Proliferating panic : regulating representations of sex and gender during the culture wars

During the culture wars in the United States from the late 1980s into the 1990s, surveillance of representations of the American citizen reached a particular frenzy. In her powerful metaphor, Martah Wilson, founder of the arts organisation Franklin Furnace, refers to the proliferating panic of conservative commentators about avant-garde artists challenging the heteronormative status quo. This article explores the moral panic that has accompanied attempts by the New Right to shape and define the American citizen as heterosexual, monogamous, white and a believer in middle-class family values. Decisions about government funding for the arts have been made with the aim of policing and regulating the work of artists, particularly those who critiqued traditional American values. My focus here is the work of performance artists Karen Finley and Holly Hughes, and the conditions that led to controversy around their performances. Finley and Hughes created performances that challenged hegemonic discourses of gender and sexuality. They were two of those artists branded by the media as the ‘NEA Four’, practitioners whose work was considered indecent and consequently de-funded by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)—the main government funding body for artists in the United States. During the moral panic associated with the ‘NEA Four’, national debates about freedom of speech, censorship and the legislative control of arts funding rapidly polarised. Discourses about the regulation and prohibition of gendered and sexual representation actually proliferated discourses about sex and gender, escalating the panic