When Difference Became Dangerous, Before and After 1982

This year marks the 35th anniversary of one the most difficult conversations to occur within contemporary U.S. feminist circles. In 1982 controversy erupted around Barnard College’s Scholar and the Feminist conference “Towards a Politics of Sexuality" into what is known colloquially as the sex wars.   Although scholars have lavished attention on this event and its legacies, their analyses have largely revolved around which group was in the right or on the Right.  This paper begins instead with Audre Lorde’s question “When sadomasochism gets presented on center stage as a conflict in the feminist movement...what conflicts are not being presented?” Following Lorde, I explore what difficult conversations the sex wars forestalled by focusing on one of the poles that framed the ensuing debate, danger.  Using digital methods drawn from computational linguistics, I analyze both women’s movement periodicals and feminist academic journals before and after 1982 to explore who and what were presented as endangered or dangerous. Digital semantic content analysis is then used to explore how these discourses shifted at a meta-level before and after 1982. Finally, using the same methodology, I analyze archival documents from the 1981 National Women’s Studies Association conference on racism as well as those from the 1982 Barnard conference on sexuality to explore what I argue is the greatest conflict obscured by the sex wars: conversations about racism in the women’s movement and feminist academia.