‘Disreputable Life’: Race, Sex, and Intimacy

Abstract

Recent genealogies of the self-governing liberal subject have placed a renewed emphasis on the sphere of intimacy for its production. A critical narrative has emerged whereby liberal constructions of ‘appropriate’ intimacy as an autonomous sphere serves to actively disavow the racialisation and sexualisation of the liberal subject as white and heterosexual. At the same time, its constitutive outside, the nonwhite and the nonheternormative, positively require explanation to shore up its boundaries. Yet these widespread complementary assumptions miss places and times, such as the Progressive-era US, in which mainstream discourse has interrogated the liberal subject and has explicitly examined its heterosexual whiteness, while it has also strategically underexplained its others. Writings of Progressive figures such as Jane Addams and Louise de Koven Bowen on the productive regulation of intimacy, particularly marriage and prostitution, are put in conversation with current accounts of these issues. In doing so, the assumption of the liberal subject's invisibility to itself is problematised on an empirical basis, and the reification of distinctions between race and sexuality—even as their contingent production is being explained—is problematised at a theoretical level.