through democratic action
• and are only ever guaranteed
• through such action. (2006, 74).
• The University must promote those values that
  enable freedoms to choose, and protection of
  communities. It must imagine and enact such
  values through the socialisation (the formal and
  hidden curriculum) of its members.

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Acknowledgements References

• Acknowledgements
• Colleagues and Students (for listening)
• The Office for Transformation and Diversity
• Institutional Office (for the opportunity)
• References
• Anderson, B. 2006. Imagined Communities .(New
  ed.). Verso London New York.
• Appiah, K. 2006. Cosmopolitanism Ethics in a
  World of Strangers. New York W.W. Norton and
  Company.
• Appiah, K. 2005. The Ethics of Identity.
  Princeton Princeton University Press.
• Arendt, H. 1973. The Origins of Totalitarianism.
  London Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
• Barnard, J. 2007. Totalitarianism (same sex)
  marriage and democratic politics in
  post-Apartheid South Africa, in South African
  Journal of Human Rights 23(3) 500-525.
• Bratton, M, Mattes, R. and Gyimah-Boadi, E. 2005.
  Public Opinion, Democracy, and Market Reform in
  Africa, Neuva York Cambridge University Press.
  66.
• Rancière, J. 2006. Hatred of Democracy. (Transl
  S. Corcoran), London Verso Books.
• Robson, R. 2007. Sexual Democracy in South
  African Journal of Human Rights 23(3) 409-417.

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Thank you