Spotlight on SRSP: Steven Epstein 

Steven Epstein is an associate professor of sociology at University of California, San Diego. He has studied a recent attempt to promote moral panic about publicly funded sexuality research in the United States. In the early 2000s, the Christian right group Traditional Values Coalition compiled a “hit list” of scientists doing research in sexuality. After the list made its way to policymakers, named individuals found that their funding from the National Institute of Health was in jeopardy. Epstein’s paper, “The New Attack on Sexuality Research: Moral Panic and the Politics of Knowledge” is published in Volume 3, Issue 1 of Sexuality Research and Social Policy: Journal of NSRC. In it, he argues that such controversies should be approached simultaneously as moral struggles around sexual norms and as credibility struggles around knowledge production.

American Sexuality: How have Christian right groups impacted the work and lives of sexuality researchers?

Steven Epstein: The story I tell in my article looks at a recent wave of what’s actually a longer trajectory, going back decades, in which sexuality researchers found their work under hostile scrutiny or under attack. In the most recent episode, researchers found that their names had been compiled on a hit list of, essentially, so-called suspect individuals. The hit list that was circulating through Congress had originated from the Traditional Values Coalition, the ultra-conservative organization based in southern California. They compiled a list of people they thought were suspect, some of whom were no longer doing research, some of whom were, in fact, deceased. They gathered information on the federal funding people received for doing research related to sexuality. By getting members of Congress interested in the issue, the organization created a more generalized kind of fear in which researchers were beginning to feel that one could not talk openly about issues of sexuality. Scholars doing work in sexuality and health in the ’ 80s and ’ 70 and ’ 60s have talked about similar problems. They either had to be relatively secretive about what they were doing, avoiding certain words in the titles of grant proposals, or they would have likely been investigated for doing work that was a scary threat to certain people.

In this most recent episode, the NIH program officers who were overseeing “suspect” research projects tipped off scientists and actually said not to use certain words in the titles or the abstracts of proposals. The practical effect is on what gets studied, what we know about and what we don’t know about. There are also a lot of more subtle effects on the everyday work experience of people who are trying to carry out this research, in terms of messages that are sent to veterans in the field, younger scholars, and students. If people feel besieged, if people feel they have to disguise what they’re doing and pretend this has nothing to do with sexuality, if they can’t use words like gay or prostitute in their proposal, then it has a demoralizing effect on the research community. Inevitably, there are some people who feel that it’s just not an area of research that they can sustain activity in; it’s too difficult.

AS: What is the moral panic surrounding sexuality?

SE: We live in a society that is often obsessed with sexual threats, real or imagined. By getting people worked up about sex, certain groups can advance all kinds of agendas that may actually be only tangentially related to sex. That leads to these periodic eruptions of moral panic. The brouhahas surrounding sexuality research that I write about in my article are not full fledged moral panics because there wasn’t sustained attention to it among the general public. But conservative right organizations, like the Traditional Values Coalition, featured it on their Web sites to try to promote a moral panic. What the conservatives were essentially trying to do was, not just to score some points in relation to their agenda that had to do with morality, but also to suppress the production of knowledge, because from their standpoint it simply was better not to know. They attacked researchers for investing in topics they thought sounded outlandish—studying sex workers, studying the ways the elderly are sexually active—on the assumption that there are certain things that are just not useful to know.

AS: What were some of the factors that fueled the right wing? What events took place during that time that shaped where we are now?

SE: There is a whole confluence of different actions and trends that brought us to the point where we were fighting about sexuality research. Part of it reflects the explicit attempt by some conservatives, in a sense, to imitate what they understood their opponents to be involved in. AIDS activists, breast cancer activists, a lot of health activists on the left in recent years have argued that the voices of ordinary people have to be respected within biomedical and scientific contexts. Some people on the right have said, “Well, okay then, we should have a say in science and public health as well.” Putting it that way sounds reasonable, but distinctions can be drawn between the different ways of making one’s voice heard in scientific research processes. It provided an opportunity for conservative Christians to link issues in a way that tied deviant sexuality to other things that they don’t like about contemporary American life. The list of studies targeted reflects the way in which we have become a multicultural society and the way questions of diversity and health disparities have become more important to sexuality researchers as well as to biomedical researchers. Many of the studies on the hit list were ones that focused specifically on communities of color.

AS: In the 1980s there was the controversy over the National Endowment for the Arts’ support of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work, specifically his photos of male nudes. Have scientists and artists formed any coalitions; have they had any dialog concerning federal funding?

SE: I honestly don’t know of any examples. But there are similarities between the targeting of the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities back in the ’ 80s and the more recent targeting of the National Institute of Health. But I don’t think we’ve seen the emergence of alliances between artists and scientists maybe because the language and the logic that are used in response tend to be different. Artists have the language of freedom of expression; scientists and sexuality researchers tend more to speak about the importance of scientific processes and of preventing outsiders from distorting scientific work.

AS: You wrote that defenders of sexuality research have not articulated alternatives to conservative representations of sexuality. In a nutshell what is the right wing representation of sexuality? What alternatives to that would you offer or suggest?

SE: In a nutshell, the right wing representation of sexuality is one that has restricted it to monogamous heterosexual relationships and that has been suspicious of any linkage between sexuality and pleasure or the idea of sexuality as something enjoyed for its own sake. What I meant by my statement was that, unfortunately, in the present political environment, it is very hard for those who have been subject to this hostile scrutiny to study sexuality for its own sake, on its own terms. There has been more of a tendency to want to fall back on a couple of other lines of defense, either emphasizing the public health significance of sexuality research—and, of course that’s very important to do—or defending the autonomy of science and suggesting that outsiders shouldn’t be interfering because that makes for bad science. What hasn’t been said in the process is anything about the intrinsic value of learning more about sexuality. What don’t get said are important messages about sexual diversity. Of course, given the climate of fear, it is not necessarily the most strategic point to emphasize, but in the long run it is problematic when alternative representations of sexuality are suppressed.

AS: How does what’s been happening affect the average Joe, and society as a whole?

SE: There are a bunch of effects. First of all, there’s plenty of historical evidence to suggest that when particular groups who may be marginalized get singled out on the basis of their sexuality—people start to make a big stink of so-called deviance—the end result is often the emergence of beliefs, policies, and laws that end up restricting the sexual rights and opportunities of a much broader swath of the population.

AS: It seems that the public is more skeptical of science in general these days. Why do you think that is, and how can scientists help reverse the trend?

SE: It’s absolutely true that in recent decades people are less inclined to defer to experts of all kinds. One has to recognize that scientific progress brings unanticipated consequences. The resulting suspicions are characteristic of our culture. Sometimes, they’re good things—we shouldn’t always defer to experts and I do believe that people should play an active role in thinking about the consequences of scientific and technological advances. AIDS activists played a role in challenging scientists and also worked with scientists. The lesson for scientists is that the days when they simply called the shots—or had the ability to be the experts that people deferred to—those days are probably gone. But there are ways of negotiating in this new environment that, on one hand, can avoid arrogance, but, on the other hand, can protect scientific research from those who prefer not to know, those who want to shut off lines of inquiry because of moral beliefs.

AS: That’s interesting because you’re not against people, the public, being involved in questioning or working with scientists, but at the same time, you make the distinction between that and what the right wing is doing.

SE: This is exactly the dilemma. In a democratic society it’s absolutely crucial that people not just leave everything up to the experts, because scientific and technological decisions have an incredible impact on our everyday lives, from determining the kind of air we breathe to determining the food we eat. But that doesn’t mean that any kind of intervention by the public is as legitimate as any other. It’s complicated and tricky to draw these distinctions. I don’t have all the answers here, but in my article I talk about the role AIDS activists were playing in the late 1980s and 1990s. They were getting in the face of scientists and doctors and other health officials, but they also had a deep investment in working with them for solutions to keep those they cared about alive. Their investment included learning a lot of science themselves, which normally activists don’t do, and their commitment, in the end, for finding answers meant that the character of their participation was very different from those who question science for opportunistic reasons. A lot of the complaints you see about the Bush administration has less to do with complaints about public participation in science and more to do with complaints about opportunistic decisions about science that have little to do with the reading of scientific evidence or concern for scientific answers. One example is climate change. Do Republicans really believe the science of climate change, or global warming, remains uncertain? Or have they simply found it convenient to take the findings of one or two scientists who question whether global warming is happening? Similarly, in issues around sexuality—such as what information about condoms do we need to make available, or do we market the morning after pill, and so on—it seems like conservatives, rather than really wanting to engage with the scientific community in a serious way, have already made up their minds and are simply drawing stances on science that come from elsewhere.

AS: What are your predictions for the future? Do you think we’re headed for the Dark Ages?

SE: No. I think that despite the very disturbing directions we’ve been heading, we have to recognize that when we look historically at transformations around issues like sexuality in the United States over the course of the last half century that there have been certain movements toward liberalization. These movements are very powerful and have acquired a lot of real momentum, for example, the LGBT rights movement. The resistance against it was certainly very strong but there’s still been a gradual trend toward victories in terms of advancing gay rights, despite setbacks. I think that reflects a certain liberalization of attitudes about sexual diversity. That gives me some hope.

AS: What is truth to you? Can morality lead you to truth?

SE: Truth is our provisional, contingent, and temporary understanding of how things are. It’s crucially important that we pursue it while we recognize that provisional character. The motivation for pursuing truth many come from many different sources, including morality and politics. But the pursuit of truth is not reducible to expressions of morality or politics.

AS: How would you explain that to a ten year old?

SE: I would say that people have to do the best they can to know and say what things are really like in the world, to be as honest as they can about that. Part of the honesty includes the recognition that our capacity to know what’s true and what isn’t is always limited.