Ken Plummer
When people define situations as real they become real in their consequences.
(Thomas 1932: 572)
A person has as many selves as there are situations.
(James 1985: 93)
A separate individual is an abstraction unknown to experience, and so likewise is society when regarded as something apart from individuals. The real thing is human life.
(Cooley 1956: 36–7)
This chapter suggests a way of looking at issues of human sexual rights. It focuses on how human beings are symbol manipulating creatures living their lives embodied and embedded in different kinds of historical and social situation. Human life unfolds precariously in a heaving universe of contingency and change.
At its heart there is an ontology of the human being as a bundle of potentials and capabilities that need appropriate social conditions in order to flourish. Without the right social conditions, human life becomes flawed and damaged and prone to too much suffering: lives become ‘wasted.’ In the important work of Amartya Sen (1999) and Martha Nussbaum (1999), there is a listing of what these human capabilities could be for all human beings. They include: life; health; bodily integrity; senses, imagination and thought; emotions; practical reason; affiliation and recognition; the ability to play; some control over one’s environment; and, finally, an ability to live with other species expressed in a concern for and in relation to animals, plants and the world of nature. Such a list offers a good starting point for thinking about what a human life needs to develop if it is to flourish.
My critical focus in this humanist task is through one focused route into this position: namely, the century-old stance of symbolic interaction.
The traditions of symbolic interactionism are long, and not without schisms and controversies. Interactionist thought have their origins in the Stoical philosophical traditions of the ancients. In recent times, they were born again in the philosophies and pragmatism of William James, John Dewey, Charles S. Peirce, George Herbert Mead; in the poetics of Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman; in the more formal theorising of Georg Simmel and others; and in the down-to-earth fieldwork of sociologists and reformers like Robert Park, W. I. Thomas and Jane Adams. The term symbolic interactionism was coined in 1937 by Herbert Blumer and its ideas informed the work of Everett Hughes, Howard S. Becker and Anselm Strauss. It has undergone a philosophical renewal in the work of Richard Rorty and Sidney Hook. And there are many affinities with cultural anthropology, cultural historians, humanistic social psychologies and (some) postmodern and cultural theorists.
At its heart, symbolic interaction offers a grounded, practical and everyday approach to social life and social understanding. It sees human beings as bundles of potentials living everyday lives in local contexts through doing things together, and struggling to make meaning in their daily lives. The symbolic nature of human life is central to understanding; these meanings are never transcendental, essential or fixed but are ambiguous and contested. Social life is emergent. At its heart lies the process of language and communication and the ability to recognise, interpret and understand ‘others.’ But it is deeply and always precarious and unfolding.
All human beings dwell in what we might call ‘Otherness.’ To live, like it or not, we have to become attuned to others – to develop role-taking ability, to acquire sympathy and to empathise with fellow humans, and sometimes other animals. If we fail this, social life as we know it simply could not continue. Life is embroiled in metaphor – it can be seen as a journey and a struggle in the acquisition of meaning as we tell the stories of our lives and our times. And so we come to define ourselves, our bodies and others; our pasts, our presents and our futures. It matters hugely how we make these definitions and how we construct our symbols: we must be cautious, for, when people define situations as real they may well become real in their consequences.
Symbolic interactionism is one of a range of accounts of the world that, taken together, may be called critical humanism . The core of their ontology is a fragile sense of what it is to be a human being. We are indeed specks of dust in a boundless universe, being, as Ernest Becker once argued, profoundly, the ‘little Gods who shit’ (Becker 1973: 58). We are little animals striving to make sense of our lives through elaborate symbols in a universe so vast it defies comprehension. And yet, at the same time, we need to grasp our human vulnerability and place it at the heart of our thinking. The grand abstraction and the search for universals is bound to falter and we are usually better working with a theory of the human being that is grounded, practical and charged with doing things, usually together with others.1
Flowing from this view of social life is a distinctive view of sexualities: one that is largely at odds both with popular naturalistic and biological accounts (‘sex is natural’) and with more sophisticated Freudian theories (who tend to ‘read’ sex and desire into everything). My approach is a much more practical and down-to-earth approach to sexuality that focuses on the ways in which sexual symbols and meanings are generated and transformed constantly in everyday life, across lives and across history. Culture, power and ethics play crucial roles in the organisation of such negotiated meanings, which connect closely with emotions, bodies and selves.
This way of thinking has a long lineage but started to gain popularity in the 1960s through the work of John Gagnon and William Simon, two sociologists who were working at the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research. They drew from their Chicago-based training in fieldwork, were influenced by the work of the literary theorist Kenneth Burke for whom ‘symbolicity’ was so central; and borrowed ideas from their influential peer – Erving Goffman, and his idea of dramaturgy and social stagecraft. The peak point of their writing was the syntheses of papers they created in Sexual Conduct: The Social Sources of Human Sexuality, first published in 1973 and reprinted, in slightly revised form in 2005. The book, as Simon said years later, ‘was actually a series of essays rather than a coherent linear text’ (Simon 1999: 130). But it has been hugely influential.
Their most influential idea was the metaphor of sexual scripting. Rather than seeing sexuality as a biological drive or gender as a fixed essence, sexuality should be seen as meanings organised loosely into scripts that suggest who people are sexually and what others they can desire sexually, what they can do sexually, where and when they can do it and also explain to them why they do it. Such scripts change from society to society, group to group, person to person and even within the same person. Scripts are not fixed but are wide open to improvisation. They can be examined at a wide social level (historical, cultural), at an interpersonal level (what people do with each other) and psychically (how people come to inhabit their own emotional and symbolic sexual worlds and sexual scripts).
This is account of sexualities shaped a great deal of further thinking and research. It encourages us to look for symbols of sexualities: look for the meanings and the histories of self, of conduct, the stories we tell about it and the wider cultural sense of it. It makes us think about how we give meaning to our bodies and our feelings, our fantasies and our relationships, our lives and our histories. It encourages attention to be focused on the ways in which sexualities are moulded through interactional webs and networks. Finally, it sees sexuality as emergent: not as a fixed essence or thing but always on the move, flowing, developing and changing. The question here is to find ways of capturing – albeit momentarily – this flux and flow: the doings, feelings and tellings of our meaning-making sexualities assembled with others, in a world of profound divisions and inequalities (cf. Plummer 2005).
With these background issues in mind, I want now to turn to human rights. Although ‘human rights’ have a long history, I take them to be a thoroughly contested field. Across the world, the issues the idea raises have been widely challenged and debated. Those who suggest that rights are straightforward, inalienable, uncontested – and many do – work from a shallow and culturally limited ideas of rights. One day being active in any of the multitudinous social movements working for human rights, or reading the massive and polarised literatures on human rights – in law, in politics, in sociology – would surely reveal just how contested notions of human rights are. Symbolic interactionism and critical humanism provide one major tool into thinking about all this.
Human social life is a grounded, practical affair. This is also true of human rights. Human rights are everyday matters of great practical importance to the everyday lives of practical people as they go about their daily rounds of sufferings and joys. Hence, while there are indeed some great philosophical writings and some hugely important abstract documents of rights – notably the Declaration of Independence, 1776; the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 1789; and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948 – these have all been born of blood and human suffering: the French Revolution, the War of Independence, the two world wars, the Holocaust, the Stalinist/Maoist purges. Millions have been slaughtered both in the name of rights and in order that such grand statements could be produced. Such grand abstract documents conceal a multitude of battles (cf. Grayling 2007; Hunt 2007).
Although rights can be analysed abstractly (and usually are), the task for social researchers is to become intimately familiar with the crusaders, their claims and the social processes through which rights emerge and are made public. There is an important need to see ‘rights’ as part of the day-to-day world of lived meaning, and not simply belonging to the theoretical and philosophical or even legal heavens. Thus, when we hear the term human rights we always need to ask: Whose rights? What rights? Why are rights being claimed here? And where and when? The very idea means many things to many people and it has throughout different cultures and different historical periods.
Claims for sexual rights are recent (see Coleman and Cottingham elsewhere in this volume) – they are not to be found in the classical statements as such, but have to be read into them. All rights work takes place in morally grounded activities and political practices; and with issues of sexual rights traditional moralities clash furiously with those advocating progressive changes (Hunter 1990). There is a major conflict over defining what it means to live a good life and to be human. Abstractions may be used in the arguments; but the actual battles are very down to earth and we need to understand how they take place (Plummer 2003).
Human social life can only be understood with due attention to its symbolic nature and the full range of ever ambiguous human meaning. This is also true of human rights. Human rights are powerful symbols, but their meanings constantly shift across times, spaces, groups. The term has variously meant ‘security’ (Hobbes), ‘life, liberty and property’ (Locke), ‘freedom’ (Kant), ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ (Paine) and so on. These days notions of rights are often linked to ideas of citizenship (see Corrêa and Petchesky elsewhere in this volume), and there are many versions of this too: economic, legal, welfare, intimate, cultural, feminist, global and so on (Isin and Turner 2002).
The idea of human rights is always an emergent and contested symbol. Symbolic interactionism places the symbol at the centre of its thinking – and stresses the triadic nature of meaning for humans. Thus meaning appears as we approach an object such as human rights, it is then handled and manipulated as we try to put it into action and then is itself further modified as it emerges through its outcomes. Human rights are not – by their very symbolic character – ever capable of standing still. They are always ambiguous and emergent. We may declare human rights in various declarations – but behind these declarations exist huge human struggles for meanings. We know too that when we read seemingly much approved and agreed on documents such as the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), many people have spent thousands of hours debating and analyzing in order to make sense of their arguments and applications. Finally, the outcomes of any rights framework is never clear – they emerge as new sets of understandings that then themselves become open to further interpretation. It is important to grasp the flow of meanings, the contestations, the ambiguities of the symbolic (Blumer 1969).
Human cultures are mosaics of multilayered, negotiable and ever emergent symbolic interactions. Human rights are part of these cultures. Cultures are never tight, fixed or agreed on but are multilayered ‘mosaics of social worlds’. As Seyla Benhabib (2002: 9) says: ‘The interpretation of cultures as hermetic, sealed, internally self consistent wholes is untenable and reflects the reductionist sociology of knowledge.’ There are innumerable social worlds that are constantly contradictory and tensionful. Cultures are ‘the scraps, patches and rags of daily life’ (Benhabib 2002: 36); they are the layered, daily lived, toolboxes of ideas and materials that are constantly in flow and flux to help us resolve daily problems of living. Ideas of human rights have become part of this toolbox. But there is nothing clear, unified or established about this. Thus, when we are looking across cultures, we should never be at all surprised to find enormous differences: the trouble is that we are sometimes too surprised when we look inside specific cultures that we also find these differences.
Cultures do not speak to consensus and uniformity: by their nature, they cannot. Thus to speak of sexual cultures as harmonious, well-ordered consensual wholes is nonsense. To talk of ‘Muslim culture’, ‘women’s culture’, ‘British culture’ or even ‘gay culture’ is, in truth, to immediately step into social worlds of massive ambiguities, contradictions, tensions – never worlds of agreed on consensus. Social life as lived times grows out of these tensions. It is important to grasp this – because some views of cultures flatten them and turn them into monologic, monolithic and monomoral overly stable forms. Human rights debates over sexualities can become lost if they work with this naive, dead and overly simple view of culture.
Thus, while it is useful to sense the pervasiveness of multiculturalism, this can also bring the danger of seeing a different culture as if it were fixed, different and lacking dynamics of change. It is more useful to recognise their ceaseless dynamism, overlaps, continuities and contestations. Cultures, and human rights, are always lived actions: in bricolage, in mobilities and complexities; and they are always negotiated and deeply contested. This is what breathes persistent life into culture, what animates it. Without it, culture dies. Multicultures are not separate essences apart from one other, but are always overlapping and emergent as well as internally contested.
Human social life is always made, acted, constructed through the interactions of living people in a society. People do things together and build social life. This is how societies work. Human rights too are constructions of people doing things together. Rights are not given in nature merely waiting to be found. Rights are inventions created by human agents through symbolic interactions. They involve the collective conduct and social meaning of many, and come into being through the interpretive work of social movements and a diverse range of moral crusaders and entrepreneurs: from kings, prophets and philosophers to governments, social movements, writers and non-governmental organisations. We need to study collective behaviour and social movements as part of this web of ceaseless negotiated interactions.
Symbolic interaction always depends on an idea of imagining others – of dialoguing with, at least linking to, and maybe even empathising or sympathising, with others. Human social life could not exist without awareness of others in the social world. The social human is always contingent on other people. There is no way that individuals can function in this world on their own. And in large part this is because human beings have selves predicated on communication and dialogues with others. In a very profound sense, ‘we live in the minds of others without knowing it’ (Cooley 1998: Chapter 13; Scheff 2006: 33). Language, communication and the self are bound together and to be social requires that we acquire and develop an idea of self. And doing this always hovers on the edge of a moral imagination that invites all people to consider how these others – who are inescapably present and bound up with our lives – should actually be handled within our lives.
In this, we are never monologic in the sense that we have unitary and single voices: rather we always dialogic – in discussion with others – even as we forget this. How are these others to be connected to ourselves? In my view, we cannot understand humanity – or sexuality or human rights – without taking a dialogical and reflective stance. Our rights must be linked to the idea of otherness – we depend on others for the rights we can have. Rights imply mutuality – and usually obligations as well as rights; so rights can only exist in dialogue with others. We have no social claims to our rights if we have no sense of the others who can give us these rights, and if we have this, then we need to be aware of their rights too. We are all bound together.
These dialogues are dependent on what the symbolic interactionists – through James, Mead and Goffman – called ‘role taking’: but there are many closely connected words that suggest this: empathy, sympathy, recognition, being attuned to another, being aware of someone’s needs. Thus, being attuned to the other requires a communication network – even patches of communal cultures – that enables us to take seriously the presence of others. Some of these others will be near to us and close, our significant others; but others will be much more distant and far away (from generalised others to abstract others). We feel less for them and we are shaped less by them. And part of the self-process is not just awareness of others but also a feeling of self-regard concerning how we come to see ourselves and place ourselves in the social world.
People nowadays may claim human rights for themselves; but for such rights – including sexual rights – to make sense we need to know something about the wider contexts in which such claims are made. And one of these most surely derives from an imaginative understanding of what is meant by both the self and the other: the self who has rights and the other who may or may not have rights. Sexual rights demand a close attention to the sexual worlds of others as well as of ourself. They connect to what might be called a moral imagination – the capacity to empathise with others and to see the possibilities for ethical actions (McCollough 1991: 63).
Social life is shaped by the definitions of situations we make, and the stories and narratives we tell. Cultures construct narratives with diverse moral meanings for the self that can be connected to human rights. Part of the search for self and other, along with the conception of just what rights a human might have, will arise from the significant and generalised others with whom one is linked: real people in real life. These are the key players in shaping our social worlds and our senses of rights. But there are also wider, broader features of a culture which foster our sense of empathy, role taking and comprehension of other worlds.
One argument developed in the past few decades highlights the significance of storytelling and narrative for the construction of the self (Holstein and Gubrium 2000). Lynn Hunt (2007) in her recent history of human rights, for example, places great store on the rise of the eighteenth-century novel as a key factor in shaping a wider sensitivity to other. Accounts of violence and torture, for example, helped people imagine the pain of others. Novels gave people new ideas about how the self worked, and ‘imagined empathy’ in a range of areas sensitised more and more people to ideas of the rights of others. Before her, the philosophers Martha Nussbaum (1999) and Richard Rorty (1989) placed great store on the role of reading novels and art more generally as a keystone for comprehending moral and political life.
There is always the possibility, then, that when people define situations as real they become real in their consequences. This is also true of human rights. The stories we construct that tell of sufferings and joys help direct us to a world we wish to become and a world where human rights are recognised. ‘Good stories’ can be the harbingers of human rights. They have often arisen from telling us about the truly dehumanising things that people do to each other in the form of genocides, war, torture, slavery and oppression as well as in the everyday simple nastiness of some people. But they also can tell about the importance of equality, the value of lives, of what it is to be fully functioning human being.
Kay Schafer and Sidonie Smith (2004) talk of Human Rights and Narrated Lives in their examination of the traumatic past in apartheid South Africa, the underground literature that circulated during this time and the subsequent Truth and Reconciliation Commission. They look also at Aboriginal experiences in Australia and the struggle for indigenous rights; at the stories of abduction and forced sexual slavery during the Second World War by poor Korean women in Japanese ‘comfort stations’; at prison narratives and political prisoners – especially in the USA. The stories they tell sensitise readers to terrible things that have happened and pathways ahead through human rights dialogues. As they say:
This book is a testimony to the efficacy of stories: stories silenced by and emerging from fear, shame, trauma and repression; stories enlivened by hope, connection, commitment and affiliation; stories fed by calls for justice, fuelled by empathy and an ethics of equality and human dignity; stories framed by faith in international covenants calling for dignity, justice and freedom. These stories, taken together, mount a powerful argument for the efficacy of storytelling in advancing the ongoing and constantly transforming pursuit of social justice, emanating from, but not limited to, the human rights project inaugurated by the United Declaration of Human Rights.
(Schafer and Smith 2004: 233–4)
The same has been happening in the field of sexual rights. Narratives of sexual difference, sexual suffering and sexual survival are required to progress the development of sexual rights: for in them lies a wider understanding of the selves and worlds of others that are so closely linked to our sexualities and our humanities.
Human social life is embedded in power and moral relations and always has to be negotiated – societies are contested negotiated orders animated by schisms and fracturings. Rights work involves a continuous round of negotiated collective actions to interpret, rationalise and define both social identities and related rights. It is a core feature of the work of social movements, and entails ‘claims and counterclaims’, often animated by quasi-arguments and storytelling. It is endemically schismatic and political.
Social movements can be seen as arising out of subterranean worlds where people are resisting dominant powerful forces. Under conditions of stress and crisis, people engage in collective activity that produces claims and help frame arguments about the nature of their lives and their problems. From this, they work to mobilise resources and get organised. By the nineteenth century, social movements had become international, playing a key role in participation linked to the ‘expansion and contraction of democratic possibilities’ (Tilly 2004: 3). Three factors mark out the development of social movements after 1750: the prominence of sustained campaigns beyond any single event; the use of a wide range of tools (from pamphleteering to demonstrations); and organisations’ ultimate sense of their own worthiness, unity, size and commitment (Tilly 2004).
Sexual rights have become an important part of this work – in the women’s movement, the homophile/queer movement and the transgender movement. The gay movement may have culminated in Stonewall in 1969 and the formation of the London Gay Liberation front in 1970. But, like all social movements, such a movement did not arise overnight; and without such movements no rights claims could be made. Now, the actions of such movements and claims for sexual rights are firmly on the international agenda.
Human social life is processual, emergent and flowing: there is always a history to it. This is also true of human rights. Rights work moves through certain phases, histories and stages. At one point, it is invisible and hardly articulated; at another it finds a voice; and at a later stage it can become habitualised and institutionalised. But it is never fixed and is always on the move. Claims for human rights have long histories.
In her study of the history of human rights, Micheline Ishay (2004) suggests five major waves: early times, the Enlightenment, socialism and the industrial age, the world wars and international rights and the global age. For most of recorded history, religions have been the seedbeds of rights – they have provides rules, codes, commandments, ‘ways of living’ for societies to observe, and although these are not rights per se, they often hint at rights to come. Yet in most of these codes, same- sex relations are strongly condemned. ‘Humanitarian’ as they often are in providing a seedbed of values for how to live a good life, they are also harbingers of hate in marking out the despised sexual other and advocating the hatred of such groups.
In recent times, there has been growing concern for rights within the field of sexuality. As Rosalind Petchesky comments, they are ‘the newest kid on the block’ (2000: 81–103). There were odd hints of such rights in nineteenth-century feminism; hints that grow in a few countries during the twentieth century. Historians have documented a substantial tradition of gay life during the early part of the twentieth century (Houlbrook 2005; Doan 2001). Likewise, in Germany and to a lesser extent in the USA, there were significant pushes towards homosexual emancipation (Weeks 1977, 2007). In the UK, the scandals of Oscar Wilde forced homosexuality deeply underground, extensive though it was. In the twentieth century, the cases of Wildeblood and Montagu2 led to the Wolfenden Report, which, in turn, created organizations that lobbied for homosexual law reform and, ultimately, legal changes in 1967 in the UK. But such concerns do not become part of global sexual citizenship debates until the 1990s.
While it is grounded in the self, it is also intrinsically linked to an awareness of the others in the wider world. George Herbert Mead classically located the ways in which the self moved out from the significance of others in the immediate world to the existence of a ‘generalised other’, initially the community but later to the international global community. In the twenty-first century, social commentators now presume the significance of the global – they see global markets, global media, global governance and global cultures. They stress that social processes of globalisation proceeding alongside those of globalisation, and have reinvoked the ancient idea of cosmopolitanism to flag the significance of being citizens in the wider cosmos or world (Toulmin 1990).
George Herbert Mead was a dedicated internationalist (Aboulafia 2001: 18). Speaking in the 1920s, he suggests that:
The organised ‘other’ … is a community of narrow diameter. We are struggling now to get a certain amount of international-mindedness. We are realising ourselves as members of a larger community. The vivid nationalism of the present should, in the end, call out for an international attitude of the large community … If we assert our rights, we are calling for a definite response just because they are rights that are universal – a response which everyone should, and perhaps will, give.
(Mead 1934: 167, 260)
Struggles over such rights now take place not only in local arenas but also in global ones. They are part of universalising attitudes, emergent global flows and what has now become the search for global standards of human rights and a global citizenry. We see it embodied in the work of many non-governmental organisations and in the work of the United Nations. Kant’s famous principle – the peoples of the earth have entered into a universal community – has now developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part of the world is starting to be felt everywhere.
The hopeful news now is to be found in writers who have detected the rise of a new cosmopolitan attitude within the world and the arrival of a cosmopolitan self (and with it, perhaps, a cosmopolitan sexuality?). Cosmopolitanism, above all else, sees us all as universally part of the same world but as incorrigibly different. People everywhere are different and there is much to be learned from these differences. But at the same time, ‘humankind’ is one (Appiah 2006; Beck 2006; Fine 2007).
In this chapter, I have tried to continue my journey as a critical humanist. Despite our differences, dreams and desires, we are all part of the same small species in a vast universe. We are busy practical beings with our different enterprises, sufferings and joys and are here but for a very short time on our planet. By seeing our social lives as symbolic, emergent and interactive, we may deepen our understanding of our sexualities, our rights and, ultimately, our human capabilities.
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