Summary of Chapter 1
Michael Warner begins The Trouble With Normal with a discussion on “The Ethics of Sexual Shame.” His point of departure is the realization that almost everyone experiences some amount of shame when it comes to sex, no matter what kind of sex they have or desire to have. Shame is jut a part of the experience of sex. Sometimes, people try to cover up the shame with euphemisms, like calling sex “making love.” But these kinds of euphemisms only show just how uncomfortable most people are talking about sex itself—they talk about “love” instead of the actual act of sex.
If shame is always a part of sex, Warner argues, then the question we should be asking ourselves is not how to get rid of shame, but what to do with it. You can’t get rid of shame unless you get rid of sex. But you can change what the effects of shame are. Warner claims that, confronted with the shame of sex, most people shame others for sex instead of acknowledging their own experience. One way of doing this is through “moralism.” That’s the claim that some forms of sex are better than others. In this way, people shift the shame from their “good” sex onto the “bad” sex of everyone else.
Warner borrows from Gayle Rubin’s famous 1984 essay “Thinking Sex” to tease out the differences between so-called “good” sex and so-called “bad” sex. In the United States of the late 20th century, Rubin said that there is a sexual hierarchy with the good sex on top and the bad sex on the bottom, where it is further shamed. The good sex includes sex that is heterosexual, monogamous, married, procreative, noncommercial (that means people don’t exchange sex for money), in pairs, in a relationship, and with members of the same generation. This sex is in private, does not include pornography or sex toys, and is “vanilla” in contrast to the sex that includes bondage, domination, or other forms of kink. Sex that doesn’t have one of these attributes can be considered “bad,” and it is shamed in order to relieve the “good” sex from its own shame.
In order to defend this sexual hierarchy, Warner argues people often turn to a notion of sex that is natural and innate. The idea here is that the “good” sex, like heterosexual sex in marriage, is natural, while other forms of sex are not. Shame should only be attached to the “unnatural” kinds. The problem with this, Warner argues, is that sex has actually changed throughout history. Some forms of sex that are considered “bad” today were more widespread in the past, and vice versa. This suggests there is no “natural” kind of sex. Moreover, people often do not know what sex they like until they have it. That suggests there isn’t an “innate” kind of sexual preference either. People need to be able to explore different kinds of sex and sexuality in order to learn their preferences.
After discussing how sex can have different meanings at different times in history, Warner discusses the current state of sexual shame in America today. His first case study is the impeachment of Bill Clinton, who was nationally embarrassed because of a sex scandal. Warner notes how discussion of the impeachment focused more on Clinton’s sex life than it did on laws Clinton had broken, because sex is by definition humiliating and therefore was a weapon against Clinton. The Clinton case also shows how much people like talking about sex, if it means shaming someone else. This suggests that, contrary to popular belief, we aren’t “repressed” in our society. There isn’t a taboo against talking about sex. In turn, the shame surrounding sex is not simply produced through people being silenced about sex, but through people actively talking about and humiliating others.
Although shame is a universal component of sex, Warner also discusses how there are differences in who is shamed and how harshly they are shamed. The experience of Bill Clinton, a heterosexual male, is different from, for instance, the experience of gay men who are shamed for sex. This is because there is a difference between “shame” and “stigma.” Stigma refers to an entrenched mark of disgrace that is usually associated with a particular group of people, not just an individual. Gay people, as a group, are stigmatized in ways that Bill Clinton, as an individual, is not.
Another way of looking at stigma is to consider which forms of sexual shame are related to identities, and which are not. In American culture, “gay” is an identity in a way that “user of pornography” or “person who has casual sex outside of a relationship” is not. On consequence of this is that members who have a sexual identity, such as gay, may also work to police other members of their community. This is called “purifying” that community, and it means shaming others who have sex that is “bad.” Thus the gay community, for instance, might try to purify the community by pushing out the “bad” gays who have sex outside of relationships, use pornography or sex toys, have sex across generations, etc.
In contrast to this gay identity politics, which reacts to the shame of a stigmatized identity by creating a hierarchy with that identity, Warner calls for a “queer politics” that is not based on identity or respectability. Here, “queer” refers not to gays, lesbians, bisexuals, or transgendered people. Instead, it refers to anyone who has sex that is outside the “norm,” that is, anyone who has sex that doesn’t fit perfectly in the list of “good” sex. A politics of queerness is a politics of acknowledging, rather than trying to pretend away, the shame involved in sex. This politics, Warner argues, works towards building a society that does not stigmatize people for sex.
Analysis of Chapter 1
This first chapter of The Trouble with Normal is both expansive and focused. It is expansive because it finds a pattern in how we experience sex across history: shame. Here, Warner draws on his wide knowledge as a professor of English literature and American studies in order to make a case about the pervasiveness of a cultural experience. At the same time, Warner is homing in on the particular forms of sexual shame at play in American society in the 1990s. He shows he is up to date on current affairs by turning to the Clinton scandal as a symbol of contemporary sexual hysteria, and he directly addresses the gay rights movement as well by citing and engaging a number of public intellectuals and activists from the gay community. Warner writes as a queer person to queer people, which contributes to the casualness of his tone, but he also writes as an scholar who thinks history and philosophy can help us understand the present.
In discussing shame, Warner leans heavily upon the work of Gayle Rubin, whose 1984 essay “Thinking Sex” was influential in positing a “sex hierarchy”: the ways in which some sex is deemed “good” and some sex is deemed “bad.” In that essay, Rubin argued that part of the cause of this hierarchy is that people lack a concept of “benign variation”: a sense that differences in sexual preference don’t have to be dangerous. Rubin explains:
Most people find it difficult to grasp that whatever they like to do sexually will be thoroughly repulsive to someone else, and that whatever repels them sexually will be the most treasured delight of someone, somewhere. One need not like or perform a particular sex act in order to recognize that someone else will, and that this difference does not indicate a lack of good taste, mental health, or intelligence in either party. Most people mistake their sexual preferences for a universal system that will or should work for everyone. (154)
This is a similar dynamic to what Warner sees going on in American culture in the 1990s. People promote their own sex as the sex everyone should be having, and they shame others who have sex differently. But the point that Warner adds is that people do this because of their own shame, too. Instead of confronting their own shame, they try to make sure that other people have more shame.
The search for a “universal” or natural sexuality also informs another important debate within the gay community during the 1990s. That’s the search for a “gay gene,” the idea that sexual orientation is innate and biological and therefore out of a person’s control. Warner thinks this search for innate sexuality is again because of people’s shame; they are ashamed of their sexual preferences, and so they want the cause to something "natural," out of conscious control, thus not be their "fault." It is also an effective way for arguing for civil rights, because many other civil rights are also based on seemingly biological categories, such as race and sex. But Warner thinks this path is a dead-end, because sexual variation should be accepted regardless of whether it is a choice. Moreover, the turn to biology will only end up creating another hierarchy, because there will always be some forms of sexual preference that don’t seem to be programmed by genes. The task should be getting rid of hierarchy, not trying to legitimize one position at a time within the hierarchy.
Rubin is not the only thinker who informs Warner’s thought in this chapter. In general, his entire book is indebted to a school of thought that took off in the 1990s called queer theory. Inaugurated in academia by such books as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, this school of thought denaturalized the ways in which people think about sex and sexuality. In many ways, The Trouble with Normal is a translation of key concepts from academic queer theory into everyday language accessible to a wider public. One of the concepts in queer theory is the centrality of shame as a foundational part of human experience. The idea is that it is when we experience shame that we come into contact with a core part of ourselves. Shame is thus productive, not just repressive. Warner clearly participates in this tradition.
His ideas about shame are also influenced by queer activism of the time. For instance, in 1998 a group of queer activists started an event and movement called “Gay Shame,” which was intended as an alternative to the mainstream gay pride parades offered in many American cities every summer. These activists argued that gay pride had become too capitalist (sponsored by companies like Budweiser), conservative (interested in things like gay marriage instead of a radical queer politics), and “respectable” (representing only the part of the queer community that formed monogamous relationships). Instead, they called for looking at shame as a way of looking at the diversity of the queer community. Some of these ideas also informed an academic book of essays edited by David Halperin and Valerie Traub titled Gay Shame.
