From Alma 34:
40 And now my beloved brethren, I would exhort you to have patience, and that ye bear with all manner of afflictions; that ye do not revile against those who do cast you out because of your exceeding poverty, lest ye become sinners like unto them;
41 But that ye have patience, and bear with those afflictions, with a firm hope that ye shall one day rest from all your afflictions.
At one point, my mother was married to a disabled man. Even though my mother is LDS and I’m gay, we occasionally talk about sex. I was curious about my mother’s sex life at the time of her marriage to this man. When I asked her about it, she smiled and said that she looks forward to when her husband will have a “perfect body.” This statement really bothered me.
There is a way in which believing that a disabled body will be “repaired” in Heaven maintains ableist thinking. It reduces the disabled body to a position of being lesser than. Certainly, if one’s hearing or sight gets worse as one ages, it might be nice to think that in Heaven one will have perfect hearing and sight rather than have to wear a hearing aid or have contact lenses. But this is using the able body as a point of reference. As a teaching aid, one might ask a question of, “Are there eyeglasses in Heaven?” — which can help LDS children think about ableism in their culture — but adults should be more critical. Consider the person born deaf, who learns sign language as a child, is involved in deaf culture throughout her life, and has no desire to be hearing after death. Is it appropriate to assume this person will be hearing in Heaven? The answer: No, it is not.
In Mormonism, considerations of disability have carried over to the question of “same-gender attraction.” In the last decade or so, there has been a rise of church leaders comparing “same-gender attraction” to disability, as something that will be “repaired” in Heaven (before this, there was a focus on “cure.”) In the Church, disabled people are pitted against gays as a way to instill humility. For example, in a 2006 interview with Dalin Oaks, Lance Wickman spoke of his disabled daughter who
stand[s] at the window of my office which overlooks the Salt Lake Temple and look[s] at the brides and their new husbands as theyre having their pictures taken. . . . [S]hes at once captivated . . . and saddened.
Her image served as a call for humility among those whose “differences” do not place them beyond the realm of marriageability in this life. From Wickman’s perspective, his daughter won’t have to be saddened in the afterlife because there she will be “repaired” and will marry (and even have children). What I see happening here is ableism being put in the service of heterosexism. It’s pretty awful.
There is a way in which LGBT politics often intentionally divorces itself from disability politics, because of (1) ableism in the gay community, and (2) gays want to move as far away from the idea of “homosexuality as a disability” given a very hurtful history of attempted “curing” and being considered lesser than. But what Mormonism makes clear is that even if a culture largely ceases trying to “cure” homosexuality, it can still maintain “same-gender attraction” as lesser than, a “disabling” factor to be “repaired” later. LGBT and disability politics have to join forces to address this.
Huh.
There is a way in which believing that a disabled body will be repaired in Heaven maintains ableist thinking. It reduces the disabled body to a position of being lesser than.
Well, isn’t it “lesser than”?
The body, I mean. A “disabled” person’s body is, by definition, “less able” than the body of someone who has full use of all of its functions.
That doesn’t make the person him/herself of any less worth as a human being, of course. A paraplegic can be every bit as good a person as someone who is fully abled. But he’s also not going to be able to do certain things that the abled person can do–or at the very least he’s going to need to exert considerably more effort and time in accomplishing those things.
Belief that a disability will be “fixed” in the afterlife is simply recognition that there is an ideal when it comes to the functionality of the body, and a hope that everyone might someday achieve that ideal.
Please understand that I wholeheartedly agree that homosexuality is not a deviation from that ideal, and that it should not be considered a “disability” that needs to be “fixed”. Sexual orientation has no bearing on a person’s “ability” (gay people as a group are not any less “able” than straight people). Some might argue that homosexuality does exhibit an “inability” to create children, but as I and countless others have demonstrated, this is not, in fact, the case (I have five kids).
Hi, Scott. Yes, gay people can produce children either through either heterosexual intercourse or with assisted reproductive technologies. Or they can adopt.
But if you notice, the focus is on the productivity of children. An “ability” or “inability” is related to productivity of some sort, rather than a focus being on “being.” If you focus on being as opposed to productivity, then a disabled body is not lesser than the able body. Moreover, you won’t have to separate a “person” from their “body” as you did in your comment.
The way Christians (including Mormons) tend to filter this is through the phrase “created in the image of God.” The image of God in Mormon texts tends to be white, able-bodied, heterosexual, male. It points to an ideal and society gets structured around the ideal and loses focus of what “is,” creating injustices and harmful thinking in the process.
“A disabled persons body is, by definition, less able than the body of someone who has full use of all of its functions.”
There are a lot of people who think that someone who is disabled is not so much less able because of their unique physicality but because of barriers out there in the world that are in their way – barriers that result from ableism.
“A paraplegic can be every bit as good a person as someone who is fully abled. But hes also not going to be able to do certain things that the abled person can door at the very least hes going to need to exert considerably more effort and time in accomplishing those things.”
You are assuming though that what someone not in wheelchair does is, and should be, the ideal.
I am hard of hearing – ie, I wear hearing aids. I can’t hear people very well without my hearing aids but I can lipread, I can communicate with people who know American Sign Language, I can comprehend the news on the TV without the volume on, I can communicate via sign language with people out of ear shot, with a flick of a switch squealing babies because inaudible … can most hearing people do these things? No, they can not. Are they then the disabled ones?
Notions of an ideal are highly problematic – an ideal way to be a body, the ideal sexuality to express, the ideal skin colour to have, etc… Ideals get right smack in the in the way of acceptance of people in all their variations, as they are, right here, right now and just getting on with life.
I find it disturbing the way religious dogma does so much to diminish people, to constantly tell them how bad/perverted/damaged they are. There are the incessant promises of how they will be “perfected” in the afterlife (conditions apply), but that doesn’t negate the psychological damage done by telling the people how unacceptable they are in this life. Of course there are people, such as myself, who don’t believe in an afterlife. Accordingly it’s truly appalling to treat people like offal in this life–quite likely the only one we have–while holding out promises of some Never-Never land where things will be perfect.
As to people with disabilities, many of the limitations they have are due to barriers put in place by so-called “able” people. So a person needs some adaptive equipment (like a wheelchair) and/or supports (like someone to help him with daily tasks) to help him get through life. Don’t we all? Is there any among us who is truly “independent”? But apply a disability label to a person and every time they need something to help them, or face a limitation, the “able” people are right there to declare them incapable and unworthy.
This would seem to be EXACTLY the kind of thing we need real prophets for; i.e. to give definitive answers about the afterlife.
Of course, given God’s history, I suppose we should feel grateful that He’s no longer a racist.
Suppose in resurrected life, we communicate directly, mind to mind, without the imperfect intermediary of vocal vibrations and hearing and language. Suppose we see not just outer aspects but inner; suppose we see the totality of a thing in all its complexity, and not just the reflections of light off a thing’s surface registering in nerve endings… By those standards of communication/vision all of us are “disabled” in our present state.
Maybe one way to look at this is to consider that the “ability” in question is the ability to communicate — to understand and be understood. So whether we do that through sign language or with braille or by some other means is sort of secondary. I can understand how a member of the deaf community, who communicates perfectly well with sign language, could rightfully point out that he or she isn’t lacking in any human faculties and that there’s nothing to be improved on in some eternal existence… And we can probably extend this to folks who locomote with wheels as opposed to legs, and so on. The ability is locomotion, and so if a person can do this effectively with the assistance of wheels and ramps, where is the disability, really? I understand this.
Gay folks are not devoid of the ability to love or to relate sexually to a partner or even to procreate — or, certainly, to establish families, raise kids, etc. And MY love is a love for a specific person, who happens to be a man. I have no desire for my ability to love this specific person to change, to be any different than what it is now. In fact I would experience that as a terrible loss. So, no, it doesn’t make sense for me to think of this as a disability in any sense of the word.
At the same time, suppose I was in an accident and became paralyzed from the waist down, and could no longer express myself sexually with my husband in a way that I currently experience as fully expressive. Boy, would I want that to be fixed!!! Boy, would I look forward to a time and a state of being where the restoration of that ability would mean so much to me…
What about AIDS, HIV? Cancer? Sickle cell anemia? There are lots of natural conditions that are appalling. Sometimes the desire to be cured, the desire to have a physical state repaired or restored is not just valid but profoundly human…
Maybe that kind of situation doesn’t apply to being gay, or even to many states of disability — such as being blind or deaf. But I’m not sure I’m willing to throw out the notion of physical evils from which we can reasonably hope for some kind of liberation…
John @ 6:
In the Bible, the blind man was a poor beggar due to his blindness, but when he was given sight by Jesus, he became a follower of him. Jesus thus had no disabled disciples, because he healed them all. The struggle of Jesus against disability might be thought of as a contest with the powers of Satan. At first, Jesus accepts the infirmities of humanity by healing them, but eventually he accepts the infirmities of humanity by participating in them — taking on afflictions himself. Paul comes to realize that a “a thorn in the flesh” is a greater witness to the grace of God than is the miracle or removal of the thorn (2 Cor 12:7-10). “Strength is made perfect in weakness,” he says, and “I will boast in my infirmities…take pleasure in my infirmities, in reproaches, in needs, in distresses. …For when I am weak, I am strong.”
If someone were to become paralyzed, understandably, they would likely undergo a great deal of grief since their world is changed. But if someone is born paralyzed, the grief comes from being treated differently by society. The problem was not that the blind man was blind, but that society deemed him fit to be a poor beggar because he was blind. The goal should be not be to bring everyone into the world of the “able” (through imaginations of the miraculous now or later), but to make room for multiple worlds, multiple bodies.
Personally, I am more than willing to throw out the notion of “physical evils” from which we are miraculously liberated. For example, in terms of “same-gender attraction” in Mormonism, the idea of being “liberated” from a “physical evil” can lead to suicidal thinking. The truth of the matter is, disabled people (to include the elderly) are more likely to commit suicide because of how society categorizes and treats them, not because they will be better off dead [and resurrected].
My Dad is bald, but he’s often interpreted the scriptures to say that his hair will not be restored.
It seems so odd and strange to me personally. That each person has a perfect self, whatever perfect means. Maybe that I would be male in the afterlife, since men have more power and authority. That doesn’t make sense with eternal gender, however.
Alan,
This is a great post. I think we are just on the same wavelength or something. I recently wrote about disability in Mormonism here (and briefly mention sexuality): http://www.faithpromotingrumor.com/2010/12/the-stories-bodies-tell/
I think I try to get at a more nuanced version of how LDS interpret disability. In a way, I think LDS notions of “repair” function differently with respect to disability than with respect to homosexuality. For the former, there is a sense of theodicy at work, where you mother’s lack of sexual experiences with her disabled husband will be rewarded in a more just future. While this certainly privileges ablism, I see something slightly different in rhetoric about homosexuality, where “repair” functions simply as the norm, without the redeeming aspects for others. I’m not sure I’m making that very clear, but I think that it is not just that LDS though sees homosexuality as a disability, but that it is a disability without all of the “good” things that come in LDS discourse about disability. It is an excess of disability, in a way, where there are no positive theological aspects that can be derived from homosexuality in the way that LDS do for disability. Obviously, both are intensely problematic discourses, and exposing these assumptions through close analysis is incredibly important. Great post.
TT: Regarding the problematic discourses you mention, I totally agree that applying a little close analysis in order to expose certain assumptions could produce some important insights. I’d suggest Kathryn Lynard Soper’s contributions at Meridian Magazine as a good starting point for that kind of thing. If you could find the time to apply your method over there, I’d sure be keen to read your findings here.
Link?
I have already constructively critiqued KLS on her feminism piece at Patheos: http://www.faithpromotingrumor.com/2010/12/mormon-feminism-old-wine-in-new-wineskins/
Awesome. I’ll take a look. Because rather than take your word for it, I’d like to decide for myself whether or not your critique was “constructive” … hee hee.
TT: As it turns out, your second link is quite long, so I’m gonna need a few minutes. In the meantime, maybe you could expand on what you meant by this graf in that first link of yours (The Stories Bodies Tell):
Well, I not really sure Alan’s post is the best place to hash out ideas about what I meant on my post. I will take it back to the post in question if requested.
I am not totally clear what exactly you want me to explain, but I assume it is my hesitation around biological reductionism as an explanation for binary sexuality. To be incredibly brief, I don’t think that something like sexuality is reducible to biology; I don’t think biology tells us much of anything about how to socially interpret “nature;” I don’t think sexuality is a binary; I think that the biologism of contemporary gay activist rhetoric is incredibly problematic for trans activists; I think that seeing “gay” bodies as fundamentally different from “straight” bodies is not only inaccurate, but potentially dangerous in terms of segregation, and I think that there are eugenics risks in gay gene research. In short, I think most contemporary gender theorists are right that this discourse is a misstep.
TT…go ahead and use this post to hash out ideas.
I’ll probably skim through Jennifer Clancy’s book at some point. It looks really fascinating. For everyone else, she talks about how bodies have historically been read as stories in Christianity: from the disabled or sick body (thought to be caused by sin) to what people thought of the pregnant Mary or Mary-in-birth, to the skin color of slaves, etc. Obviously, people still read bodies this way, including their own.
In terms of the linking of disability to (homo)sexuality in historical Mormonism, what is fairly obvious to me is that “homosexuality as a disability” is different from other LDS formulations of disability because we’re looking at specific 20th century changes in sexual discourse. In the nineteenth-century, most Christians linked too much sex and baby-making with causing disability (which well, if you were a woman, you sometimes died as the result of sex), but Mormons figured that if you have sex with reproductive intent and are “fruitful and multiply” then you can be rewarded bodily — have multiple women make babies. You hit the 20th century, and (1) sex within marriage stops needing reproductive intent, (2) women gain financial independence and stop being considered baby-making machines and (3) you have formulations of homosexualities, all of which culminate in the LDS context in an essentialization of gender roles. I think you’re right that the “repair” aspect of homosexuality is for normalization purposes rather than redemption or justice. Especially since LDS leaders didn’t talk about homosexual afterlife “repair” until the 1990s (when worldly repair was deemed unlikely).
It seems to me like the disabled body is used a site of excess beyond the “ideal.” I’m intrigued by this section of your post:
If this is the case, I can see Mormonism trying to fit homosexuality squarely into the discourses concerning other disabilites.
Biologism is problematic for everybody. I’ve had a difficult time on MSP trying to make these points clear. I keep being bombarded with the notion that “I didn’t choose to be gay.” That is because people on this site come largely from a culture in which homosexuality is rendered mostly a choice, and they turn to biology/science as the nearest savior. But, if you’re like me and you’ve been hearing biology your whole life, you move back to choice, because biology isn’t really all that liberating. Really, nature/nurture is a binary born from the sexual orientation classification system, in which homosexuality has had to be explained somehow while heterosexuality has not. Even the Church has jumped on board with this; the “repair” theme is basically to explain [away] the conundrum of homosexuality for the culture.
What I do in my upcoming Dialogue essay is make this a 1980s-1990s debate, to tell the reader, “It’s time to move on.” Because indeed, the academy, more or less, moved on after Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler, and even the Church “resolved” nature/nurture debates in their own problematic way with the attraction/behavior distinction. When HRC delivered that petition following Packer’s spiel recently, the Church responded that it will “continue to speak out to ensure its position is accurately understood.” IOW, people continue to speak past one another by rehashing the same tired arguments.
Oh, c’mon, TT, in your #9 here, you dropped your first FPR link along with a full paragraph describing its relevance, but now you suddenly wanna play coy and pretend that my attempt to engage your #9 somehow risks sidetracking the discussion? All I did was blockquote a single graf of your own words from the linked post and ask you to expand on them while I popped over to read your second link and the twenty attached comments. Sorry to impose. I’m fine with moving on … I’ll just mention that having read your second post, I’m curious as to how you’ve managed to grasp the fungibility of Mormonism while apparently missing how that same quality also applies to the culture you refer to in the graf I blockquoted.
As it turns out, I think your second link was much more interesting, and now it’s my turn to admit that there’s more there than I’d want to tackle in comments here. So, just a couple of quick remarks: 1) I stand corrected. You’ve got KLS’s number and appreciate just how thin the gruel is that she’s offering … in Mormon terms, it’s the whole milk-before-meat nonsense all over again, but 2) I stand all amazed that all it took was for her to show up in comments under your worthy post and suddenly everything you’d argued went out the window in an attempt to reassure KLS that no matter how laughable her caricatures might be, well, it was just an honor having her around.
Because, of course, Mormons never stage protests, hold marches, sign petitions, write letters, mobilize grassroots forces, or make bold calls to action … or if they do, as long as it’s not happening in the Bloggernacle, whatever happens at Meridian, stays at Meridian, and all is forgiven. Awesome.
Alan,
I think you’re absolutely right that the aspect of LDS “trials” discourse as a growth opportunity is certainly used in the context of homosexuality. There is certainly a great deal of overlap. And I think you’re right on to look at how this discourse changes over time and is shaped in response to other moves. I think you’re upcoming article (if it is the one you posted here a while back) makes really important steps in this direction and represents the kind of critical analysis that we could all use more of. Bravo.
I’ve seen you try to make the critique of biologism here, and I’ve appreciated it, but have been too timid to back you up. It is a tricky argument to make in some circles because it is so ingrained in some people’s self-identity. I think we agree entirely.
Chino,
Posting a link that deals with similar issues about disability, and exegeting a specific passage from my post are not the same thing. I’m not backing away from explaining myself, but was wondering if I best explain myself on my post, rather than in someone else’s. In any case, I did explain myself, so I am not being coy and you’ve not imposed on me (or, thankfully, Alan’s post).
The KLS tangent, however, might be going too far, so again, it might be better served in the original location of the discussion rather than here. But, so as not to be falsely accused of being afraid to back up what I’ve said, I will respond here once, and then I hope we can move it off of this thread which has nothing to do with KLS or feminism.
“Im curious as to how youve managed to grasp the fungibility of Mormonism while apparently missing how that same quality also applies to the culture you refer to in the graf I blockquoted.”
Sorry, I’m not sure what you mean when you say that I don’t grap the fungibility of culture. That seems to be the entire point of my post on the body, that the body is not a neutral substance but one which is inscribed with multiple meanings.
I’m also not sure how you concluded that I backed down from her when she showed up. To show respect to an interlocutor is not the same thing as throwing my criticism out the window. You’ll note that she concedes much of my critique. I answered her question in a way that was fully consistent with my original argument. The conversation ended amicably. What exactly is the sinister narrative you’re extracting?
I still have no idea what you are talking about at Meridian. I asked for the link and you didn’t provide it. Nor do I have any idea what your sarcasm is aimed at.
Setting sexual orientation aside for a moment to hone in on the implications of disabilities, I agree with Andy that everyone deserves respect for being a human being regardless of their productivity. But even if we were to privilege productivity, disabilities need not be an issue.
Since human beings prosper from the division of labor, it seems to me that most disabilities do not inherently compromise an organism’s productivity.
The trick is to play to your strengths instead of obsessing about your weaknesses. Everyone has weaknesses.
Having said that, I think that it is also important to acknowledge that some people have to bear a greater burden. That is a matter of respect as well.
The idea of ableism has some merit, and yet I think some take it too far. Setting aside the nonsensical idea of a perfect body, a disability really is a disability. It irks me when people try to deny this simple fact by saying a disabled body isn’t lesser than. It is.
For example, I’ve lost most of my sense of smell. I regret this disability almost every day. I would rather have my sense of smell back than to try to deny my disability. In that respect, my current body is less than.
If a person’s identity becomes bound up in their disability, I can understand the angst it would create to contemplate losing that disability in the resurrection. I understand the angst, but I think it’s an irrational protection of ego.
I don’t blame your mother for feeling a sense of lack in regard to her sexual relationship with her husband. It is what it is. The prerequisite for making real changes to our situation is to accept reality as it is and working from there. In this case, it means accepting that her sexual relationship wasn’t as fulfilling as she would have liked. Denial would prevent her from taking positive steps.
And yes, if I’m headed for an afterlife, I hope it doesn’t include eyeglasses.
TT: KLS came to mind b/c she has edited a bunch of books like this one.
Sorry to be snippy, but if you’re worried about eugenics risks, I assume that virulently anti-gay culture-warring outfits like Meridian (and writers like KLS who support Meridian) are of course a huge concern to you.
We have all kinds of technology that we could use for eugenics right now, but don’t. Suggesting that gay gene research is risky misses the point that it’s the culture that ultimately determines how any research will be used, and in terms of building a gay-friendly culture, Meridian is sugar-coated cyanide.
The same KLS that tells us “the life of a child with Down syndrome is something to celebrate” is troubled b/c she doesn’t think homosexuality should be normalized.
There’s no point having an amicable discussion with people like this. They’re parasites that make a living as anti-gay hucksters selling malarkey to marginally literate Mormons.
Everyone on this list is supporting a swindle.
One word: Kyani
With respect to eugenics, a concept that has shaped public policy not only in Nazi Germany but also in the United States and the most progressive western countries like Sweden, it is important to realize that human beings adapt primarily through culture, not genetic change.
Apparently, genetic change has been surprisingly slow during the last several thousand years. Yet, human adaptations to various environmental challenges have been so rapid and efficient that we have become the dominant species despite the absence of genetic change.
The reason is probably that the generational cycle is very long for our species and cultural and societal adaptation is much easier and faster to come by. The latter preempts genetic change because after cultural adaptation, human beings survive challenges and biological selection ends because the challenge is no longer deadly.
This year, American Scientific carried a fascinating discussion of the data.
By the way, Alan, am I wrong or isn’t this kinda what you’re trying to get at?
Religion Dispatches, John-Charles Duffy, Are Mormons Changing Their Stance on Homosexuality? (Actually, the Church has dug its heels in even further):
I think I get it. I guess what I don’t get is how this useful insight is supposed to somehow render scientific inquiry suspect. TT asked me “What exactly is the sinister narrative youre extracting?” Sinister. Heh. OK, so here it is: The reality is that we probably already know how to eradicate left-handedness from the human population. Does that frighten me? Not at all. What would frighten me is a bunch of humans starting a campaign advocating such eradication.
It sometimes seems like what you’re calling for, since the LDS inborn/celibacy position uses science for a crutch, is an anti-scientific response that’ll kick that crutch out from under them. That’s the part I don’t get.
Think of it this way. Gay people being represented in the media, starting with talk shows in the 1990s, and later on sitcoms and dramas, has done a lot more for societal acceptance in 20 years than science has done in over 100. You should also consider that the track record of science with regard to homosexuality is pretty awful: e.g, electroshock therapy, which is science underpinned by cultural views. For once, I’ll agree with Seth R that science by itself is useless.
Consider this quote from Eve Sedgwick in 1989:
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay,” 1989.
No matter how much science you put forth to prove homosexuality is biological, unless you change cultural views, you can’t prove that it’s normal.
Now, I’m not as pessimistic as Duffy, since I think the Church can only extend welcome to gay people to a certain extent without creating an unstable internal imbalance. For example, that MSP TV Youtube video you posted the other day about the Church inviting Dustin Lance Black as a VIP guest to the Tabernacle solicited a comment of “I wonder how it makes LGB Mormons feel to see gay activists fted by the same LDS leadership that places such disproportionate demands on its own gay membership.” At some point, it’ll all stop making sense, but for now, we’re looking at rocket ship blasting at full thrust away from an event horizon. You can either focus on the rocket ship (which Duffy does in his essay), or you can look at the whole picture.
Alan, take the possibility away that some people are born homosexual or biologically determined to be homosexual and reparative therapy begins to make sense. The remaining libertarian arguments aren’t persuasive enough for me. If all it came down to was a choice rather than biology, I’d switch sides in the debate and say people should suck it up and choose to date people of the opposite sex if societal acceptance and marriage was important to them.
“If all it came down to was a choice rather than biology, Id switch sides in the debate and say people should suck it up and choose to date people of the opposite sex if societal acceptance and marriage was important to them.”
Why? (Sorry if this sounds like an attack on you…really, it isn’t)
Religion is a choice. People who belong to minority religious groups often face intolerance. But do we tell them to “suck it up” or “just go join one of the major religions” if they’re unhappy with their situation? Were there, say, a ban on people of the Froo-Froo faith (fictional) getting married, would we tell them to just “suck it up and change faiths” if they really wanted marriage and societal acceptance? If not, why is that acceptable for gay people, even if it’s considered a choice?
What’s more–would anybody consider it acceptable to push the notion that religion is a mental or moral defect, and to have entire programs dedicated to “overcoming” it? Could you imagine the outrage if an “Ex-Christian” program sprang up, run by atheists who promise they can “fix” these broken people? Yet religious groups push “ex-gay” programs as if they’re something wholesome and genuinely therapeutic. When the people harmed by them dare to speak up, the charlatans running them pretend *they’re* being persecuted. The gall!
I really don’t want to be forced to argue the other side based on a hypothetical situation where homosexuality is purely a choice.
However, let’s take polygamy for example. It is a pure choice, not biologically determined. I don’t think government should recognize polygamous marriages because nominal monogamy has had a stabilizing effect on civilization. With the chance that polygamy would have widespread, deleterious effects, legally recognizing it so that a few people could have government endorse their choices is a gamble I’m not willing to take.
I also don’t think government should criminalize polygamous relationships. It should just stay out of the question. At bottom, I think governmental involvement in marriage is extremely problematic. If we could extricate it from the situation, it seems like a lot of things would clear up.
So, in a hypothetical world where people choose their sexual orientation, I would argue against same-sex marriage because it is a novel twist on the (nominally) monogamous, (nominally) heterosexual marriage that, while it isn’t the “foundation” of our society, has helped to stabilize it. In other countries so far, same-sex marriage has had positive effects, yet we haven’t seen what happens in the long term. Why take a gamble on same-sex marriage just so government could endorse some people’s choices?
Still, I don’t think homosexual relationships should be criminalized.
For me, biological determination tips the balance. Without it, homosexuality becomes just another choice like religion that someone has a right to make freely, but the government has no obligation to endorse.
Yeah, what Buffy said. I don’t quite understand your perspective, Jonathan. Are you saying that homosexuality should be normalized only to the extent of accepting those “predestined” to be gay, but no further?
The point of gay politics as I see it let the next generation have a world where they can choose to be with whoever they want to be with without having to worry about societal acceptance. People point to gay ducks and antelopes to bolster this point, but the libertarianism is the foundation.
I know plenty of people who do tell religious people to “suck it up” or “just go join x other group” if they’re unhappy with their situation.
It’s not usually “just go join majority religion” if they want “social acceptance,” but more like, “if you’re facing cognitive dissonance, leave the church. Stop trying to rationalize and shelve your doubts.”
I think the issue is a bit confusing though. I don’t think beliefs are chosen, so to me, religion as a choice isn’t really an open-ended choice. If someone is facing crushing cognitive dissonance, he can’t simply “choose” to return back to his simpler belief structure. He can’t simply “choose” for the cognitive dissonance to evaporate. That would be nice, but unrealistic. Sure, sure, he can choose actions (e.g., keep going to church even though it’s uncomfortable), but that doesn’t change the underlying feelings which were not and are not chosen.
I’m therefore interested in Alan’s argument. For me, it’s not about nature vs. nurture…it’s not about trusting in the arm of biologism. Rather, it seems to me that between both nature *and* nurture, there is not a lot of room for conscious choice at the underlying levels of things like belief, feeling, attraction, etc., Supposing that we are fluid (in both sexuality and belief), the issue becomes that we don’t choose our fluidity or the course these things will take.
Posted 28 without having read 27. I see your perspective now. But I really question the “stabilization of society” component of hetero marriage. It’s kind of an historical myth put forward specifically to argue against same-sex marriage. It doesn’t really say much about the actual gender, racial and sexual dynamics over the course of history, which have been pretty terrible (women as property, for example — which, well, of course things will be stable if you own your spouse).
Andrew,
You’re right about belief. That’s really not a matter of choice. But the particular religious sect we belong to often is. If it weren’t, churches wouldn’t expend so much effort trying to convert others via missionaries and other forms of proselytizing. Back when I was a Christian I converted from the religion my parents had brought me up in to one I felt was more suited to me.
No, the cognitive dissonance can’t simply evaporate and it’s rude for people to simply say “suck it up and deal” or “just leave already”. I went through that myself for many years before I ultimately lost my faith. Each person has to deal with it their own way. I tried more Bible reading, more prayer and good old-fashioned denial. None of them worked and I finally had to admit I no longer believed. Other people might benefit from looking around and finding a church that’s better suited to where they are at that particular point in life (which is what my sister is currently doing).
It’s the reactions of others that can sometimes be the hardest to deal with. It took me barely a week to come to terms with my loss of faith. Some of the people around me, however, took it pretty harshly. I lost a long-time friend over it, in fact. Sadly that’s often why some people stay in a particular religious group despite misgivings–they’re afraid of losing friends or even family over it. Of course I’m sure I don’t have to explain that phenomena to anybody here.
It’s not so much that hetero marriage has stabilized society as much as mono marriage has, based on pretty persuasive arguments from historical evidence.
In the case of same-sex marriage, it doesn’t have a negative track record. It’s untried. In that respect, the case against same-sex marriage is, I admit, weaker.
Andrew, I don’t think it’s necessary to put religious liberty in a framework of choice. It’s just as valid to frame it as having the space to live according to your conscience. You have the freedom to give expression to your conscience, but it may not be true that you are free to choose what your conscience dictates. It also doesn’t mean that government has to put its stamp of approval on what your conscience says.
I see the same arising in the case of sexual orientation, but that would take me away from talking about the hypothetical world where sexual orientation is a choice.
Buffy, nevertheless, people DO say both “suck it up and deal” or “just leave already” depending on which side of the table they are. So, it just goes to show that when people perceive a choice, they *do* have different ways of addressing people.
(Also, I think the reason that churches spend so much time trying to convert via missionaries — especially the LDS church — is precisely because Mormons believe *beliefs* are chosen in addition to religious affiliation. I don’t think missionaries try to convert people to the religion without also trying to change the beliefs of the individual. “You can just choose to desire to believe, plant the seed, and then you take your Moroni’s challenge, and then voila!” This turns up with variations in other denominations and other religions. Much of the heartache with losing faith is the fact that many Mormons think this is a failure of your *choices*.)
Jonathan,
I guess the relevant comparison between the hypothetical world where sexual orientation is a choice would be a hypothetical world where one is free to choose what his conscience dictates.
The problem is this seems tough for me to imagine. I mean, I can understand that 1) people’s consciences may differ and 2) certain experiences may unpredictably change what one’s conscience dictates…but 1 and 2 do not provide me a basis to imagine a world where one is free to choose what his conscience dictates.
Just for the record, I never said that people with cogdis should suck it up. 🙂
What I was saying is that if someone belongs to religion that their neighbors don’t respect, then they should deal with it or choose a different religion. As long as the neighbors aren’t infringing on that person’s rights then it’s their choice.
Of course that would get mucked up if government endorsed certain religions like it does for marriages.
Oh yeah, didn’t mean to imply (if it came across that way) that that was something you did.
But outside of our fair Main Street Plaza, certainly people are less charitable. I’m not making this up.
Andrew, assuming free will exists, imagine a world where you can choose to either listen to your conscience or ignore it. Over time, your choices train your conscience by atrophying the ignored parts and reinforcing the others. In that world, would/should we have as much respect for freedom of religion? I’m not sure. It’s interesting to ponder.
I think the comparison to religious belief is problematic because belief is mental. It’s when belief influences action that other people begin to have a legitimate interest in your beliefs. Living in a same-sex marriage, on the other hand, is an action. It may be based on beliefs, but it has already crossed the line into the tangible world of actions.
A more apt comparison is to religiously motivated actions. It’s OK for people to believe that prayer will cure their child of diabetes. It’s criminal for them to force their children forgo medical treatment based on those beliefs.
Andrew,
WRT “belief” I was referring to belief in god(s) rather than specific doctrines. Of course individual churches try to convert people into believing their particular dogma, and reject others. That’s something that’s pretty changeable. But belief or non-belief in gods, for most people, isn’t a conscious choice.
“I think the comparison to religious belief is problematic because belief is mental. Its when belief influences action that other people begin to have a legitimate interest in your beliefs. Living in a same-sex marriage, on the other hand, is an action. It may be based on beliefs, but it has already crossed the line into the tangible world of actions. ”
How does my marriage affect anybody ? I know people have imagined vague “grave consequences” but really, how does my marriage affect others? Does it affect others more than the marriages of death-row inmates, thrice-divorced adulterers or men who’ve abused their previous wives?
“Of course that would get mucked up if government endorsed certain religions like it does for marriages.”
Legality doesn’t imply endorsement. Making same-sex marriage legal wouldn’t mean the government “endorsed” it any more than the fact that Buddhism, Satanism, Islam and other religions are legal (and get the associated tax breaks and other perks) means the government “endorses” them.
Note that I’m arguing (in the hypothetical world) against the government licensing same-sex marriage (under the assumption that they need to license marriages, which I think is a bad assumption) and granting it privileges under the law (which is an endorsement). I’m not arguing for criminalization of homosexual relationships.
In the case of a polygynous marriage, having fewer potential marital partners leaves unattached men in the population. Unattached men tend to feel disenfranchised and to be a destabilizing force. That’s one example of how a marriage can affect other people.
In a more typical example, abusive marriages have long-term negative consequences for children, making it harder for them in turn to have successful marriages.
No marriage is an island. They have consequences for the surrounding community. I hope no one is seriously arguing otherwise. The argument has always been (or should have been) that same-sex marriage doesn’t affect the community negatively, or negatively enough to justify the refusal to endorse it. That marriages have consequences outside of the couple involved should go without question.
Personally, I am strongly in favor of same-sex marriage because there exist people who are in such relationships, and they deserve the same legal rights and protections as opposite-sex married couples. But, would it make a difference if orientation were entirely a choice? A fascinating and complex question!
In real life, most of my friends are part of the international expat community. I have nearly as many friends who are from different countries than their partners as friends who married people from their own country of origin. I know several same-sex couples that have serious problems obtaining the simple right to live in the same country with their spouse. Hence, for me, the right to marry (and consequently to live in the same country with your spouse) is an absolutely crucial protection for families. (For more on my POV, see my post just write it down.)
In this case, you could absolutely argue that I’ve made a choice that I didn’t have to make. I’m not biologically oriented towards French people. Society could tell me “Suck it up — you want to live in the same country with your husband, then don’t choose to fall in love with a foreigner!” I’m glad they don’t.
That said — regardless of whether the “biological argument” is useful politically — the fact remains that there is a demonstrated biological basis to homosexuality. Science isn’t about what you want to believe. The whole point of science is to try to counterbalance bias in order to discover accurate information.
In arguing against same-sex marriage, and sleeping on those arguments, I don’t know anymore that I would switch over. However, I still believe the lack of biological determinism would severely weaken our case. I know it was one of the reasons that originally convinced me. I’ve also seen it help convince others.
I’m not willing to argue that homosexual relationships are immoral which would have made my arguments stronger for the social conservative. But for those, the fact that “God made people homosexual” gives them pause (at least the ones open to persuasion). I think it would be a mistaken tactic to abandon it as an argument just because someone has come up with (rather weak) arguments to counteract it.
And as chanson points out, it’s science.
Just a very quick bibliographic note on the critique against the biological explanation of the origins of “homosexuality,” I’d recommend starting with Michel Foucault’s _History of Sexuality: Vol 1_. Of course, as Alan mentioned, numerous contemporary gay activists and thinkers have impressive philosophical arguments against it, including Judith Bulter. The most important insight that you get from this is a more robust sense of “agency” and “choice,” that I think offers solutions to many of the critiques some of you have raised. Basically, the dichotomy of choice or determinism is way too stark and neither are reflective of how we actually live our lives or constitute our subjectivities.
As a side note, Butler opposes gay marriage, as do many older gay and lesbian intellectuals, not because they don’t think gay couples should be given equal rights (they do) but because she argues that it reifies marriage as the only legitimate relationship and actually marginalizes more radical gay and lesbian lifestyles and practices, divined the gay community between married and not married. She sees it as a profoundly conservative move that closes down and delegitimizes much of what gay liberation fought for. Whatever the merits of this argument, her arguments against the biological explanation of homosexuality (building on Foucault), most recently in _Undoing Gender_, need to be taken seriously.
Maybe i will get around to posting on this someday.
Also, Chino’s example of left-handedness @23 is interesting. The thing is that people once really did think left-handedness was wrong and sinister, and was something that required re-education to “correct.” Such a belief is, today, absurd. Recognizing that handedness has a biological basis (and that left-handedness is a natural variant) — plus the discovery that re-education doesn’t work to turn people right-handed — was a part of that acceptance. And it wasn’t that the biological basis was some sort of brilliant political/philosophical strategy — it’s that it is accurate information about how handedness works.
TT@42:
Yes, if you look at gay politics from the 1950s to the 1970s, all you’ll see is libertarianism. The right to privacy and autonomy. This is because the APA thought of homosexuality as a mental illness. Science was not on the side of gay politics.
From the 1980s onward, you see institutionalism. Part of this has to do with getting into public spaces like schools for the sake of queer youth. But it’s also about housing, employment, hate-crimes, and the rights afforded with marriage, etc. I’ll agree with Jonathan that these things probably wouldn’t have happened without an elite class resting on an APA decision. But if you read the 2003 Supreme Court decision Lawrence v. Texas, you’ll find that the victory was a libertarian one: a right to privacy and autonomy. It’s not about science and the compartmentalization of some Americans as different than others.
The fact that science is now the friend of gay politics has to do with normalizing discourses surrounding science. If you look in the Mormon context, the science is considered without those normalizing discourses, and what do you have? A lack of equality. Now, I’m not saying that we should listen to the Dean Byrds of Mormonism who would still consider homosexuality a mental illness, who reduce the science of the last 40 years to mere politics, but what I’m saying is that even with the science you still have the Dean Byrds of Mormonism who run the show! If you read any of his stuff, you’ll find that the theoretical problems with his work have to do with gender stereotypes more than questions of the biology of homosexuality. Why? Because he’s Mormon and we’re talking about eternal gender. The question of the acceptance of homosexuality in society is fundamentally a question of what are deemed acceptable gender roles as opposed to biology.
With that said, I’m still looking forward to how William Bradshaw (a BYU scientist) will tear apart Byrd in the next issue of Dialogue. I think what’s happening in this discussion here is that when we say “science,” we assume a bunch of normativizing relationships. But let me tell you, in conservative spaces where people put God before science, it just doesn’t work the same way.
And holding “science” accountable for electroshock therapy strikes me as akin to blaming modern medicine for homeopathy. I tend to think there are better ways forward than joining some conservative folks in confusing pseudoscience for the real thing.
As a competing bibliographic note, I’m gonna drop this link. As Halperin notes:
More importantly, thanks for the heads up that Bradshaw is gonna take on Byrd in that Mormon magazine. At the end of the day, I totally agree with this:
Mormon cultural views can change, they will change. But returning to that Halperin interview, I think he raises an important caution re academic theory becoming an increasingly marginal activity in terms of effecting cultural change.
Alan, with respect to arguing “free will” vs. “determinism” in homosexuality, I’m still not sure I’m communicating on the same wavelength with you. Let my explain my perspective and questions:
In the “nature vs. environment” debate, essentially every complex human behavior is a combination of both. Usually, it hardly makes sense to attempt to disentangle them. Some habit or practice may be dictated by human culture, but it’s not as though human culture were imposed by some sort of alien invaders. Culture is created and defined by humans, acting according to their nature and their environment. Attempting to separate human behavior from the influence of culture is not the path to discovering the true human nature. Indeed, if there exists a single human anywhere who is untainted by the influence of human culture, I can hardly imagine anything more unnatural.
Anything that has been encoded in human culture is (by definition) within the range of possibilities for human culture. To attempt to uncover universals about human nature, the best we can do is cross-cultural comparisons and look for patterns.
Language and religion are among the universals. Every known human society has them. Also long-term emotional pair-bonding based around mating. The corresponding customs vary widely from one culture to the next, but in the overwhelming majority of human societies, the dominant parenting/mating pattern is (and has been) serial heterosexual monogamy leaning slightly towards polygyny. Note that a long-term mating-pair system typically includes some “cheating” (in humans and other pair-bonding species), so widespread cheating is not a proof that monogamy is unnatural (nor that it is somehow imposed by culture, contrary to human nature). The sensation of “falling in love” is influenced by culture, but it has a very real biological basis. Same with sexual attraction.
In this context, it’s not clear what it would even mean to claim that homosexual orientation is a choice. Are you saying that — even though heterosexual love/attraction/bonding has a biological component — homosexual love doesn’t?? People have some control over who they can feel attracted to and fall in love with, but it is very far from 100%. It may be philosophically satisfying to imagine that you can use your free will to decide exactly whom you will love, but philosophically satisfying and true are two different things.
To say “sexual orientation is generally not a choice” may be neither philosophically satisfying nor politically convenient. However, it is useful in helping people understand homosexuality because it is accurate.
Chanson @47:
There is a major problem when some people get to say what is voluntary and what is involuntary within others. The very existence of expertise on the subject of sexual attraction, whether its clinical or by religious leaders, guarantees people who are not the object of the expertise an empowered place from which to view the “other.” In this case, we’re looking at the idea of the closet. We think we know some kids are gay before they know this about themselves, and we’re often correct years down the road, so we say homosexuality is “inborn.” But what is it that we’re actually knowing about the kid? We’re categorizing the kid as this or that in a way that straight kids are not thought about (usually based on gender stereotypes). Plus the kid might end up bisexual or straight after all. In Mormon culture, we’re currently looking at the idea of “involuntary” attraction, but “voluntary” choice over the attraction. First off, heterosexuals don’t get the same treatment. Their lives, thoughts and feelings don’t get divided this way.
It’s not just philosophically satisfying to imagine that you can use your free will to decide exactly whom you will love. If gayness were considered as natural as straightness, everybody would decide exactly whom they will love. There wouldn’t be a question of what is voluntary and what isn’t.
Biology is used for the cause of gay liberation, but I would again point you to the quote by Sedgwick above @24. The more liberation you achieve, the less important proving sexual orientation is inborn becomes. One could even say that the biological discourse just points to the politics of liberation — proving that some people are attracted one way or the other. The biology discourse of yesteryear (that Chino above calls “pseudo-science”) pointed to the politics of heterosexism.
Another way of saying this is that attempts to change orientation are an attack on free will.
Chino @46:
Of course science is accountable for electroshock therapy. You can’t just dismiss the science you don’t like as pseudo-science just because it turns out as inaccurate. The change to “gay as normal” was a paradigm shift that found its roots in the 1950s after scientific surveys and experiments, but before that you’ll be hard-pressed to find any scientists who thought homosexuality was normal.
And if I invent an apparatus for casting out evil spirits, of course science is to blame for the runaway commercial success of my new Electric Exorcism.
We posit heterosexuality as natural as a matter of course. What is natural deserves rights and privilege. So saying that homosexuality is natural or inborn is not singling out same gender attraction but it is a move in the struggle for access and equality.
Sure, there is othering, but that’s a necessary aspect of change of persuasion. The othering is an implication of the inadequate conditions of the past and present. Each one of us has to start out where we are to get to where we wish to be.
Culture and socialization are powerful, the status quo is what it is and if we wish to overcome it, we will have to engage it as it is, not how we wish it to be. And that includes especially our own attitudes, prejudices, and inabilities.
It takes time and effort to shed prejudice. Clumsiness and mistakes are par for the course. It is unfortunate that minorities have to bear most of the burden in the process but better that than the burden of lasting discrimination.
In the end, the argument is that gays are just as natural and just as human as any hetero guy or girl. Even if people don’t say it that way, at some level, they all imply it.
When people say that homosexuality is natural or that a kid was born gay, they acknowledge that the gay kid was just like them and everybody else when it comes to sexual orientation. It is really as much about identification with each other as it is about the nature of sexuality.
Alan,
Are you saying that it is a problem when scientists say that certain people, because of their genetics or whatever, are more likely to be homosexual when they’re older because that somehow negates that’s person’s free will?
First, the idea of free will is being eroded by neuroscience. It’s not certain that it will survive.
Second, you seem to be criticizing the natural sciences from the perspective of a political scientist or philosopher and attaching values to facts. Facts are value neutral and they just are what they are. Whether or not you experience facts as empowering or as restricting your free will does not change the facts.
I don’t think anyone is saying that homosexuality is less voluntary than heterosexuality. I’m saying that both are equally involuntary. At the very least, I experience my heterosexuality as involuntary (i.e. I never made a conscious choice and don’t believe I could choose to become homosexual), I have heard homosexual people express the same feeling coming from their orientation, and research seems to bear this out.
Chino, I’m sure you know that science is just as much about falsity and trial and error as it is about truth and accuracy. The problem with electroshock therapy today is that, from the perspective of a scientific consensus, it is useless. But notice I didn’t just say “science”; I also said “consensus.” When you become a scientist, you trust that what is out there, published, peer-reviewed, is accurate. If you don’t, and work outside given paradigms (particularly ones proven wrong or faulty), then you have to do extra work to justify why you’re bringing back something or veering off into questionable territory. Someone like Byrd tries to do this extra work by beginning with the premise that heterosexuality is the only natural orientation and that everything else is abnormal. This was a scientific position held by almost every scientist in America in 1920. They held that position, just as Byrd does today, because their beliefs beyond the scientific realm couldn’t entertain the notion of gay people as being anything but broken. Because if they weren’t broken, then there was no reason to be doing the science to begin with!
In fact, if you look at the history of the categorization of homosexuals from heterosexuals, you’ll find that it began as a scientific enterprise. Science is largely to blame for the closet. This is a hard pill for people to swallow because of how much they lean on science now for gay-affirmative politics.
Jonathan — you experience your heterosexuality as involuntary as a point of comparison to the experience of homosexuals experiencing their sexuality as involuntary. But if homosexuality (and heterosexuality) were considered just plain “sexuality” — and people were making their choices accordingly, you could drop the “involuntariness” concept entirely. People would just be making choices.
In terms of a lack of free will in the neurosciences — well, I’m Buddhist, so I have no problem with that. Choice in American society tends to be linked to rights-based discourse: liberty, whatnot, so I use the vernacular.
I want to live in a world where it’s a given that people can choose same-sex partners if they want to, for any reason they choose. that said, I have to respond to this:
But if homosexuality (and heterosexuality) were considered just plain sexuality and people were making their choices accordingly, you could drop the involuntariness concept entirely. People would just be making choices.
Perhaps…. but it does not follow that desire would be one of those choices, any more than hunger is a choice in a world that accepts both vegetarianism and omnivorinous.
Leaving aside the issue of coercion, people do indeed make choices about who to date, sleep with, marry, but most of us find it hard to choose who we will desire or fall in love with.
Many people have remarked that life would be much easier if we could choose who we’ll be attracted to and/or fall in love with, even within whatever orientation we got stuck with/chose/find most satisfying. The history of the world would be very different as well if we could choose who we’ll love, instead of finding ourselves surprised/delighted/horrified by what our libido selects for us, without our higher faculties having much say in the matter.
Above all, I think we’d all be thrilled if we could UNchoose to love someone once things go south. Ain’t no one likes a broken heart. Imagine life without the horror/embarrassment/inconvenience of still being hung up on your ex.
I don’t think it would be either accurate or useful to ‘drop the “involuntariness” concept entirely’ in the matter of desire. I think chanson is right when she writes,
except that I think that is philosophically satisfying, because it acknowledges something accurate about desire, period, no matter who feels it or who they feel it for.
Holly, I agree with you to an extent, as I can see something satisfying in the idea of being compelled by desire. Lisa Diamond’s research, for instance, on women whose sexual orientation fluctuates depending on who they desire demonstrates a kind of involuntariness about sexual attraction; she writes about these women fighting the identity they had given themselves (often lesbians or straight women who find themselves suddenly “straight” or “lesbian,” but for whom “bisexual” doesn’t quite fit either). But still, it becomes a question of what gets privileged: the desire, or the person desiring. Diamond has stated, based on her research, that queer politics shouldn’t be about people being unable to change their behaviors or attractions, but on people having the right to determine their own emotional/sexual lives. The fact that these women have to fight an identity they gave themselves says that there is something wrong with a system of identity that does not have room for fluidity.
I DON”T find anything satisfying about the idea of being compelled by desire; I do, however, acknowledge that whatever desire does or doesn’t compel us to do, we don’t have nearly as much control as we would like over what we desire.
But still, it becomes a question of what gets privileged: the desire, or the person desiring.
Given that, as I say, I don’t think desire necessarily compels us to do anything–we can, after all, choose not to act on it–I don’t think I am privileging desire over the person desiring. Still, I would ask: how does your framing of the situation manage to avoid privileging the choosing of sexuality over the one doing the choosing? Because it does seem that you are fetishizing choice, seeing it as this element that, once accepted, will make other thorny difficulties magically disappear.
I’m working from the realization that choice vs. determinism is a false dichotomy. The thorny difficulties come in when society says, “You should choose this person over who you might normally choose,” which has generally meant “choose the opposite gender over the same gender.” What other thorny difficulties are you referring to, Holly?
If a person wants to choose someone of the opposite gender, but finds themselves attracted to the same gender, I consider this an issue of internalized homophobia — don’t you? Internalized homophobia means that a person is against the choice to “act on their same-sex attractions.”
Look, the discussion has got to move in this direction if you’re going to see movement in conservative cultures like Mormonism. Right now Mormons define “homophobia” as being against those who are same-sex attracted, which allows them to maintain the idea of homosexuality as sinful and still think they’re treating people just fine. Take for example what you just said above — you have free will to not act on your attractions. That’s what Mormons say! I’m not demonizing what Mormons say, but I’m just saying that that kind of logic provides no movement. I would point you to the essay above that Chino posted by John-Charles Duffy that shows that no matter how much science of “innateness” you throw at the Church, they will come back with the position of “you can choose not to act on your [innate] attractions.” That’s why you have to make the right to act on one’s attractions a question of free will, regardless of the etiology or orientation of the attractions.
I’m not fetishizing choice. I am just recognizing the way “choice” and “free will” is used in the debate to the effect of maintaining a status quo.
Thats why you have to make the right to act on ones attractions a question of free will, regardless of the etiology or orientation of the attractions.
That I absolutely agree with–I said as much when I wrote
but that is a separate matter from saying that biologism has no place in the current conversation, which, if I understand you correctly, you are saying.
As long as there are people for whom being gay does not feel like a choice, that perspective should be considered, because like chanson says, acknowledging that helps to provide an accurate view of reality.
This made me lol because it’s so true! Holly, your point about heartbreak is also spot-on. For a few years my favorite song was Edie Brickell’s song “He Said” — about being abandoned by a lover. It ends repeating the last two lines:
In my case, when my older brother came out as gay, I spent a lot of time contemplating whether I could be gay too. One of my favorite comic series is Alison Bechdel’s “Dykes to watch out for” — I find the whole social network of just women to be tremendously appealing. But, analyzing my own desires, I found that I can’t deny that I am attracted to men (not all of them, mind you). There are so many women that I admire and love and want to spend time with, but there’s a particular spark I catch myself feeling towards certain people — not of my choosing, but always males. That is why I self-identify as straight. (How I choose to act on those feelings is a different question entirely.)
Good. Your use of this model is the point where I felt like I most disagreed with your perspective. “Free will” vs. “determinism” is a Theological framework that is designed to try to resolve the question of whether humans are responsible for sin or whether God is.
I think a better model for human behavior is to say that humans are exceptionally flexible and adaptable. As Hellmut pointed out, cultural evolution is much, much faster than genetic evolution, allowing us to change our ideas and behavior to fit all manner of changing circumstances.
I just want to say that this discussion has been great, and I’m sad that I haven’t been able to participate more in it. In many ways, I’ve been waiting for years in the LDS-related blogging world to have precisely this discussion, but alas the timing was such that I haven’t been able to get into it as much as I’d like.
Just two very brief comments:
1. For those who think that the “science” has somehow supported the idea of an inborn sexuality that corresponds to two (or possibly three) alternatives, while I am not a scientist, I am able to say confidently that the assumptions behind these scientific approaches are deeply philosophically flawed. For someone who is both a scientist and who is aware of the philosophical issues that have developed around gender and sexuality in the last century (which is what most scientists sorely lack in the way they frame their problems and questions, including, IMO, the guy at BYU), Anne Fausto-Sterling is an extremely useful resource. She is Professor of Biology and Gender Studies in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and Biochemistry at Brown University. Her book _Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality_ is a must-read.
2. I think that this discussion has started to move in the direction of a more complex understanding of choice. It seems that the worry that some have with acknowledging “choice” is the prospect of “gay recovery” programs. I think that this is a really important conversation worth having, and coming up with ways of speaking responsibly about issues of sexuality that avoid coercive and guilt-inducing means of directing it is imperative. That said, it is also not the case that a claim to “inborn” sexuality is somehow free from its own set of exclusions. The case of bisexuals has been mentioned already. I pointed to transpeople as another example that doesn’t fit this idea of a hetero- or homo- orientation. The whole politics of queer identity is aimed at rejecting this binary. I think I pretty much agree with what Alan is saying here (it looks like we’ve been influenced by the same set of thinkers), with the possible exception of how far he is willing to take the question of choice, but thinking about the politics of choice is certainly an important endeavor, especially if it corresponds better to reality and is a more just way of speaking about sexual diversity. In this regard, I just wanted to point to a brief review of a book on gay politics I posted, called _Love the Sin_ http://www.faithpromotingrumor.com/2009/10/free-exercise-of-religion-and-sex/
TT — As I discussed in my comment #40, I think this whole dichotomy of “choice vs biology” is deeply flawed as a way to frame the question. There’s no either/or going on, and science isn’t claiming that your destiny is written in your genetic code. Humans are shaped by their physiology, but their culture, and by their particular experiences within that culture.
For example, homosexual orientation is widely recognized in our culture today — yet self-identifying as such hardly existed in our culture a mere few centuries earlier. The underlying biology didn’t change. Genetic evolution doesn’t happen that fast, but cultural evolution does. In this case, our longer lifespans and widespread use of contraception has had a dramatic effect on our cultural assumptions about love, romance, and marriage.
I don’t want to oversimplify here — there are tons of other factors — but those were two of the biggies in terms of changing our shared cultural picture of how love and sex work.
I agree with that, Chanson. The biology argument is essential in the struggle because it delegitimizes efforts of discrimination. The First Presidency has acknowledge that now when they supported anti-discrimination protections for gay and lesbian people in local ordinances in Salt Lake City and other Utah municipalities.
Now, LDS leaders have had to retrench behind celibacy. Celibacy is not a Mormon principle. We have always emphasized chastity, which means no sex outside of marriage.
In the English language, unfortunately, the concept of celibacy has been muddled but, actually, celibacy involves a marriage prohibition, most prominently known among monks, nuns, and Catholic priests who take a celibacy vow.
Celibacy is not compatible with a theology of eternal families. The brethren have now created a contradiction, which is perhaps more compromising to their core values than homosexuality.
chanson,
I agree entirely that are our sexual taxonomies are shaped by our culture, not our biology. The point that I am making, and I think you’re making too, is that the contemporary turn to biology as an explanation for sexuality too has a history, is rooted in certain assumptions, and reflects cultural values more than some ahistorical “truth.” FWIW, the modern phenomenon of “homosexuality” as we know it today is often considered to be a modern phenomon. Halperin’s _One Hundred Years of Homosexuality_ begins with this presupposition of sorts. This is not to say that same-sex sex is modern, but that the particular way of categorizing it is, and that such a history is also likely to change.
chanson @61:
Chanson, this is not how it works. It is not a matter of there being a supervening model of biological innateness prior to the intervening model of a homo/hetero binary. The duality of choice versus innateness is written into the homo-hetero binary.
For example, look at ancient Greece: you will find a lot more men engaged in homosexuality than the supposed 1%-5% that are supposedly “homosexually oriented,” by today’s standards. Why are these men doing this? Cultural? Biological? Are some “naturally” doing it, while others are only doing it because of the “culture”? These questions don’t make sense, because they move you away from what’s actually happening in order to make it fit into a framework of today.
Perhaps if heterosexism is at its prime, the 1%-5% represents those who absolutely cannot fit in based on gender roles — feminine men and masculine women who also happen to be gay. Halperin, who TT mentions above, has written about how the homo/hetero binary created an identity that didn’t exist before: “the straight-acting gay man who can pass as straight.” This man’s gayness tends to get thrown into the pot of “Look, this guy is so straight-acting, which means that there must be a biological reason for gayness!” But really, what’s happening is a bunch of gender assumptions about who should be doing what and why, and why they aren’t doing what we assume they would be doing.
To my knowledge, there are no Kinsey reports of other cultures, say, ones that don’t use the homo/hetero binary. You wouldn’t be able to ascertain who is “hetero” and who is “homo,” because you shouldn’t categorize people in ways they don’t categorize themselves. Now, if you go to most major cities today, you’ll find that the Western homo/hetero binary has been implemented in places like Bangkok, New Delhi, Taipei, Cairo, Rio de Janeiro. This is more a spread of ideas, a globalization of an identity structure, than it is people coming to terms with a biologism.
You can say that same-sex attraction exists everywhere. But the biologism requires you to say “how much?” — a question that makes little sense out of its cultural context.
Porquoi? It makes perfect sense to me to ask questions like that under a hetero-homo model. And if a different model also helps us understand sexuality better, do research under model that as well. What’s wrong with that?
I obviously don’t believe your assertion that we “shouldnt categorize people in ways they dont categorize themselves” stands on its own without further justification. We categorize rocks, plants, animals, etc. in ways that they don’t categorize themselves. Why should people be treated specially?
Unless you’re studying the cultural model itself and how it affects perceptions, it can be useful to apply different models than what people apply to themselves.
Jonathan, first off, I’m saying it doesn’t make sense because the numbers don’t match up cross-culturally. In ancient Greece, men had sex with teenage boys as a matter of a masculine/feminine pairing regardless of genitalia. It’s not that all these men and boys were “gay” — because if they were, then I’m curious what happened to “biological evolution” that chanson mentions @61 given that homosexuality is now more limited in our culture.
Secondly, people have studied the model and found that, in the long run, it does more damage than not. Again, I point you to the closet as an oppressive cultural mechanism. A closet that people have to come out of (or stay in) results from the classification system. It doesn’t just “naturally” exist.
People have consistently been arguing on here (Chanson and Holly particularly) that if people believe they are born that way, then we should respect that — meaning, don’t categorize people beyond their own categorizations. However, since you all seem so science-minded on the issue, you should know the APA works from the premise that while some people believe that sexual orientation is innate and fixed, across the human species it actually develops across people’s lifetimes. Humans become aware at different points in their lives that they are gay/straight/bi, and at other points, they feel differently. Psychologists who are more read in gender/queer theory recognize that what’s going on here is a problem with the paradigm, but they are restricted because of vernacular understanding, a culture that is so laden with the concept of “orientation.” Often what they’ll do is remind their readers that the definitional boundaries of orientation are fuzzy.
People have consistently been arguing on here (Chanson and Holly particularly) that if people believe they are born that way, then we should respect that meaning, dont categorize people beyond their own categorizations.
There are plenty of ways in which I think we can and should categorize people beyond their own categorizations. For instance, I think we should categorize Brian David Mitchell as something entirely other than his own categorization of prophet.
The fact that I respect people’s right to claim that they were born gay does not in any way, shape or form mean that I agree whole-heartedly with your assertion that we shouldnt categorize people in ways they dont categorize themselves.”
If you can’t put more nuance in your own arguments and statements, at least don’t remove it from mine.
I don’t think this leads to a monumental overturning of the current model.
Currently, we move away from the idea that people consciously choose their attractions. Where we fail, then, is in saying, “Attractions are not changeable,” when we ought to be saying, “Attractions are not consciously changeable.”
However, there is a problem here. When you start saying, ‘Humans become aware at different points in their lives that they are gay/straight/bi, and at other points, they feel differently,” you open up the possibility for more people to believe that at one point, they may “feel differently” about their undesired sexuality. Regardless of how likely (or unlikely) such changes are, and even the very nature of the change.
Holly, I wasn’t aware that every response of mine requires optimal nuance while the people who respond and characterize my arguments, such as yourself, are not held to the same standard. Respecting that people are born that way is an example of letting people categorize themselves. I imagine that you could have read me as saying this, but instead chose to be hypocritically finicky.
Andrew, you’re still missing a critical component. Attractions are not consciously changeable except for the people for whom they ARE consciously changeable.
If a person has an undesired sexuality, that points to a problem with societal acceptance of a sexuality as is and not a problem with the sexuality itself. The fact that some people want to change but cannot should in no way delimit the fact that some people do change, consciously or spontaneously. Also, the fact that some people do change, consciously or spontaneously, should in no way determine that others be required to change. It’s pretty simple. Let people choose their own emotional and sexual lives without an overarching heterosexist framework.
“consciously *or* spontaneously.”
What is the research that shows consciously chosen change (as opposed simply to spontaneous change)? I’m curious and ignorant.
I would agree with the statement that sexual orientation (defined as sexual attraction of varying intensity to various subsets of the population) is a product of biological and cultural factors. Although sexual orientation may change over time, the choice of orientation is not generally a conscious decision and not subject to intentional change.
Alan, nothing that you’ve said so far has seemed to me to be incompatible with my personal definition of sexual orientation. I’m still struggling to understand why you think (do you?) that studying sexual orientation and publishing the results are harmful.
So before science took up the study of sexuality, you’re saying that people that were attracted to the same sex could freely express and act on their attractions? That’s obviously not true, but rather that science was initially subject to cultural prejudices. Now, science is becoming more accurate and actually leading cultural change. Yet you want to ignore scientific inquiry into sexual orientation?
Well, if you consider ancient Greece, the men stopped having sex with the teenage boys once they married their wives. It is very difficult to think of that as fitting with the mechanics of “spontaneous change.” Again, we’re looking at a problem with the way innateness and change are formulated as a duality.
In any event, consider the following quotes:
There are also the numerous claims of people who said they found God and then chose to be straight, and their stories were often used by conservatives in the 1990s to hold onto the possibility of change for the queers in their cultures and beyond. Nowadays, most conservative psychologists are actually on board with the level of variance in human sexuality; they’re just still under the arm of heterosexist theology so that even if people cannot change, they still can’t “act on their attractions.” This is why, and I’ve emphasized this probably a dozen times on this thread, “born that way” is not the political powerhouse people think it is.
You might like this website: http://www.queerbychoice.com/.
But if you consider ancient Greece, you also consider a society where orientation as we now formulate it didn’t even play a role. You can’t look at “men having sex with teenage boys and stopping when they married their wife” and then say, “They were attracted to teenage boys and adult women.” The former doesn’t say anything about their orientations.
I feel that Lindsy’s quote doesn’t show anything about consciously chosen change either. When she says, “I fell in love with men,” she doesn’t say, “I consciously chose to fall in love with men.” When she says, “I experienced most of my closest emotional relationships with female friends,” she does NOT say, “I consciously chose to experience most of my closest emotional relationships with female friends.”
Similarly, the quote of a gay woman says “I am converted,” but it doesn’t say, “I chose to be converted.”
Only Kenzaburo Oe’s comment suggests the idea of choice…but it leaves me with a lot of questions — how does one “let” himself love a person of the same sex? This sounds more like someone who has been repressed “letting” himself not be repressed. Are all people repressed then? And is our orientation system the mechanism by which we are repressed?
You say:
but what is to disqualify the possibility that when they say they “chose to be straight,” what they mean is, “they choose not to act on homosexual desires/”same sex attractions”” and they choose to engage in heterosexual actions, whether or not they are sexually attracted to their partners of the opposite sex? Is THAT possibility so foreign? so strange?
I guess I’ll have to check the queer by choice website.
Jonathan, you’re right to an extent…before the category system, people still could not have sex with the same gender. The reason was because of a belief that one should “not lie with a man as one would lie with a woman.” Sodomy was a sin because anything nonreproductive (regardless of the gender of the partners) was sinful and therefore deemed unhealthy, including masturbation. You have to realize that in the 1800s people basically thought that if semen was not expelled into a vagina, then you were in serious trouble; people believed the purpose of sex is to be “fruitful and multiply.” Mormonism held onto this belief until the advent of birth control. Still, in the 1800s, people could and often did act on their same-sex attractions to the exclusion of orgasm: sleeping together, kissing, emotional connection, etc.
Science came in in the early 1900s and proved that nonreproductive sex is fine, but it also considered homosexuality to be a disease. Eventually scientists put two and two together and science has been on the side of gay politics ever since.
Let me be clear. I am not anti-science. There are plenty of scientists that I cite. But science is bound up in paradigms and vocabulary that has a lot of difficulty being historically introspective. The scientific inquiry into sexual orientation today is still bound up in assumptions of the early 1900s that links genitalia to an inborn “orientation,” when clearly, if you look at this question across time, it’s more nuanced.
http://www.queerbychoice.com/feelings.html
Regarding, for example, this page, I feel a basic disagreement. The person who is sad who chooses to smile and think positive thoughts does not choose to be happy. He is doing this “faking it till he makes it,” with the hope that eventually, faking it will make it.
Maybe for some faking it will make it. But the person did not choose for this. In the same way, for someone who tries to fake it, to smile and think positive thoughts but who is still brought to the sadness, he also did not choose for the faking not to make it.
I find it interesting that the site would juxtapose what it views as “normal” feeling control with clinical depression. I find the comparison a bit off.
Any number of people fit that scenario, Andrew. That is the result of the conservative idea of using the people who did consciously change as a paradigm for everyone. You get people who say they “changed,” but couldn’t and didn’t. But like I said, this played its course in the 1990s and early 2000s. Eventually, conservative clinicians who worked everyday in the field realized that not everyone can change (something the rest of the psychological community knew long ago), and so they changed their tune.
I haven’t been that deep into the science of orientation but from what I’ve seen, it’s pretty nuanced and revealing even greater nuance. (And to be fair, genitalia is highly correlated with orientation, among other things.)
The quotations that you give seem to be examples of people accepting or discovering their orientation, not changing it. Research has shown women to be generally more fluid in orientation. In other words, biological and cultural factors have predisposed them to have a broad orientation. This is in contrast to men who seem predisposed to have a narrower orientation.
For example, even if I were told that sex with men was better than with women, I couldn’t allow myself to try. I don’t have the capacity to do what Lindsy did. My orientation isn’t capable of same-sex attraction. For Lindsy, women weren’t off the menu like men are off mine.
BTW, an undesired desire isn’t necessarily a sign of cultural oppression. I don’t want to want to eat junk food. Many pedophiles don’t want to desire children. Second-order desires are part of the human condition.
Jonathan,
You’re just being held back by fear and anxiety! I read it in an interview.
This website is absolutely surreal.
Wow! I guess I should just relax then. 🙂
Jonathan, if you define “orientation” as “whatever is on your menu then, now or later,” then I have no problem with that. But would it really be meaningful to consider such a menu as something you’re “born with”? It seems like it make more sense to consider it as something that “manifests over the course of a life.”
In terms of desire and cultural oppression, I did think of pedophilia when I wrote that, but that brings in the question of consent of one’s sexual partner. Junk food brings in the question of health. Not all desire is good desire.
Andrew, I hope you’re differentiating between what I’m saying and that site. The problem with that site is that they take their experiences and try to apply them to everyone. But if you notice, people who don’t feel they choose their orientations often try to apply their experiences to everyone, too. I actually rather like Jonathan’s phrasing of “narrow” versus “broad” orientation because it has room for fluidity that “homo” versus “hetero” does not. The only thing I’d say is that it still doesn’t make sense to say that a person is “born with” a broad orientation that they come to “discover,” because it would matter what happens to them in their life, and the choices they make, in terms of how the orientation would manifest. And really, which is more important? The orientation as it actually manifests in the person’s life, or some abstract potential manifestation?
I think it makes sense to say sexual orientation is inborn inasmuch as the circumstances of birth predict the range of future sexual preferences even if it takes time for that sexuality to manifest fully. No one is born fully expressing their sexuality, but the roots of their future sexuality are there. An easy comparison is to secondary sexual characteristics that don’t appear until puberty but are largely predetermined genetically.
The problem with that site is that they take their experiences and try to apply them to everyone.
How are you not doing that, Alan? Your basic approach to sexuality seems to me somewhat analogous to the church’s: you want everyone to define their sexuality–or rather, refrain from defining their sexuality–in very specific ways, or, you say, something dire will happen. Admittedly, your reasons for doing so are more respectable than the church’s, but you’re still insisting that people view their sexuality according to your paradigm of choice rather than orientation–because we must. You don’t just say this is how you view it; you say we must all come to view it this way too. You keep arguing for fluidity, but there’s little in how you would let individuals define their own sexuality, because you insist it has to be undefined.
Why? As you’ve pointed out, the categories of homosexual and heterosexual are fairly recent; before that, sex was viewed as individual acts. Didn’t really help us have such a healthy approach to sexuality.
And why can’t both approaches–as well as other approaches we have yet to discover–exist all at once? Why can’t some people define themselves as born gay, and others say, “I choose to have a same sex partner at this point; who knows what I’ll choose tomorrow” and others say “watch me invent a new way of framing my sexuality”? Why does there have to be only one way to skin this cat?
Jonathan @ 82:
The last thing I’d say, since I feel like we’re going in circles, is that psychologists have already moved in the direction of viewing sexuality as a life course phenomenon instead of a “born with” scenario. So you can fight it if you want, but that’s the paradigm now in the psychological sciences. If you have access to academic articles, you might check out this one:
Bertram Cohler and Phillip L. Hammack, The Psychological World of the Gay Teenager: Social Change, Narrative, and Normality, Journal of Youth and Adolescence 36, no. 1 (2007): 4759.
They pretty much lay out the history of sexuality studies for gay youth, and talk about how queer youth in places that don’t have a closet (where homosexuality is fine), don’t use their sexualities to define themselves the same way as before. The development of sexuality and the way they talk about themselves is different. Studies now require narrative input that does not take the single framework of “coming to terms with my inner gay,” since there is no “inner gay” in relation to an “outer hetero society.”
Holly @83:
I don’t think there is only one way, but I do find ya’ll at least as stubborn as I am. I’m not arguing for everyone to be fluid, but just that there are phenomenological problems with the concept of orientation. I hope I’ve made at least some of the problems clear.
By my count, this is only the second time I’m dropping my fave Halperin link here.
It really is germane to what y’all are talking about (or at least, I think it explains why the tension between theory and advocacy has been around for nearly two decades before this thread got started).
As far as I’m concerned, too many of the prescriptions from both the academic left and right feel like Sunday School dj vu all over again. Both sides have retreated into arcane discussions about sex at a time when what’s needed is to make the case for fairness. Granted, “fairness” ain’t sexy. Q.E.D.
there are phenomenological problems with the concept of orientation.
Well, yes. There are problems with most if not all human concepts. But it does not necessarily follow that the concept has outlived its usefulness and must be discarded NOW, as you advocate, or scrapped entirely at any point. At this time in the current debate, there are still people working toward the same goal you’re working toward who find it both useful and necessary.
If it truly does become useless and entirely at odds with what else we know about sexuality, it WILL go away and we will cease to use it, in the same way we no longer discuss sexuality in terms of inverts and perverts (except a casual use of the latter).
Chino, as I said @24, talk shows and sitcoms have done more for “fairness” than science has. If people are going to rely on science for politics — which by the way, is an academic and rather exclusive enterprise — then, they should probably know what they’re talking about.
In terms of Halperin saying Foucault supported gay marriage, what I take from that is that Foucault supported the idea of a society respecting the relationships of gays as on par with the relationships of heteros (which is currently a question of “marriage equality”), asserting that you don’t have a non-oppressive civilization otherwise. But on the question of the institution of marriage itself as tied problematically to the state, he is a lot more critical.
Alan, I was pointing to that Halperin interview again b/c he spends the bulk of it describing how academics and activists parted ways in the nineties. I wondered if it might not lead a thoughtful theorist to at least acknowledge here that the two sides have been talking past each other for a while now.
As far as Foucault on gay marriage is concerned, I like to trot out that remark of his because its silliness appeals to me. It reminds me of the time I was enjoying schnitzel on a bun with Adorno in Washington Square Park and he told me there would be no civilization until the lipstick lesbians who lived in the apartment above his agreed to a mnage trois. I was appalled at the time, mostly because the way he said it wound up spraying flecks of mustard on my coat.
Sorry, Chino. Was on the defensive here for a while; tough to switch gears.
What I’m noticing about MSP the longer I’m here is the crazy amount of diversity of thought. Writing here is almost like a trial run for public scholarship — by which I mean the kind of scholarship that is needed to bring the two sides together again. One thing Halperin doesn’t talk about when he warns cynical queer scholars that “gay marriage” actually has opened up the possibility for more radical conversations is how it has done this: the internet. I think what’s happening right now is that older professors who aren’t technologically inclined are being phased out, and younger ones are participating more online. We’ll see a more publicly engaged university in the coming years — partly as a matter of maintaining relevance in a bad economy, but also because it is clearly a necessity.
Notice that I chose to publish in a Mormon journal instead of a university one. Sure, I had to do a lot more work to break down queer theory into the easiest morsels I could, but as Einstein once said, “If you can’t explain it to a five year old and have them comprehend, then you probably don’t understand it yourself” (not that Mormons are five-year-olds, but you get what I mean). So it was good for me and I’m hoping it’s good for my audience.
Halperin notes that the 1990s were plagued with the question of the “gay gene.” Queers were dealing with churches telling them homosexuality was a choice, and so they looked to gay science: LeVay and all them. Meanwhile queers in the academy were anti-essentialists because well, poststructuralism of the 1960s as well as feminists of color critiques of essentialized [white] feminist politics of the 1970s.
But the 1990s has come and gone. What you have now is what that Duffy essay explains: churches that can tolerate gay essentialism, but still maintain homosexuality as a sin because “God says so.” You have Mormon gays who identify as “same-gender attracted” before they get married and still marry the opposite gender. So, gay essentialism obviously ain’t the solution.
Now, the thing about gay marriage is that you’re right…it is about “fairness” — the public debate is not really about gays marrying because they can’t help who they love (essentialism), but because they love who they love (a more radical position). So, it’s not like the 1990s “gay gene” stuff carried over to the 2000s completely (although I’m a bit cynical about that after this thread). What I’ve been arguing here, however, isn’t about the 1990s/2000s. It’s about shaping the 2010s.
Alan — I nice if you’re backing down from being on the defensive. I think this topic would be far more interesting as a discussion than as a debate/duel.
I’m sorry I was in transit (away from the Internet) for more than a day and missed the middle bit of this discussion. I think that you thoroughly misunderstood and/or misrepresented my point. Let me attempt to state it a little more clearly:
Human biology/physiology has not changed dramatically within the last few centuries. (Yet the daily experience of people in the rich/developed world has changed very dramatically for various reasons.) People’s personal experiences are shaped by their culture. Your culture gives you a set of definitions and expectations to work with, and people use those definitions and expectations to interpret (and shape) their lives and experiences.
Now which part of the above (if any) do you disagree with? Your “ancient Greece” example is a prime example to illustrate the point I was making. Though — since the whole homosexuality thing is currently a little loaded — I was going to instead use the example of the medieval conception of “courtly love” and how it might have influenced people’s experience/perception of being “in love” (even though the underlying biology of being in love didn’t change).
Also, I made a point to follow up with a positive and upbeat discussion about feminism in the seventies and how it affected Mormon women. It is an incredibly interesting topic that I would love to discuss here more. Why poison the well by presuming to lecture me and Holly about it, as though you’re the expert and we’re just neophytes on the subject? I think we all have interesting insights to share, and we’d understand each other better if we didn’t try to turn the discussion into a sparring match.
Chanson @91
No kidding! Especially since your basic reason for disagreement in the first place was that a statement I made would wound your mother’s sensibilities if she heard it (!), and since you had to back down from your position eventually and admit you were wrong.
Alan @90
Yes. There are a lot of well educated people here, with and without graduate degrees. You need to know your shit and be accountable for it. Lecturing people who’ve been studying and/or publishing in the field of gender theory and/or science and/or engaging in political activism for a decade or two (or even three) as if they don’t know the first thing about any of those topics isn’t really going to fly.
I don’t think it is the solution. From the beginning, I’ve said that it is part of a solution, a solution that I see working in the trenches. I confess that I’m not aware of the current fashions in academia on the subject, but neither are the people whose opinions are changing toward greater equity and inclusion.
Chanson, Holly — often what I say is not intended as lecture so much as monologue. The rest I would chalk up to the diversity of responses, the varying levels of insight. It is sometimes difficult to keep in mind who knows what without having embodied (*glares at Holly [edit: with disembodied eyes]*) experiences with any of you.
But yes, I would admit that it gets harder to keep what other people know in your mind the more you monologue =p
(psst. Did alan just admit that he’s talking to himself? cloudcuckoolander alert)
🙂
Hey, I know for a fact that everyone here monologues. =p I hardly ever write in my own blog (which is where most people get it out of their systems); I do most of my blogging on MSP.
no, i’m definitely lecturing to an unaware and unobservant public. :p
Well, sometimes the cuckoolander is right.
Oh, come on, Alan. If it’s a monologue, why post it in a comment here? Why include something that is you talking to yourself in a forum that most people understand to be about conversation among many people, however well that does or doesn’t happen? How, in this forum, is a monologue especially superior to a lecture?
Do you not realize what you’ve just communicated about your approach to audience?
Holly, I’m not sure why you’re pushing this. I’m not referring to monologue as “talking to myself” in a strict sense. What I’m referring to is when a person makes a bunch of points wound up in emotion that veer off into solipsism momentarily and then they steer themselves back into conversation. You’re no stranger to this approach, and it’s one approach of many.
From my perspective,this has been a good discussion. Perhaps there are some dynamics that I’m not aware of, but i don’t see Alan lecturing, condescending, or monologuging here. I have seen few of his interlocutors really understand the implications of what he is saying. Frankly, the option of keeping biological essenetialism as one among many tools in the activism is not really compatible with his critique. Basically, it is just not an honest or compelling argument.
FWIW, I think he’s creating a compelling case, adding to my suggestion for why this argument is bad within the gay movement, buy showing why this argument just doesnt work for churches, not because they reject it, but because they can accept it without consequence. It is a really persuasive argument.
Chino,
The Halperin interview is really fantastic and I’m glad i read it rather than
Oops.
Anyway, the Haperin interview is great. I know that he knows that Foucault actually opposed gay marriage in more than one interview,despite what he may have said at Lacan’s house. The split between academics and activists in gay and feminist circles is ioortant to think about, but i take what Halperin is saying as less condemning of academics than Chino does. The fact that Halperin sees the split happening in gay communitites precisely on this issue of biologism is fascinating (see the last page of the interview).
Anyway, Halperin’s _Saint Foucault_ is amazing and makes the case for the close link between academics and activists, arguing against activists who didn’t want to bother with theory. One of my favorite books.
and I’m not sure why you can’t just cop to having handled the matter badly. Why keep defending discourse that clearly didn’t work, particularly given that in the instance we’re talking about, you criticized views you admitted you hold and rhetorical approaches you admitted you rely on, and repeated a bunch of stuff that’s already common knowledge among your audience? Would it really cost you so much to say, “Yeah, my bad; sorry”?
You could say as much to Chino; what, you can’t say it to the ladies?
First, I try not to indulge in solipsism and think others shouldn’t do it either. Second, is it the best approach to accomplish your rhetorical goals?
is not really compatible with his critique.
the fact that things are incompatible does not preclude their necessary coexistence. Mormon feminism is an example of that.
Holly,
That may be, but the case needs to be demonstrated, not asserted.
Human reproduction is a good example. The reason women often get sick when they get pregnant is that their immune system detects an alien entity and tries to get rid of it. During each pregnancy, there’s a battle between the immune system and the reproductive system, which are incompatible; if the immune system wins, the fetus is aborted; if the reproductive system wins, the immune system is temporarily suppressed and the fetus continues to gestate. This is why women with auto-immune disorders like lupus or MS generally experience fewer symptoms while pregnant, and a serious worsening after giving birth.
thus, the immune system and the reproductive system are incompatible, but they are both necessary, and they do in fact coexist.
Holly — there are two things going on here. First are the actual arguments and second is the way they are delivered. It is not the case that they way I have delivered my arguments has obscured other people’s. If we take chanson’s argument @61, for example:
I read this to mean that “there were gay people prior to the naming of them because of the biology of gayness.”
And so I responded accordingly. Later chanson said that my “ancient Greece example is a prime example to illustrate the point I was making” — ostensibly, the point being that human biology hasn’t changed that much, not specifically homosexual biology. But this nuance was lost in her phrasing, which was her gaffe, not mine. So I have no need to apologize to chanson, so far as I see.
I apologized to Chino because he attempting bridge work. On the other hand, you seem consistently antagonistic.
What I gather of your position is that you dislike theorists that throw essentialism out the window. All right, fine. What TT is saying @101, though — that biological essentialism is bad for future politics — I believe is true of not only of gay politics, but also feminist politics. I tend to think of Mormon gender essentialism as a psuedo-theological position that came about specifically to fight feminist and gay politics. The fact that you seemingly uphold gender essentialism and also consider LDS culture to misogynist should be teased apart — because it’s interesting, but unfleshed out. The problem so far as I see it is that you if give Mormons their gender essentialism, then you must also give them their theological positions concerning gender.
The incompatibility here is the problem of essentialized gender in Mormonism: that all women are supposed to be a, b and c. The power of Mormon feminism is that it breaks down this essentialism and allows women to be individuals!
and can I also just point out that if there were some sort of magic activist argument approach that would compel churches to dispense human rights and justice and stop preaching doctrines that marginalize and harm whole groups of people, women would have found it and used it to their advantage at least a century ago. Sexism and misogyny would have been long eradicated, starting in churches and extending out to secular society.
In other words, activists can’t change the church or what it teaches. The church may or may not evolve as the rest of the world evolves. But the best activists can realistically hope for is to make it impossible for the church to succeed in imposing its agenda on the rest of the world.
I guess I’m more optimistic than you when it comes to the power of theory + activism, then.
I recognize that female bodies are different from male bodies. I do not think this constitutes inferiority or superiority. I think it constitutes difference. I recognize it as a reality that must be addressed, down to the fact that birth control is less frequently covered by insurance plans than viagra. I don’t think that these biological difference constitute a sound basis for most stereotypes about either women or men, or for the oppression of women. I don’t think we actually have much clue what human traits are essentially feminine or masculine.
If that position constitutes gender essentialism to you, so be it.
the power of feminism is that it breaks down essentialism, which is an essential part of Mormonism. Hence the incompatibility.
Alan–out of curiosity, why did you write this?
after all, “gay” refers to a sexual orientation, which you say doesn’t really exist. Shouldn’t you have written, “Even though my mother is LDS and I typically choose to desire men” or some such thing? Why rely on this category your theory rejects?
Do you get uncomfortable with transgender politics? The location of transgenderism in Mormonism seems to amount to “if they get a sex change, then they are unworthy,” without any real discussion about the nature of gender, since it was already decided that for some reason gender is essential — or, as Boyd Packer once put it “there is no mismatching of bodies and spirits.”
I disagree with you that Mormonism and feminism are as exclusive, or incompatible as you say they are. I think it’s more of a refusal to broach real-world topics in the culture that could point to flaws in the theology.
Oh Holly, identifying as gay is no more an admission of a belief in biological origins of sexuality as identifying as LDS is an expression of a belief that religion is biologically determined. Are you sure you dont need a lecture? And the issue of trans politics has finally come fully into this discussion. I mentioned it twice and now Alan has mentioned it. Your position is exactly the problem that results from biological essentialism. That is why the T is in GLBT and why the theory is a precondition for the politics.
No. Do you?
And why on earth would you imagine that I agree with a single thing BKP has ever said about gender in his entire life?
Oh Holly, identifying as gay is no more an admission of a belief in biological origins of sexuality as identifying as LDS is an expression of a belief that religion is biologically determined.
if it’s all about the rhetoric, then use different rhetoric.
Hehe, I didn’t say you agreed with Packer.
Then why bring Packer up when asking about my position on trans politics? why not bring up a position you support, or one you think I might support?
I brought up Packer after I asked your position.
My only point is that if Mormon feminism definitionally requires essentialized gender (which is how you characterized it @110, is it not?), then it puts it in a transphobic (and/or trans-ignorant) position.
It most definitely is not how I characterized Mormon feminism. I wrote
It’s how I characterized Mormonism, which is not the same thing as Mormon feminism. I assume you can comfortably acknowledge that distinction.
I will certainly acknowledge that certain strains of Mormon feminism are homophobic and, if they ever acknowledge the existence of transgender, most likely transphobic as well. Chino pointed it out well enough in this thread when he included a link to this piece by Kathryn Lynard Soper: http://timesandseasons.org/index.php/2008/10/girls-are-you-hip-enough/
But as you have pointed out, Mormon feminism is diverse, so there’s absolutely no reason for you to even imagine that you have the slightest idea what sort of Mormon feminism I adhere to, unless I’ve told you explicitly here – or you’ve managed to read some of my published work on the topic of gender and sexuality. However, if you’d done that, you might have had a clue that I don’t have a problem with transgender politics.
And a question for you: I went back to the “Mormon Times” thread, checking some of your statements about Mormon feminism. I found a statement I neglected to ask about before. You wrote:
How does acknowledging the reality of the body, including differences between the male and female body, constitute “setting femaleness and maleness in stone”? Because if it does, even Elizabeth Grosz, whom you claimed to like, is guilty of that. There was absolutely no reason for you to assume that I see or want anyone else to see femaleness and maleness set in stone.
I’ve said all along that you need a more nuanced idea of embodiment, and the statement I’ve quoted here is more evidence as to why.
p.s. If you want to understand why I “seem consistently antagonistic,” the fact that you make groundless assumptions like that, and then lecture me – or monologue in my direction, as you might put it – for holding opinions I don’t actually hold are two primary reasons.
Holly,
May I suggest, in the genuine spirit of clarification, that you are being incredibly vague, often dropping short, rhetorical bombs, and then when people make a good faith effort to dialogue with what is otherwise a blantant assertion from you, you insist that that isn’t what you meant, that you actually meant something else, but then you never tell us what it is.
How exactly is your argument that sexual difference is rooted in the body (rather than culture) not conflict with trans politics?
Now, I don’t want to jump all over you in case you are not saying that you agree with Grosz, but if you think you’re position (as thin as it is here) is somehow compatible with her’s, I’d like to challenge that idea. In any case, I’ll let you clarify what you mean, so that you don’t accuse me of mischaracterizing your view, and just let you elaborate. So, what is your theory of sexual difference, and why do you see sexual biologism as an important part of that?
TT asks
Sexual difference and gender are not the same thing–that’s one of the first things you cover in academic discussions of gender and sexuality. Sexual difference is rooted in the body; gender is a social construct rooted in culture. One can be transgendered precisely because gender is something different from genetalia.
Did you really not know that sex and gender aren’t the same thing, or did you think I didn’t know it?
p.s. There’s another example of things that could be incompatible and still necessarily coexist, even in one body, at least before advancements in surgery made sex reassignment possible: sex and gender.
and one more comment to support my insistence that the reality of the body be recognized, and that doing so is not incompatible with support for transgender politics: I call your attention to “Southern Comfort,” a 2001 documentary about Robert Eads, a trans man who, because his surgery was done after menopause, did not have his ovaries removed, and subsequently died of ovarian cancer. His struggle to get healthcare is horrifying. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0276515/
Hahahahaha! You really want to go out on the sex/gender distinction? What is this, 1985? Is this really what we’ve been working with here?
You’re right about one thing…sexual difference is not gender. It is not even in the same conversation. It is a rejection of the very sex/gender dichotomy you make, and your conflation of these two is increasingly confirming that you do need a lecture after all (especially since you get the way the trans understand the sex/gender distinction completely backwards. See here: http://www.faithpromotingrumor.com/2009/02/gender-mormonism-and-transsexuality/).
But before I deliver it (and I’m honestly trying to avoid embarrassing you here, believe it or not), I want to understand correctly. Are you suggesting that “sex” and “sexuality” are fixed (even biological?) and cannot be changed, and that things like masculinity and femininity are culturally variable? Is this the basis of your feminist, gay, and trans theory, and the reason that you are rejecting Alan’s constructivist approach?
Holly,
The continued assertion that things can be both “incompatible” yet also “coexist” doesn’t really explain your position of how a biological and anti-biological etiology for sexuality are able to do so. In reality, you are simply pointing to things that might stand in tension, not things that are mutually exclusive. If you want us to give you the necessary nuance and credit with a coherent position, you will really have to explain how it is that you think these two approaches can work together, even if they are in tension, as opposed to just asserting it, which is what you’ve done so far.
A phrase like “the reality of the body be recognized” is incredibly thin. What is “reality,” and which “reality” of “the” “body” are you prioritizing as what gets “recognized”? Why do you say “the body”? In what way are we supposed to “recognize” bodily differences?
I want to say before this goes to far, I am sorry for laughing at you. I just found your insistence that you be taken seriously, and your abhorrence for being condescended to and lectured to, to be incredibly ironic as you both condescended and lectured to me, while simultaneously advocating the very position that is called into question by contemporary theorists for the last several decades. It struck me as funny, but I realize that ironically condescending back to you is only going to raise the stakes and the potential tensions. I’d rather focus on the arguments, so that we can get some clarity on what the issues are at stake instead of focusing on who should have said something nicer, and I regret stooping.
None of us pull all our tools out of our toolboxes every time we say something around here, which should be obvious at this point.
“Sexual difference” in the way Grosz uses it is kind of a misnomer. It isn’t really about genital difference (AKA “sex”) or “gender.” She uses it in a more Lacanian fashion: maleness as constituting “that which is represented,” and femaleness as constituting “that which is not yet represented” — pointing to the “penis” as having been problematically central to our symbolic system, whether referring to gender or to sex.
As an example of the application of this: I’ve seen Southern Comfort, and the problem was precisely that gender and sex are assumed in society to require correspondence. Since Eads was a he, it’s assumed that he “shouldn’t” have ovaries. You’ve said that when you recognize “the difference between the male and female body” that you’re not “setting maleness and femaleness in stone,” but you actually are in your very utterance. Ovaries themselves don’t have gender or sex; the transgender body indicates that what we think about as “sex” is actually “gendered body parts.”
Sex can change. Things like hormones or hormone mimicking agents change the sexes of amphibians and even human fetuses. Animals (including human animals) are sometimes born with genitalia that do not match their chromosomes; sometimes people find that out, and sometimes they don’t. That is one of the issues of embodiment I am interested in.
But once people are born, they have a biology to contend with, make sense of, exploit, chafe against, enjoy, whatever. I’m interested in how people do that. For most people, their sexual identity is a big part of that.
Sexuality certainly evolves. Puberty is an example of that.
“reality” is something we simultaneously construct and struggle to understand. Elements of it in relationship to “the body” include illness, pain, the ways that cultural norms teach us to stand, what bodies do what sort of work, etc. One “reality” I prioritize and one difference I want people to recognize is that female bodies, especially brown and young female bodies, are trafficked more often than male bodies of any sort. I say “the body” because that is a way of discussing physicality in the discipline in which I have a PhD.
As for my sense that Alan’s anti-biological etiology for sexuality is able to coexist with a biological etiology it’s incompatible with – well, both are ideas, and both exist. I don’t need to prove that they can coexist; they already do. Incompatible means “unable to exist together in harmony” or, rather, “in tension” – that’s its primary meaning. (Yet again I have to direct you to a dictionary, TT.) It doesn’t mean that the existence of one thing necessarily cancels out the existence of the other. if it did, incompatible spouses would not divorce; instead, one would simply cease to exist.
OK, I’ll accept the distinction in the last sentence. But if I’m guilty of setting maleness and femaleness in stone” through my very utterance, you are guilty of maintaining the homo-hetero distinction you want to dissolve, by referring to yourself as gay, which means “homosexual,” in the OP rather than emphasizing your choices.
If my rhetoric contradicts my stated goals and positions, then so does yours.
I’m “gay” because if people see me holding my partner’s hand in public, that is how they think of me; “gay” is short-hand for a categorization not exactly of my choosing. I generally call myself gay for the sake of queer politics today, but I look forward to a day when the term won’t be an identity handed to me by society.
TT, what you’ve written on the Church and transgenderism is interesting. I think that given that, historically, the Church has conflated homosexuality with transgenderism, the use of “gender” in the Proclamation on the Family has more to do with an assumed collapse of the sex/gender system, where “gender” was chosen in place of sex because the word “sex” would make people gasp.
Thank you Holly for the reply. So, if I understand you, you concede that bodies, sex, and sexuality all change, except that in all cases you root them to “biology,” like hormones. So, basically, you have a fundamentally biological view of the body itself as the source of difference. If this is not an essentialist position that relies on the naturalization of differences, it is not clear to me how you would distinguish your view from that. It still seems as if you have essentially reproduced the “sex is to nature as gender is to culture” split. But this isn’t what you mean when you say that “reality is something we construct and struggle to understand,” since you see the “reality” of “sex” and “the body” as self-evident, no? What is the degree of “construction” that you see in the “reality” of the body, because it is not clear that you have admitted to any here.
As for the issue of the “incompatibility,” of an anti-biological and biological etiology of sexuality, I presume that you were really not advocating something as bare as “both ideas exist in the world,” and since incompatible ideas both have the property of existence. Of course they do. That doesn’t really provide a defense of your claim that:
“As long as there are people for whom being gay does not feel like a choice, that perspective should be considered, because like chanson says, acknowledging that helps to provide an accurate view of reality.” (58)
Here, you seem to assert that a biological explanation for sexuality (if I’m understanding properly the context in which the comment is made, and I may not be) “provides an accurate view of reality.” (Though at 67 you seem to back off this entirely and just suggest that we “respect people’s right to claim that they were born gay,” which is confusing because I don’t think anyone ever suggested that this was not someone’s right, nor that such a view should not be “respected,” whatever that means.)
But what is really at issue is the assertion you made in 83:
“And why cant both approachesas well as other approaches we have yet to discoverexist all at once? Why cant some people define themselves as born gay, and others say, I choose to have a same sex partner at this point; who knows what Ill choose tomorrow and others say watch me invent a new way of framing my sexuality? Why does there have to be only one way to skin this cat?”
Again, it does not seem as if you are simply suggesting that different people actually hold incompatible views, and incompatible views have the property of existence. I understood you to instead by making a normative claim about how the movement should simultaneously take contradictory understandings of sexual identity, one in which it is innate, and other in which it is not. You seem to be suggesting that both views can and should be put forward simultaneously, as both different ways to “skin the cat.” The argument against this, of course, is that both sides think that the other is wrong and even detrimental. Certainly both sides will continue to have the property of existence, but that shouldn’t stop each from trying to persuade that the other is misguided. If you were just saying that opposite sides of the argument exist, it wouldn’t be that interesting, but instead you were saying that Alan shouldn’t try to persuade those that he thinks are wrong because they should “exist all at once.” Again, I ask, how exactly should this coexistence occur?
As for dictionaries, “in tension” doesn’t appear in any dictionaries I’ve seen for “incompatible.” (And last time, you had to go to a thesaurus to make your case, not a dictionary. Look up the difference) Even so, your own definition denies that incompatible ideas can “exist together,” despite your contradictory insistence that “they can coexist.” Uh.
“I have a PhD.”
Whoopdeedoo.
“One reality I prioritize and one difference I want people to recognize is that female bodies, especially brown and young female bodies, are trafficked more often than male bodies of any sort.”
While this is certainly an important issue, it has absolutely nothing to do with the issue of constructivism vs. essentialism. This sort of analysis certainly isn’t precluded by the kind of approach to thinking about sexual difference or sexuality that is being put forth here.
“I say the body because that is a way of discussing physicality”
Okay, but such a phrase is loaded by presuming already a singular, normative “body.” It presumes the facticity of “the body” rather than its situatedness. Such an approach begins from the grounded naturalness of the body, rather than questioning and investigating that presupposition. It takes “physicality,” or “hormones,” or “orientation,” as provided rather than produced.
Alan:
and I refer to male and female bodies because we don’t generally discuss “a collection of parts that include a head and arms and a set of genitals and a pancreas and some viscera and bones and shit and other stuff too.”
TT:
The source of different treatment for different bodies is often the differences between them. That’s what I think. That does not mean that I think that the body itself produces all the differences that society claims exists between men and women, or between other categories. I don’t think that.
I recognize that many people do. People do ultra-sounds and think they know the sex of their baby; in that way, the “reality” of “sex” is evident, and we need to deal with what that means when fetuses without penises are aborted more frequently than fetuses with them. On an experiential level, the “reality” of the body is, like everything else, constructed and imbued with meaning both by the person who has/is “the body” and the culture s/he/it (or s/h/it) inhabits.
I don’t see “the movement” as monolithic, and I don’t think all elements of it have to move in complete accord. In fact, I think its chances of succeeding are greater if different people are doing different things.
So what? I never said I was an essentialist. In fact, I wrote, “I dont think we actually have much clue what human traits are essentially feminine or masculine.”
Not to me. To me, because it sounds sort of weird to talk about “the body” rather than “bodies,” it makes the concept more abstract and less natural.
So, Holly, it seems that we are back to trying to decipher just what exactly you disagree with, since when you are pressed you concede the points that have been made and just suggest that the critique doesn’t apply to you. Though I am not convinced that we are on the same page as you say (especially given your continued assertion that one cannot deploy the category “gay” or “man” or “woman” if one subscribes constructivist notions of sexual difference and sexuality; or your understanding that an essentialist view of the body is not the same thing as an essentialist view of gender), let’s assume that we are in agreement as you say on all of these issues. What exactly is your disagreement? What is the alternative view for how people should speak about sexuality as part of a political strategy?
What makes you think I am “conceding” points that I express readily myself in other conversations? And precisely where in this specific thread were the points I “concede” above made?
Alan acknowledges that he hopes to discard the term “gay” eventually, so I don’t see what’s so weird about pointing out that it’s problematic as a category in terms of his overall agenda. Aside from that, “gay” is a phallogocentric term. Just as the word “man” is supposed to mean both “human being regardless of sex” and “male but not female person,” “gay is supposed to mean both “homosexual regardless of sex” and “male but not female homosexual,” which is why it’s the G opposed to the Lin LGBT. One can of course deploy it, but it replicates many of the gender biases and erasure of women of all other sexist language.
Where do I say you can’t deploy the terms “man” or “woman”?
My disagreement is that like Chanson,
That at least appears to be the source of my disagreement with you, even down to the fact I say that it doesn’t really matter that you insist that positions like that one are incompatible with Alan’s.
You, not me, were the one looking for disagreements between us. You tried very hard to find other sources of it, but as you’ve acknowledged,it appears that by and large you failed.
There were other disagreements with Alan, which occurred in the “Mormon Times says religion can be bad, but not theirs” thread. He backed off on those, but that is what chanson was referring to when she said, “Why poison the well by presuming to lecture me and Holly about it, as though youre the expert and were just neophytes on the subject?”
I cannot give you “the” alternative view. Again, I think you are posing a false and unnecessary either/or – either Alan’s way or ….?
And as if speaking is the only thing we do with regards to sex.
Before we being to discuss the implications, I would like to be perfectly clear on the basics of what Alan is arguing.
Alan — You did not answer the question I posed @91: What is it you object to about my characterization of the interplay between biology, culture, and human experience?
I’m looking at your comment #64. You quote my post, OK. You say “Chanson, this is not how it works,” OK. You make some remarks about the “homo/hetero binary” which have nothing to do with my comment #61. And you follow-up with the example of ancient Greece — which is an illustration of my point about how cultural expectations frame human experience [see the top of Andrew’s comment @73 for further clarification]. Frankly, after reading your comment @64, I have no idea what you think I said.
Now, I’d like to ask you to stand down the flame thrower a minute and read my actual comments. Since they may have gotten lost in the shuffle, I’ll ask you to start with #47, then #61, then #91. Please answer the question I asked, before making mysterious accusations of supposed “gaffes” I made….
Chanson, I disagree with pretty much everything you say @ 47.
You begin by stating that every complex human behavior is a combination of both nature and nurture. I assume you’re including sexual orientation in this. You end by saying that sexual orientation is generally “not a choice.” So I read this to mean that you are generally foreclosing nurture. Or…you saying that we have no choice over nurture, since we are bound to “culture.” In any event, you might as well say that sexual orientation is basically “nature.”
The reason I said that it doesn’t work this way is because the concept of sexual orientation began in the late 1800s. So, it’s not really possible for something that didn’t exist prior to a certain time to be “nature” or “nurture” or any combination of both prior to that time. But this doesn’t stop you from your next premise, which is really problematic.
You point to “serial heterosexual monogamy leaning slightly towards polygyny” as the “dominant parenting/mating pattern” of human societies throughout time. I assume you are referring to this as a declaration of “nature” and not “nurture” — or as “nurture” as a result of our “natures,” or whatever. The way I read what you’re saying is that you are looking at the topic “cross-culturally” in order to strip away “nurture” to get at the “nature” of the beast.
But where does homosexuality fit into this suggestion of “serial heterosexual monogamy as the dominant paradigm throughout time?” It doesn’t. It just appears at the end of your comment where you say “in this context, it’s not clear what it would even mean to claim that homosexual orientation is a choice.” Well, of course it’s not clear if you begin with a paradigm in which “heterosexuality” has been the “dominant parenting/mating pattern” across the centuries! The reason I brought up the homo/hetero binary in my response to your comment is because without the presence of homosexuality, you can’t have heterosexuality as a dominant paradigm. It’s just not philosophically possible. So, you might rephrase your paradigm to “serial heterosexual monogamy leaning slightly towards polygyny + some homosexuality going on in there somewhere, too.” Otherwise, your paradigm is, frankly, heterosexist.
The truth of the matter is, though, you can’t take the homo/hetero binary and apply ahistorically as you have. For one, the binary asserts things about desire that don’t span the centuries.
Here’s some history to chew on: think about how there is gay stuff that goes on in prisons and other same-sex exclusive spaces, practiced by those who did not, prior to entering those spaces, have a “homosexual orientation.” One thing that sexual historians have noted about homosexuality in the early 20th century is that industrial capitalism created spaces for people to cohabitate in ways that an agrarian society did not. Agrarianism requires the production of children for a livelihood. And what do we have over the course of human centuries? Agrarianism. As I’ve discussed @74, people in the 1800s were not heterosexual or homosexual because most people’s ideas about sex (as underpinned by their theology) were related to the production of children, and not desire. People’s sexualities were related to the economy. If anything, desire (lending to terrible things like “spilling your seed”) was considered part of human evil. That’s why there are Catholic nuns and priests; Jesus was assumed to be asexual. People didn’t think of sexual pleasure as essential to a marriage until the 1920s or so. So, in this context, how can a “sexual orientation” even exist, much less be a combination of “nature” or “nurture?” In fact, some historians go so far as to ask when sexuality got separated conceptually from race!
In the 21st century, we have reproductive technologies so that it really doesn’t matter the gender of your partner if indeed a person even wants children — which in fully industrialized societies, the population is going down, isn’t it? In this context, is there any reason to believe that there won’t be more gay people, more people who “choose” to fall in love with the same gender? I certainly feel that I choose my orientation in today’s context, a lot more than you or I could have chosen our “orientations” in the 1800s.
Now, I haven’t even brought the “science of orientation” into this yet, but maybe I don’t have to and my point has already been made. The point being that desire, which is constructed in scientific discourse in terms of “nature” (or an “unchosen sexual orientation”) actually has a great deal of “nurture” built into it, in which our choices are a lot more open than we think. Not to mention, the concept of “sexual orientation” brushes over transgenderism. Ever seen those talk shows where a man is surprised to find out that he’s been dating another man?
Currently, in the Prop 8 battle, the supporters of the proposition put forth a somewhat secular argument that gay marriage shouldn’t be supported by the government because of reproduction and the interest of population growth or maintenance. The argument has historical merit, but if gay marriage happens in America, it’s going to be because of freedom of choice and not because people have unchosen sexual orientations.
Prior to the 1920s or the late 1800s or whenever date is relevant, did people even feel sexual attractions to one another?
…Or is this just something we invented one day?
Alan — Thanks for answering the question I asked — now we’re getting somewhere! My short response is the following:
Orientation and behavior are two very different things.
I assume you agree with this statement (unless you’re arguing that orientation doesn’t exist or that it is wholly artificial — which would naturally lead to the question of what created it).
When I say that serial heterosexual monogamy leaning slightly towards polygyny is the dominant parenting/mating pattern, I mean that that is the type of arrangement that the overwhelming majority of human adults have entered into in the overwhelming majority of known human societies. More to the point (for this discussion), it’s the pattern that the overwhelming majority of people have been raised to expect. Still is, BTW.
This cultural expectation affects peoples’ behavior. The obvious example here is the huge number of gay Mormons in mixed-orientation-marriages who are just coming out now (to themselves and their spouses) after decades of marriage. There is no particular reason to believe that fewer marriages (proportionally) were MOMs in the past. The obvious explanation is that the modern awareness of homosexuality is the catalyst that has sparked a whole lot epiphanies of the sort “Hey, that’s me! I thought I was the only one!”
If you read their stories, you see it over and over. Many people from my generation and earlier ago couldn’t conceive of growing up to be a happy, out, gay adult in a committed same-sex relationship. They didn’t have the cultural framework to understand that as an option. So they chose their behavior among the options they were aware of. A typical person in the equivalent situation another generation or two earlier would simply never have come out, and instead would have remained married until death.
On to sexuality in same-sex societies: As others on this thread have explained, this phenomenon has very little to do with orientation. It has a lot to do with opportunity (or, more specifically, lack of opportunity to be with a person of their choosing). Part of it is also youthful experimentation (which, I suspect, is why Freud thought that adult homosexuality was “arrested development”).
There is, however, a connection with orientation: some of these same-sex societies are self-selecting. Consider, for example, the Catholic clergy (especially during the Middle Ages). I’m sorry to use this example (for obvious reasons), but if you want to talk about history, it’s one example where we have centuries of documented, historical evidence — not only of same-sex sexual activity — but of long-term same-sex romantic relationships. Despite the dominant paradigm I mentioned, some portion of the population chose a different path, and — even if people didn’t usually have the opportunity to choose to be in a monastery or convent — underlying orientation probably influenced many peoples’ inclination to aspire to the monastery/convent life.
Now, contraception: It is only very recently that we’ve had a widespread cultural distinction between heterosexual sex and reproduction (with the resulting dynastic/inheritance implications). This has dramatically changed the dynamics of heterosexual romantic relationships. One result is that the average person expects to have multiple romantic-sexual relationships before settling down to raise a family. And one result of that is that our culture has a dramatically increased expectation that you will love (and be in love with) your spouse.
In centuries past, naturally, many people loved their spouses. However, it was generally considered (at best) a “nice to have” in a marriage. Today, it’s widely considered a necessary component of a successful marriage. Today, people routinely divorce for no other reason than “I wasn’t in love with him/her.” That would have been inconceivable in our own culture in centuries past.
Now, I don’t want to oversimplify and pretend that this is the only reason. As I said, human culture evolves through a complex interplay of different factors. But the modern expectation “I should marry who I love and love who I marry” is a major factor to explain why gay marriage is an issue now — even though it wasn’t in the past. Marriage changed. Our culture changed. Our underlying biology did not.
Don’t know if you ever got around to reading “Marriage: A History” by Stephanie Coontz, Chanson, but this is a nice summation of a point she makes. If you did, you summarized it well; if not, you really should check it out.
I haven’t read it (yet), but I’ve heard lots of good things about it.
Actually they did, and in some interesting ways. For instance, failing to please a wife sexually was grounds for divorce in the middle ages.
this is discussed in both Terry Jones’s documentary series “Medieval Lives” (which is really fun) and in Coontz’s book. It’s also mentioned here. http://rosaliegilbert.com/divorces.html
Holly,
(136): “What makes you think I am conceding points that I express readily myself in other conversations? And precisely where in this specific thread were the points I concede above made?”
You’ve argued heavily early in this thread that the body is determinative of human subjectivity, but you seem to have moved away from that position. Here is how I see the conversation developing:
With respect to desire, you put it at same the level of determinism as hunger: 54: “it does not follow that desire would be one of those choices,any more than hunger is a choice.” In defense of chanson’s argument for taking biology seriously, you go further than she in saying it “is philosophically satisfying, because it acknowledges something accurate about desire, period.”
58: You object to Alan’s argument that “biologism has no place in the current conversation” and that “acknowledging that helps to provide an accurate view of reality.”
You’ve seemed pretty consistent in defending a biological basis for sexual orientation.
Sometimes you’ve seemed to make a more modest claim, as in 67, that “I respect peoples right to claim that they were born gay,” though as I’ve said it is not clear who are are arguing against here, because no one has suggested that such a right not be respected. The right is not in question, only the view of the determined subject that is at stake in such a declaration, as well the political efficacy of such an approach.
When it comes to setting out how sexuality should be defined, you object to Alan’s argument for fluidity: “You keep arguing for fluidity, but theres little in how you would let individuals define their own sexuality, because you insist it has to be undefined.”
All of this leads to the crux of the issue, which is your belief that biological and anti-biological approaches could and should both have a place in how sexuality is understood. Though you later take a minimalist approach that all you meant was that they both happen to exist, this is not the sense of your question”
83: “And why cant both approaches [fluidity and determinism]as well as other approaches we have yet to discoverexist all at once?”
You elaborate in 86: “it does not necessarily follow that the concept has outlived its usefulness and must be discarded NOW, as you advocate, or scrapped entirely at any point. At this time in the current debate, there are still people working toward the same goal youre working toward who find it both useful and necessary.”
Then, after Alan’s misreading of chanson, you appeal to your authority and object being lectured to in 92. You berate him again on this in 99, and 103, suggesting that “Why keep defending discourse that clearly didnt work,” when your demonstration of how his approach doesn’t work has barely risen above a declaration, far from any demonstrated case. And to top it all off, you accuse Alan of sexism because he won’t admit defeat in 103!
All of this adds up to a pretty consistent picture of your defense of biological determinism as a viable approach for thinking about sexual taxonomies. You suggest that it does not need to be discarded, that it is still useful and necessary. This is the claim, along with your idea that two opposing approaches should both be used, is what I wanted to investigate in 101-102, where I note that the inconsistency between the two positions is precisely what Halperin attributes the break between academics and activists to. If you have a solution to this problem, I am interested in hearing it, but so far you have only asserted or asked rhetorically why two contradictory positions can’t both be advanced.
Your response to this issue was to assert that “incompatible” things can coexist, listing examples of things that you believe to be incompatible, but never explaining how you resolve the real tensions between academic rejections of biological determinism and activists’ reliance on them (104, 106, 123).
When pressed on why you think biological essentialism (which has been the whole issue so far), is a critical part of gender and gay politics, you back away from the earlier defense of such ideas, CONCEDING that you do not actually think (110) “biological difference constitute a sound basis for most stereotypes about either women or men, or for the oppression of women. I dont think we actually have much clue what human traits are essentially feminine or masculine.” So, why exactly have you been defending it as a legitimate method in gay politics, when you reject it in feminist politics? You even go so far as to say “the power of feminism is that it breaks down essentialism,” which seems to be exactly the position that Alan and I have been arguing for with respect to gay politics, and are curious as to why you are arguing against an anti-essentialist view.
Then, in 111, you suggest that anyone who doesn’t accept biological determinism should not use the term “gay” to self describe.
Then, the argument turns more closely to the specific kind of biological essentialism you are advocating for, which is rooted in the body, despite your claims as a feminist to have rejected them (see Alan’s 112). You have retreated from essentialism when it comes to feminism, but have instead moved a new kind of essentialism and determinism to “the body.” This, among other reasons, is the argument against a reason to accept a happy “coexistence” of biological and anti-biological essentialism.
Again, in spite of your claim to reject “essentialism,” you continue to assert a biological essentialism with respect to male and female bodies: “acknowledging the reality of the body, including differences between the male and female body” (119), and “Sexual difference is rooted in the body; gender is a social construct rooted in culture” (122). I’m guessing that you are still not seeing the incoherence of your position, as it has thus far developed:
1) biological essentialism and determinism remain a necessary and useful part of gay politics
2) Feminism is anti-essentialist
3) Biological differences form the basis of male and female difference, (which bizarrely you don’t see as in conflict with transpolitics (122).) Here, you retreat to the sex/gender distinction, which is another version of biological essentialism, and in the specific way in which you advocate it is actually opposed to trans politics.
Besides the contradictory approaches between 1 and 2, the problem is that you’ve smuggled essentialism back in to the equation by naturalizing the differences between male and female. Now, perhaps this is not a problem after all for your argument, even if it undermines your supposedly anti-essentialism feminism, given your defense of essentialism with respect to gay politics. Yet, you do not take a consistent position on this either.
Later, your position shifts from being a defense of biological essentialism and determinism to a more vague notion that the “reality of the body be recognized.” (124) But how this relates to your previous defense of biological essentialism and determinism is not clear.
Because of this confusion and seeming lack of precision, I ask point blank (125): “Are you suggesting that sex and sexuality are fixed (even biological?) and cannot be changed, and that things like masculinity and femininity are culturally variable? Is this the basis of your feminist, gay, and trans theory, and the reason that you are rejecting Alans constructivist approach?”
In response, you deliver your most clear argument on biological essentialism. Yet, you seem to take conflicting views. In one view, you are rooting all of bodily identity in the apparent naturalness of the body (130): “But once people are born, they have a biology to contend with, make sense of, exploit, chafe against, enjoy, whatever. Im interested in how people do that. For most people, their sexual identity is a big part of that.” But next, you seem to suggest more of a constructivist approach: “reality is something we simultaneously construct and struggle to understand. Elements of it in relationship to the body include illness, pain, the ways that cultural norms teach us to stand, what bodies do what sort of work, etc.”
But, to add to even more confusion, in the very next comment, you CONCEDE Alan’s constructivist approach to bodies that “sex” is always already “gender” because it is already an interpretation of bodies, not an objective classification, and admit that, “my rhetoric contradicts my stated goals and positions,” but think that Alan’s does too. So, again, whether you are accepting a constructivist approach, essentialist/determinist approach, which in 58 you had described as “an accurate view of reality,” or some strange hybrid is constantly shifting, let alone how you see them “coexisting” in any meaningful way.
Ultimately, I admit to some vague sense that you seen an underlying biology, that includes sex, illness, and perhaps even sexual orientation, etc, that culture then overlays some other meaning. This seems to be what you mean in (134): “That does not mean that I think that the body itself produces all the differences that society claims exists between men and women, or between other categories. I dont think that.” Yet, you then back away from this further, again conceding a fully constructivist approach when you say, “On an experiential level, the reality of the body is, like everything else, constructed and imbued with meaning both by the person who has/is the body and the culture s/he/it (or s/h/it) inhabits.”
So, you can perhaps understand where the confusion comes in trying to figure out what you are arguing, as you move initially from a defense of biological essentialism/determinism, to ultimately adopting a fully constructivist approach. Hence my confusion in 135. Perhaps your own schizophrenic adoption of competing views explains why you think purely constructivist approaches should be adopted alongside the positions it opposes, such as biological essentialism and determinism. As you say, your defense of this assertion at this point boils down to: “both are ideas, and both exist.”
At last, when we finally get to the point seeking some real clarity on what exactly you disagree with about the constructivist approach, and why you think it is so necessary that it not be adopted to the exclusion of the positions that it contradicts, you appeal to chanson’s hybrid cultural constructivist-scientific position (136): “Humans are shaped by their physiology, but their culture, and by their particular experiences within that culture.”
But it is not clear how this constitutes your disagreement with me, since I actually don’t have a problem with this statement by chanson (in fact, I agree explicitly in 63), if she takes physiology to refer to simply the way that the bodily parts function, and that culture supplies the rest. This is the position that I’ve been arguing for, and have been confused at the way you’ve vacillated from initially rejecting this as the sole and best understanding of how sexual subjects are constituted, to embracing it.
So, this is a long way of saying that often I find that we agree, especially the more you back away from essentialist and determinist positions and move toward constructivist positions. I am still not sure how you see them functioning together, or why you see them as both “necessary,” especially when you happen to adopt the opposite view. In that sense, I think that “Alan’s way” (it certainly is not unique to him) offers a pretty compelling alternative, and the more you sketch out your own position, the closer it begins to look to his. If in the end, it seems we agree entirely, that will be nice.
One final point:
I said before that I am not entirely willing to go all the way with Alan on the way he is speaking about “choice,” but we can leave that for another time. I’ve mentioned before that I’m most influenced by Butler, and on this point _Bodies that Matter_ best explains how I account for bodily materiality. As part of this, “constructivist” is a term that she rejects there, though I’ve used it here as a shorthand for that position. I’m not sure we are sufficiently deep into the issues for it to matter too much however, since what is at stake for her is a rejection of the alternative we’ve set up here, the essentialist/determinist position.
Okay, let me be more clear. This statement was a comparison of the 1800s to the 1900s in American society particularly. In terms of “desire” existing prior to the 1800s in other places, well of course it did. We have, for example, poems from Muslim men in ancient India writing about their undying love toward another man they met in the marketplace or whatever. There’s the Kama Sutra. And so on.
But you guys are still missing the point, even though chanson, said it herself: orientation and behavior are two different things. You readily discard the notion that people in same-sex spaces have sex because they want to; instead you say it’s: “lack of opportunity to be with a person of their choosing” and/or “youthful experimentation.” This remains a heterosexist outlook, because you are looking for an orientation before you are looking for the behavior as it manifests. Have you ever looked at studies of the “orientations” of ex-prisoners? Everything I have read indicates that people “return to heterosexuality” because of reasons like “the resumption of family and marital ties,” not: “omigod, I want to have sex with the opposite gender now!” In other words, the fact that inmates are released into a heteronormative social structure obscures evidence of how situational homosexuality has an effect on their future sexual choices. But if you look historically at societies that have more than just “situational homosexuality,” but rather “cultural homosexuality” (e.g., ancient Greek aristocracy), it’s clear that orientation is not a useful construct to describe “potential behaviors if only things were different.”
As I’m sure you’re aware, when people were first studying the epidemiology of HIV, and discovered black men on the “down low,” these men violated the assumption that sexual orientation is defined by sexual behavior. These men were assumed to be “in the closet.” But if you break this down into its situational aspects — black Christian culture that says no to homosexuality, the requirement to produce children, and so on, you will see that “the closet” is produced by the cultural aspects of the society and has nothing to do with “orientations.”
Let’s take the examples you give. Mixed-orientation marriages.
Have you read Quinn’s book about same-sex relationships in 19th century Mormonism? You have a situation where people didn’t think sex was for anything but reproduction. Desire to be close to someone of the same sex happened all the time, whereas men and women were kept ostracized unless they were married. So, what you have going on here are a bunch of “culturally oriented behaviors.” There is no semblance of “orientation,” as it is described today.
Medieval same-sex cloisters. You say “underlying orientation probably influenced many peoples inclination to aspire to the monastery/convent life.” How about instead: “monastery/convent life oriented some people toward the same gender.” The latter statement doesn’t require you to take a social construct of today and apply it anachronistically. Queer historiography does not work that way.
Now, one thing I will agree with you on is that the modern expectation of I should marry who I love and love who I marry is indeed why gay marriage is an issue now.
So, why did the Muslim man have undying love toward another man he met in the marketplace?
Why do some people have undying love toward people of the same sex, other people have undying love to people of the opposite sex, other people have undying love to people of both sexes, other people have undying love to no one, etc.,?
Are you saying it’s just because of culture?
You keep bringing up that orientation and behavior are two different things (as we have done too, which is why you note that chanson mentioned it), but then you bring instances of *behavioral* changes as if that decides everything. When you mention “situational homosexuality” and point to *behavioral* changes, I wonder whether you even recognize anything about the distinction that we have brought up, even though you keep trying to bring it up for your points.
Why is it heterosexist to look for an orientation before you look for behavior as it manifests, when we understand that orientation and behavior are two different things? Because we understand that the two are two different things, we can’t look at behavior as it manifests and make assumptions about orientation, or about who has undying love for whom.
I’m really trying to understand what you are saying here, but it just feels like the world you are describing is utterly foreign and I can’t translate.
Oh, please. I would hope that you could see that I am attempting to keep this discussion as concise as possible while repeatedly explaining that the storyline has additional nuances.
Alan, I am not your enemy. You want to challenge the common wisdom, and I respect that. I am not trying to attack or defeat you — I am trying to understand your position and have a reasonable exchange of ideas with you. I will continue this discussion with you when you demonstrate to me that you are interested in doing the same.
TT @144:
I will admit that one problem was that I followed Alan’s lead and used biology and biologism as if they are interchangeable, when they are not. You introduced the term to the conversation, @14, writing “I think that the biologism of contemporary gay activist rhetoric is incredibly problematic for trans activists.” @18 you wrote, “Ive seen you try to make the critique of biologism here, and Ive appreciated it, but have been too timid to back you up.”
No one here believes that human life should be interpreted from a strictly biological point of view, so I assumed that biologism meant consideration of biology’s role in human development, not a strict reliance on it. I should not have done that; I should not have trusted or mimicked your and Alan’s use of key terms. I should have googled both biologism and biology and maintained a strict distinction between the two. It would have avoided problems. Perhaps that is the grounds by which you attributed to me views I do not actually hold and feel that I have since “conceded” points you think I initially disagreed with.
As I said, you have been the one intent on pursuing this disagreement. You asked me to tell you what the basis of our disagreement was. I tried, even though I don’t particularly care. If it turns out that we don’t actually disagree, well, I guess you’ll have to figure out the basis of the disagreement on your own, or else agree to agree.
I decided this morning that I don’t actually accept the distinction Alan made @129 about body parts, since people don’t generally experience themselves as parts. I can see its rhetorical usefulness, but I don’t think it’s what life feels like for most people.
Alan @145:
then you’ll understand why it does little to support any generalized view of human sexuality.
Part of heterosexism is when you begin a premise about humanity by privileging the heterosexual version of events (which you’ve been doing repeatedly now), and degrading non-heterosexual instances as “nuance.” You seem to be forgetting that at all times non-heterosexuality is a norm alongside heterosexuality. I’m sorry if you’re unfamiliar with the full meaning of heterosexism, so I am informing you.
Alan,
When you say “heterosexual” and “non-heterosexual,” to what do you refer? Feelings (to whom one feels ‘undying love’) or actions (e.g., situational or cultural)?
It seems to me that one cause of heterosexism — even ignorant as I am — is the fact that a person who does not have non-heterosexual *feelings* is biased to marginalize the very concept of those who do. Is that off the mark?
Supposing I’m still on track, it seems to me further that what is required are feelings. Feelings that appear to the individual experiencing them to be relatively unchosen — so that the very possibility of alternative feelings seems impossible at worst or “nuance” at best (which isn’t good enough, since, as you point out, it denies the norm status.)
Finally, it appears to me that to assert that at all times non-heterosexuality is a norm alongside heterosexuality, there has to be some pervading *thing* to represent non-heterosexuality.
My question is: should this be non-heterosexual behaviors or non-heterosexual feelings and attractions? It seems like if some people have some — dare I say biological — non-heterosexual feeling or attraction, then that does far more to establish “norm” status, despite actions and behaviors taken, than does pointing out shifting, transient behavioral patterns.
Fortunately, this is how the world seems to look to me. And yet, you don’t seem to agree.
So, where am I going wrong?!?
A “thing?” What about the fact that you can’t have heterosexuality without homosexuality? They are philosophically dependent on each other. I have stated this already.
A lot of what is happening here is a conflation of population regeneration throughout the ages (or a survival of the species) with “heterosexuality,” and a reduction of homosexuality to “feelings and actions.” You might not think this is a “reduction,” because to be “fair,” heterosexual people have turned the idea of “feelings and actions” toward themselves as well, to complete the sexological classification system. But you have to remember that the homo/hetero binary was created for the sole purpose of explaining the “illness” of homosexuality and to normalize heterosexuality. When people tell the story of history (such as chanson does above), they continue along this line of thinking: normalized heterosexuality. You will be hard-pressed to find studies to locate the “heterosexual gene” because of the assumption that heterosexuality is natural for population regeneration. When people look at history, they see “male” and “female” pairings, and associate this with today’s “heterosexuality.” Meanwhile, they strip away the patriarchy that maintained this system throughout the ages.
It’s very difficult to do lesbian history not because of the historical subjugation of women’s bodies to include those who might “ordinarily” have been “lesbian” — but because of the fact that because ALL women’s bodies were subjugated, so there was no lesbianism or straight women to speak of. Sure you’ll find instances here and there of female same-sex relationships and of women speaking frankly about their desires for men. But my point is, if you take away population regeneration for the purposes of labor or whatever, there is an influence on the sexuality of a society. It is hard to see this change because it often spans centuries. In ancient Greece, homosexuality among the male aristocrats was much higher than it was today, not because there were no women present (AKA situational homosexuality), but because gender was viewed differently in Greek society. What I would really like from you is an explanation of how if there is such a thing as biological “orientation” that predetermines who people are attracted to (in which heterosexuality is a norm and homosexuality is not), how you can have a culture for whom this mysteriously does not apply?
I don’t think we’ll ever see a society where we both recognize a variety of sexual desires and refrain from categorizing ourselves. Just think of the confusion on personal ads and dating sites. 😉
But to move away from philosophy into real life, you can’t *just* have a philosophical dependence. This isn’t like ideal forms. Rather, what’s important is that there are people who actually *are* attracted to the same sex, not that theoretically, the *idea* of people attracted to the opposite sex necessitates the *idea* of people attracted to the same sex.
Why is it that heterosexual people have turned the idea of “feelings and actions” toward themselves to be “fair,” rather than to more accurately reflect reality? Do heterosexuals not have feelings and actions?
So, hold on. When people assert that the closet has existed in the past, and that there have been mixed orientation marriages (which means that they see “male” and “female” pairings and do *not* associate this with today’s heterosexuality necessarily), you disapprove. But when they don’t, you disapprove.
Are you trying to say that in the past, women simply did not experience sexual attractions to men or women?
When you say “homosexuality among the male aristocrats,” are you saying “homosexual behavior” or “homosexual attractions”? And how are you telling the difference. How do you tell the difference between a philosophical zombie (or even a heterosexual) who engages in “homosexual behavior” and a person who experiences the homosexual qualia — the internal feelings and attractions, so to speak?
This distinction is important because:
I don’t see from these examples how this “mysteriously does not apply.” It is very easy for me to conceptualize people engaging in sexual relationships with people to whom they are not sexually attracted — ESPECIALLY in cultural conditions where relationships do not prioritize sexual attraction to begin with.
But it’s not so easy to conceptualize at all that the actual attractions or feelings have changed over time and culture.
Jonathan, but you’re still assuming that there is no orientation change or flexibility possible!!!!
Why would we need to categorize ourselves if the entire pool of humanity were appealing and attractive to us?
It doesn’t seem realistic to me or you, but apparently, our current foundation just won’t work and is horribly “heterosexist.” Or whatever.
Andrew, I’m not the one using a philosophical Platonic ideal and badly associating it with reality. Did you miss the whole transgender part of this conversation? What we think about as sex is actually gendered body parts — body parts that are gendered and given meaning by culture. This explains how a heterosexual man can unwittingly date and be attracted to another person with a penis without knowing that person has a penis.
So when I say that there was no “lesbianism or straight women,” I am not saying there was no desire, I’m saying that the binary gender system that you’re clinging to does not manifest the same way across time.
I didn’t pay all that much attention to the discussion (except through my email notifications), but I didn’t see much problem, at all, with the transgender part of the conversation. It hasn’t seemed like it has much of a problem with sexuality.
OK…
so, hmm…
(lightbulb dimly lights)
Would race be a good analogy? We view race kinda in terms of “racial body parts”, but the body parts (and other aspects of race) are “racialized” by culture. Different culture = different idea of race. We never look the appearance of blue eyes or blond hair or dark skin or a broad nose, but the association of them in racial packages changes depending on the culture we have. If we aren’t in a specific culture (say, we don’t come from Brazil), then even though we can see the physical traits that are wrapped up as a particular “race,” they won’t make sense to us.
Is that on track?
Yes, gender works similarly, notwithstanding the function of reproduction.
I had never thought about it like that.
ugh. Now I’m going to have to go through this entire thread all over again with this is mind…
Well Holly @ 148, I’d say that actually ended quite well. It is nice to have the confusion worked out. I for one appreciate it. To the extent that you saw me “pursuing this disagreement,” it was mostly in reaction to your accusation that Alan’s argument had utterly failed, and that he should apologize to you. I didn’t see it that way at all, and wanted to pick up the argument that Alan and I had been advancing from early on. In any case, it seems all cleared up now and so we’re cool.
But that statement was not referring to something from this thread.
Given that I acknowledged in my last comment a move that could have saved time had I not made it, and given that there are repeated references in this thread to another thread, and given that nothing in this thread corresponds fully to the situation Chanson, Alan and I were discussing in our back-and-forth, I have to ask: why didn’t you ask me to explain that comment instead of asking me to explain my view of gender, essentialism and embodiment?
Anyway. As I wrote in @136 here, that was about an exchange that happened on the thread “Mormon Times say religion can be bad but not theirs.” Starting @26, I said “The culture [of Mormonism] is thoroughly misogynist.” Alan said, “Blanket statements like this seem unhelpful,” because they upset his mom. He later acknowledged that he himself would, in certain circumstances, say that the culture is thoroughly misogynist. This and subsequent comments are what chanson was referring to when she made the comment in this thread about “why poison the well by lecturing us as though we’re neophyptes” on the topic of feminism etc.
As I think about it, I can’t help noticing that Alan wants to toss out a discourse about queerness that many are still using with some success, NOW, because he thinks it’s the best way to make change happen for the LGBT community. He knows this will upset people but doesn’t care. It’s what has to happen. We must be bold. We must plunge ahead.
But when it comes to feminism…. Well, we still need to be conservative and cautious. We can’t move too quickly, and upset people. Can’t use terms or ways of speaking that others will find jarring.
For me, that’s really what these two threads, which I saw as overlapping (there were several references in this thread to that thread, and vice versa), came to be about. The most important point I made here, the one that summed up what I really wanted to get at in this thread, was @86:
I don’t claim to know the etiology of human sexuality. I’m open to what others find out. I truly do believe that if orientation doesn’t work as a way of framing desire, we’ll stop using it, and I won’t mourn it, any more than I mourn the categorization and treatment of temperament and illness according to four humors.
But if you told people who were managing their health well enough under that system that they had to abandon that idea NOW because it A) didn’t work and B) wasn’t “philosophically satisfying,” they might well have disagreed.
To suggest another way of getting people to move on from a reliance on unchosen orientations: a few years ago I published a piece on mixed orientation marriages between gay men and straight women, provocative enough that it’s taught in law schools and gender studies programs across the country. Although I don’t think this statement isn’t applicable to the situation, I didn’t say that people had to stop entering MOMs because they A) don’t work and B) aren’t “philosophically satisfying” from many perspectives except rigidly patriarchal ones like Mormon theology; instead, I said that people can do whatever they want, but given how often and how badly MOMs fail, it did seem like everyone might be happier in the long run if straight women married straight men, and gay men married each other. I know there were gay men who found it persuasive.
it’s about multiple audiences.
To bring it back to Alan’s argument: I was thinking about how the issue he wants to advance plays right now to multiple audiences, and how he could appeal to those audiences.
On the other thread, @43, Alan wrote to me:
More than one feminism…. as if anyone involved in Mormon feminism could miss that fact, as if those of us active in Mo-fem stuff don’t moderate what we say according to which of those audiences we’re addressing. Chanson called his full comment “infuriatingly reductionist and polarizing.” In response he wrote,
there’s no single feminism, he tells us approvingly, but gay activism and discourse has to be unified, he argues. In fact, he writes @57 here:
but, he suggested on the other thread, if we want to see movement in conservative cultures like Mormonism with regards to feminism, we can’t have unity, and we shouldn’t make “unhelpful” blanket statements or call LDS culture misoygnist – even on MSP – because such statements upset his mom.
That’s the argument I thought failed utterly. Having analyzed it here and compared it to his argument in this thread, I think it’s even more of a failure.
Alan said @107 here:
OK, I seemed consistently antagonistic. Chanson, however, attempted bridge work after reacting in anger to his “lecture.” Her bridge work, however, didn’t warrant any acknowledgment from Alan. I rather thought it should have. And given that he has underscored the heterosexism here, I hope he will acknowledge his own sexism. Because when you consider it all – the way he talks to women, the way he wants women to behave (he can call LDS culture “thoroughly misogynist,” but we really shouldn’t), the way he seems to think we don’t know our own history, the concern he has that feminism not make people uncomfortable – that’s really what it looks like.
Huh.
Thanks for giving me a reason to think through and write this, TT.
Holly, you have been calling for a unified feminist politics, but saying that there cannot be unified queer politics because people “might well have disagreed” with what I was saying. Throughout this thread, I have been trying to demonstrate that the essentialism/biologisim currently used to “unify” queer politics has run its course. It has run its course because (1) it is not philosophically sustainable, and (2) there are many, many queers who hate this politics, have always hated it, and have never felt represented by it. Perhaps if their voices were on this thread, rather than just mine and TT’s, you would have changed your tune long ago, rather than arguing tooth and nail with me and TT. In terms of feminism, it is also the case that essentialism/biologism is (1) not philosophically sustainable, and (2) hated by a lot of women.
The difference between your arguments and mine is that I don’t find essentialism to be viable for either feminist or queer politics. You were seemingly okay with using it to unify both. The fact that on this particular thread that I’ve been writing about a unified queer politics under a new banner of “choice,” and that I talked about on the Mormon Times” thread of a divided feminist politics, does not make me “sexist” — but is circumstantial to this particular conversation.
As a counter-example, on the Patheos site after Kathryn Soper’s reply to a bunch of Mormon feminists, I posted: “I take…offense to Kathryn’s categorization of Melissa [Proctor] and Tresa [Edmunds] as ‘feminists,’ and therefore out-of-step with the ‘average’ Mormon reader.” And guess what happened? Soper said, “Alan, I’m a feminist myself, so please be offended on my behalf as well. ” Another woman said: “It seems to me that one of the problems Kathy was trying to address in the response you found offensive, Alan, is that the audience Kristine [Haglund] and some of the other respondents appear to be writing for is different than the audience Kathryn was trying to engage in her initial essay … As Kristine noted, ‘How we talk about feminism matters.'”
IOW, if you begin a conversation with “LDS culture is thoroughly misogynist,” how many people do you think will leave the room? Well, if it’s a Mormon audience, the answer is a lot. I pointed this out not to lecture you (because I know you know it), but because you make statements like that alongside statements of “respecting” queers who feel they are “born that way.” So, if you’re willing to “respect” those queers in the language that you use, I could only wonder why you aren’t “respecting” Mormon women who don’t think LDS culture is misogynist through the language you use — e.g., my mother.
[Edit]: Oh, and in response you said that MSP is a site where you figured you could speak frankly about LDS misogyny — so I thought that was cleared up. But apparently the part where I’m somehow “sexist” and should apologize hasn’t been.
No, I have not. I don’t know why you fabricated that belief, Alan, but that’s what you’ve done.
I defy you to find a comment in either of the two threads under discussion – or, for that matter, any of my work – where I have called for a unified feminist politics.
Instead, I have been quite adamant about saying that LDS women get to approach feminism as they see fit.
Your mom’s not here, Alan.
I am pretty careful about the way I discuss feminism in my published work – for instance, my last two essays in Dialogue, to use an audience you’re familiar with. You were talking repeatedly about your Dialogue piece, and I was responding to the way you characterized it.
Holly @ 148:
I hope you’re not saying that you’re going to privilege the experiences of those who feel female and have a vagina, over those whose who feel their vaginas have nothing to do with their genders. Your insistence on “grounded experience” is noble, but I also think it tends to pull you back into problematic essentialist positions.
Chanson’s way of addressing me has been polite and cordial, but I still saw her as not making room for difference in her arguments. Being polite and cordial is not itself “bridge work.” Chino, on the other hand, was making an umbrella observation concerning activism/academics. It pulled me out of the fray, and I apologized to him for not more readily entering that new context.
When I said @107 that “the power of Mormon feminism is that it breaks down essentialism,” you said @110 that “the power of feminism is that it breaks down essentialism, which is an essential part of Mormonism. Hence the incompatibility.”
Whereas my characterization of “Mormon feminism” has room for movement of multiple perspectives, your characterization of “feminism” AND “Mormon feminism” requires the first agenda item to be making Mormonism and feminism “compatible” AKA a unified feminist politics.
No. I’m not even going to talk about gender. I’m going to say that most people don’t think “oh, look, that’s my foot, which is only a part of me, stepping off the curb, thanks to my knee, another part, bending, and my hip bone swiveling in its socket. Here is my hand, which is a part of me, reaching into my pocket, as my thumb and fingers try to find my chapstick. Here are my eyes, which are a part of me, looking to see if traffic is coming, thanks to my head, another part of me, turning first one way then the other.” Instead, most people think, most of the time, “I’ve stepped off the curb; I’ve reached into my pocket for chapstick; I’m looking left and right before I cross the street.”
Most of the time, we think of our bodies as us. We don’t say, “My body is walking down the street;” we say, “I’m walking down the street.” We don’t have to check our balance; we have a sense of wholeness that lets us move without falling down. It’s typically something like illness or injury that makes someone see their body as parts or as “Not Me”–a broken leg, a recalcitrant body that won’t obey mental commands to sit up after something like surgery and seems to thwart one’s will for oneself.
No vagina or even gender mentioned at all in that scenario. Like I said, I’m interested in bodies–which means everything from toenails to armpit hair to earwax to me, not just the bits between the legs.
That’s ludicrous.
There is neither an agenda nor a first point on it. I’m reporting, as you did, on something – the fact that many people firmly believe you can’t be both Mormon and feminist. I was identifying one reason as to why.
I see Mormonism and feminism as incompatible. But as I also said, I recognize that many incompatible things–spouses, political parties, personal ideologies–often exist in the same uneasy space.
And if I did have an agenda with a first point on it, as you claim I must certainly do by deeming Mormonism and feminism incompatible, it most definitely wouldn’t be the one you say is required by that incompatibility.
I’m mildly curious to see if you can come up with it. It shouldn’t be too hard if you’re at all interested in working at it. It might be worth your time to attempt it, since I know Mo feminists who do have this goal.
Of course, I also know Mo feminists who want to stop it.
Hehe, I would actually want to ask everyone else to also guess, too.
hehe, fine.
but I assume at least that you’ve given up trying to show that I ever called for a unified feminist politics.