The Barnard Sex Wars

Contestations of feminism, academic censorship, and Barnard’s shifting relations to its research center 

By Sayuri Govender

Illustration by Iris Pope

“I have to talk about passion in the future... Will our political theories hold a place for women like me in the future? Maybe I’ll be an odd piece of history/old dinosaur bones that women in the future find fascinating and bizarre.”

– Amber Hollibaugh, Diary of a Conference on Sexuality, 1982

In February, the Barnard Center for Research on Women held its 50th Scholar & Feminist (S&F) Conference. The sold-out event space was flooded with Barnard students clad in keffiyehs and professors donning “Hands of Our Students” pins. Their attention was focused on panelists discussing feminism in the face of authoritarianism, protectionist feminism during war, and repression at the university. Throughout the weekend, recollections of the “Barnard Sex Wars,” the notorious protest at the 1982 S&F conference, were ubiquitous. In the opening remarks, BCRW directors narrated how the Sex Wars solidified the center’s reputation for pushing key debates on feminism and resisting censorship after Barnard’s controversial suppression of sex-positive academic material. The recurring references to the Sex Wars inspired a new look into discussions on the university in crisis and Barnard's historic and current acts of censorship. 

In 1982, Barnard’s campus became the nexus of a years-long feminist debate on sexuality and representation. That year, the Barnard Center for Research on Women was hosting its 4th Scholar & Feminist Conference, ‘Towards a Politics of Sexuality.” Workshops included a range of topics, some being “Beyond the Gay/Straight Split: do Sexual "Roles" (Butch/Femme) Transcend Sexual Preference?”, “Politically Correct, Politically Incorrect Sexuality,” and “Sexual Purity: Maintaining Class and Race Boundaries.” These exploratory and vast conversations were led by professors, feminist organizers, authors, archivists, and artists.  

Yet, after months of organizing, the conference was met with obstacles and opposition from anti-sex organisers and Barnard itself. Right-leaning rhetoric and respectability politics would lead to the conference becoming infamous, even characterized as the controversial end of second-wave feminism. The days of the conference themselves consisted of anti-sex protests outside the gates, censorship of programming, and a smear campaign on various pro-sex feminists that continued decades after 1982. These were the Barnard Sex Wars. 

Feminists had been discussing the role of sex and sexuality long before the conference, and would continue long after. With divisions being drawn between pro and anti-sex feminists, this fight played out in organizing spaces, academia, and in feminist media. Anti-sex feminists—led by organizations Women Against Pornography, Women Against Violence Against Women, and New York Radical Feminists—championed ideas of dismantling patriarchal systems through ending pornography and thus violence against women. However, these ideas often veered into right-wing ideology, as they centered ideas of controlling women’s sexuality and condemning acts of sexual liberation and freedom, especially against lesbians and queer women. To pro-sex feminists, they promoted ideas of women being sexual victims, unable to be sexual subjects. These opposing feminists consisted of lesbian, queer, and sexually progressive women who led the organizations Lesbian Sex Mafia, No More Nice Girls, and Samois. Pro-sex groups advocated for female sexual liberation and sexual diversity, centering ideas of radical pleasure and queer kink. These groups faced consistent push back from anti-pornography groups that claimed that this type of sex and pleasure was anti-feminist or patriarchal—claims that proliferated through wide ranging smear campaigns or public humiliation of pro-sex feminists.  

These clashing ideas came to a head at the 1982 Conference. One\ extreme measure was led by anti-sex feminists’, specifically Women Against Pornography (WAP). These organizers engaged in sustained efforts to destroy the “Diary of a Conference on Sexuality”. The Diary was a 70-page archival document produced for the conference that outlined its planning process, suggested readings, meeting minutes, and aims, methods, and hopes for the event. It included co-authored papers by numerous scholars and activists, guides for the panels and events, photographs, comics, essays, letters, and artistic and academic approaches to feminist thought on sex and sexuality. It centered ideas such as lesbian S/M practices, social constructs of sex, the role of race in sexuality, sensuality and sexual autonomy, and a push for a rethinking of sexual liberation. 

The week before the conference, WAP had enacted an individual and targeted attack on those associated with BCRW, making phone calls to Barnard officials and trustees expressing that the conference committee “had been “taken over by sadomasochists,” and that the committee demonstrated a lack of judgment in inviting speakers who were “sex deviants.” In a panic, then-Barnard President Futter interrogated BCRW staff and forced them to give their materials to Barnard for review. Barnard honed its focus to the key document of the event: the Diary of a Conference on Sexuality.  

Two days before the conference, Futter called BCRW organizers in for a late-night meeting. Her panic was palpable, especially because the Helena Rubenstein Foundation, the funder of the conference, had threatened to pull the funding out of the conference if the Diary was printed with its name within it. Thus, Futter confiscated all 1,500 copies of the Diary with what organizers cited as unclear and vague reasoning. Organizers saw this as Barnard fearing the media backlash from WAP, who could leverage their already prominent media attention to bring bad press to Barnard and thus lose financial support from the Helena Rubenstein Foundation. (Yet, due to the controversy of the event, The Foundation would cease funding the conferences after 1982 anyway.)

In the meeting, Barnard ultimately offered to pay for the re-printing of the Diary, given that all mentions of Barnard and the Helena Rubenstein foundation were removed and the content was heavily edited. Organizers agreed, not wanting to completely dismiss the hard work of the Diary’s contributors—hoping that their work could still have its depth and reach. Yet, Barnard had misled them. Organizers would come to find out that the reprint would only occur months after the conference, thus stifling the reach of the Diary and its authors.    

Had those opposed to the Diary been able to read its true content before and during the conference, they would have found academic work that was not explicit or obscene, but thoughtful and nuanced. In the Diary’s core “concept paper,” committee planners expand on the necessity of discussing sexuality, the disapproval of myths, and the push for autonomy over pleasure and sexual difference. They express how “Sexuality poses a challenge to feminist scholarship, since it is an intersection of the political, social, economic, historical, personal, and experiential, linking behavior and thought, fantasy and action.” Ongoing discussions, especially from anti-sex feminists, fell into patriarchal reasonings, imposing ideas of sexual danger and transgression as interlinked with female sexuality. Thus, the Diary frames the conference, how it is seen “not as providing definitive answers, but as setting up a more useful framework within which feminist thought may proceed…participants will consider the question: what is the status of sexual pleasure?”

…

On the day of the conference, WAP organizers staged a protest in front of the Barnard Gates, passing out leaflets titled “We Protest” followed by a two page explanation of their condemnation of the conference. Written and endorsed by WAP, Women Against Violence Against Women and New York Radical Feminists, they name-dropped a series of conference organizers and described them as sexual deviants and outlaws who upheld dangerous patriarchal ideas of sex and S/M—and were proliferating these ideas at the conference. The leaflet stated that “Represented at this conference are organizations that support and produce pornography, that promote sex roles and sadomasochism, and that have joined the straight and gay pedophile organizations in lobbying for an end to laws that protect children from sexual abuse by adults.” By promoting a false notion of what conference organizers and panels believed, and arguing that the women organizing the conference had a perverted view of sexuality, they successfully slandered and damaged these women’s reputations. There was no room to clear up these distortions or to tell WAP and anti-sex feminists about the nuances and complexities that were absent from their claims because the explanatory and expansive Diary of a Conference on Sexuality could not be handed out.

The climactic events of the Sex Wars that unfolded at the conference—from the controversial confiscation of the organizer's work to the public protests that greeted over 800 attendees—in turn ignited the discourses at BCRW. The Diary was a pillar of the conference—so when it was confiscated, banned, and censored by the Barnard administration, those who were part of and supported the work of the conference and the BCRW worked to make the clandestine act public. In an interview, Margot Kotler, organizer of the 50th S&F Conference and Assistant Director at BCRW, described how, in addition to the public attacks from anti-sex feminists, Barnard’s effort to censor BCRW “it actually made it very famous… This was probably the first conference that solidified the [BCRW’s] reputation as a place where the key debates in the field were happening.” 

Yet, this solidification of the BCRW’s stature also came with a price. Many organizers of the 1982 conference faced extreme career-based repercussions due to their prominence in the Sex Wars, such as Dorothy Allison, a leader of the Lesbian Sex Mafia and committee member, and Carole Vance, the head organizer of the conference. These intense attacks and vilification were elaborated on by Allison in a 2011 oral history, citing how “It turned into a nightmare…I know people who lost their lives because of that conference. A lot of people lost their jobs. Plenty of people had nervous breakdowns, left town, disappeared… The Women’s Movement was not the safe place we imagined it to be.” Vance further illuminated the experience of this backlash at this year’s conference.“For many years after, I could never get a job in women’s studies,” she revealed, “because people said, ‘well you were right, the conference was right, but you are too controversial.’”

Rebecca Jordan-Young, BCRW interim director and a prior mentee of Vance, expressed in an interview how “people don’t understand the price that she paid. She’s one of the absolute founders of feminist sexuality studies who never even held a tenure line job [or] a job in a women’s studies program… [she] was never given the kind of security that her stature deserved.” 

…  

When looking at 50 years of BCRW’s history, heightened tensions act as what Kotler describes as “barometers of the Center’s relationship to the College…[and these] flashpoints show where feminist research can push against institutional limits.” The 1982 conference was only one of many such flashpoints. Kotler described how “In 1991, [the center] had an almost fully Black staff for the first time. And the director, Temma Kaplan, who was white, did really amazing work on transnational feminist solidarity. She made the center a very radical space. But she was fired and the staff was fired and replaced with an all-white staff in 1992.” 

On the opening panel Former BCRW Director and Professor Premila Nadasen expressed how "only a small number of women of color have worked at BCRW, and many have faced challenges.” Nadasen revealed how she was supposed to organize the 50th anniversary conference last year, under the theme of academic freedom. Yet as Nadasen faced continued barriers to its creation, she came to the realization that there was not enough academic freedom at Barnard to do a conference with this goal. She announced her resignation and the cancellation of the 50th anniversary conference at the end of 2024. At this year’s panel, she revealed how she faced intense obstacles beyond organizing the conference. Specifically, Barnard actively curtailed her efforts to organize a commemoration of Columbia’s South African Anti-Apartheid Divestment movement, as well as an archive of the movement designed with students in her course Anti-Apartheid Solidarity Movement. 

In the aftermath of Nadasen’s resignation, Rebecca Jordan-Young became the interim director of BCRW. Over the next year, she followed the governance procedures to become the full-time director of BCRW. Having received a unanimous vote of approval from the BCRW advisory board in January 2025, Jordan-Young only needs recognition from the college to be officially appointed director. Over 14 months later, Barnard has yet to approve her. 

Jordan-Young described how this “create[s] a feeling of instability for the Center… it’s hard for all of us to know what that means in terms of our planning [and] what it signals in terms of the college’s willingness to support [the center].” She also stated how this year, for the first time ever, Barnard did not give BCRW any unrestricted funds, and the conference was funded solely through gift funds and savings. 

Despite the uncertainty of this moment, BCRW maintains its push for cutting edge feminist scholarship and activism. “Our job always is to make sure that BCRW remains a space where we can practice academic freedom as an academic research center” Jordan-Young affirms, “and continue a legacy of providing room for the most challenging forms of feminist thought and action that may be a little bit bolder than what the institution itself feels ready and able to do.” This unwavering stature in light of Barnard’s relationship to BCRW almost acts as a microcosm of a broader pattern of struggle within feminist organizing and scholarship. In her remarks at the conference, Nadasen articulated that “feminism is contested.” It is contested at BCRW, Barnard, and beyond. Nadasen states that this contestation is “defined by relations of power.” At Barnard, the imposition of administrative power can determine which forms and branches of feminism are uplifted, and which are censored and ostracized. 

As BCRW navigates Barnard’s current oppressive thumb, the histories of the Sex Wars allows us to understand this moment of academic censorship today. Current assistant director Margot Kotler expressed how “The story of the confiscation of the Diary teaches us that academic freedom is absolutely necessary for feminist research, [especially] at this moment, where feminist research is under threat and is being censored.”