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2 “Homosexuality”: A Cultural Construct An Exchange with Richard Schneider Schneider, A conference at Brown University, “Homosexuality in History and Culture, and the University Curriculum,” held on 20-21 February 1987, highlighted an ongoing debate between you, John J. Winkler, and others, on the one hand, and John Boswell, on the other, concerning the genesis and cultural articulation of homosexuality. While Boswell argues that “homo-” and “heterosexual” are categories that many (or all) socicties implicitly recognize, you contend that this dualism is actually a cultura] construction of the last century or two in the West. I wonder if you could clarify this debate. Halperin. The debate to which you refer reflects a longstanding (and, some would argue, sterile) ideological dispute within social science between “essentialists” and “constructionists.” As that controversy applies to sexual categories, it divides those who believe that terms like “gay” and “straight” refer to positive, objective, culturally invariant properties of persons (in the same way as do the terms for different blood-types or genetic traits)* from those who believe that the experiences named by those terms are artefacts of specific, unique, and non-repeatable cultural and social processes, “Essen- tialists” typically consider sexual preference to be determined by such things as biological forces or hormonal levels, and treat sexual identities as “cogni- tive realizations of genuine, underlying differences” (to quote Steven Ep- stein, who devoted an essay in a recent issue of the Socialist Review to an exploration and critique of this controversy),' whereas “constructionists” *T owe these examples to Edward Stein, who points out to me that genetics may provide the best model for essentialist claims about sexuality, because a specific genetic potentiality may be realized or actuated differently in different environments without itself undergoing any change (the appeal to this genetic model, however, should not be taken to commit essentialists necessatily to the proposition that sexual orientations are “caused” by genetic factors—although some esseutialists may coincidentally happen to believe that: the genetic model merely provides am illustration of the way that an essentialist argument might work). at 42 / One Hundred Years of Homosexuality assume that sexual desires are learned and that sexual identities come to be fashioned through an individual's interaction with others.” The debate between essentialists and constructionists largely recapitulates the old “na- ture/nurture” controversy over the relative influences on the individual of heredity and environment—or, as Boswell prefers, it may represent merely the most recent instance of a long-lived scholastic quarrel between “realists” and “nominalists” over the existenee of universals.* In any case, it is easy to understand why essentialists are inclined to regard sexual categorics as relatively unchanging over time, despite the various social or cultural forms sexual expression may take, whereas constructionists believe that different times and places produce different “sexualities.” My own position is close to that of the constructionists. Anthropological and historical studies have shown to my satisfaction that patterns of sexual preference and configurations of desire vary enormously from one culture to the next. 1 know of no way to explain why human beings in different cultures grow up, en masse, with distinctly different sorts of sexual disposi- tions, temperaments, or tastes, which they themselves consider normal and natural, unless I am willing to grant a determining role in the constitution of individual desire to social or cultural factors. But even if | am wrong about the causes of variation among patterns of human sexual preference, the extent of such variation still remains to be gauged, and that can be done only if we do not insist on defining it in advance of actual research, allowing our current presuppositions to fix the contours of what has yet to be discovered. Constructionism may not turn out to be right in all ofits preliminary claims, but in the meantime it encourages us to put some distance between ourselves and what we think we “know” about sex. And so, by bracketing in effect our “instinctive” and “natural” assumptions, it makes it easier for us to highlight different historical configurations of desire and to distinguish vari- ous means—both formal and informal—of institutionalizing them. ‘The very least that can be said on behalf of the constructionist hypothesis, in other words, is that it is immensely valuable as a guide for future research, It directs the scholar’s attention to the salient particularities of sexual life in a given society, particularities that might have gone unnoticed—or, if noticed, unexamined—in the absence of a research program that called for scrutiniz- ing them. It also helps the interpreter resist the temptation to integrate alien or exotic phenomena into a plansible discourse of the known, into a picture whose appeal derives largely from its familiarity to its viewers, Whether or not the accounts constructionists give of their own methods and aims are cogent, whether or not the conclusions they reach are well-founded, they have certainly turned up enough interesting material to demonstrate the heuristic value of their theories. When they have finished charting the various social and historical constructions of sexual meaning, we shall be in a better position to judge the validity of the constructionist hypothesis and to deter- “Homosexuality”: A Cultural Construct / 43 mine what, ifanything, can be said on behalf of its essentializing competitors. In the meantime, it’s too soon to close off debate on the theoretical issues: there’s too much work to be done, Now, with respect to the question you raise, constructionists have demon- strated, I believe, that the distinction between homosexuality and heterosex- wality, far from being a fixed and immutable feature of some universal syntax of sexual desire, can be understood as a particular conceptual turn in thinking about sex and deviance that occurred in certain sectors of northern and northwestern European society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. ‘The new conceptualization, moreover, seems to coincide with the emer- gence, in the same period (or in the centuries immediately preceding it), of some new sexual types—namely, the homosexual and the heterosexual, defined not as persons who perform certain acts, or who adhere to one sex- role or another, or who are characterized by strong or weak desires, or who violate or observe gender-boundaries, but as persons who possess two distinct kinds of subjectivity, who are inwardly oriented in a specific direction, and who therefore belong to separate and determinate human species. From what | have been able to tell, these new sexual types, the homosexual and the heterosexual, do not represent merely new ways of classifying persons—that is, innovations in moral or judicial language—but new types of desire, new kinds of desiring human beings. ‘To say that homosexuality and heterosexuality are culturally constructed, however, is not to say that they are unreal, that they are mere figments of the imagination of certain sexual actors. (Constructionists sometimes sound as if they are saying something like that, and so there is some justification for Epstein’s ascription of such a belief to them, but that is not—or, at least, it ought not to be—the construetionist claim.) Homosexuality and heterosexuality are not fictions inasmuch as there really are, nowadays, homosexual and heterosexual people, individuals whose own desires are organized or structured according to the pattern named by those opposed and contrasting terms. No one, save someone determined to uphold a theory at all costs, would say that homosexuals or heterosexuals are simply imagining things, that they are deluded in supposing that they are attracted to one sex rather than another: they really do desire what they do, and that is a fact about them. But if homo- and heterosexuality—within some sectors of our culture, anyway—are not fictions, neither are they pure facts of life (as such things used to be called), positive and changeless features of the natural world; Rather, they are among the cultural codes which, in any society, give human beings access to themselves as mcaningful subjects of their experiences and which are thereby objectivated—that is, realized in actuality. Hence, we need, as Epstein has written, “a better understanding of the ‘collectivization of subjectivity.’ We mnst be able to speak of sexually based group identities without assuming either that the group has some mystical 44 1 One Hundred Years of Homosexuality or biological unity, or that the ‘group’ doesn’t exist and that its ‘members’ are indulging in a dangerous mystifieation.”* Schneider. Many gay people are predisposed to take up with Boswell’s argument, feeling their own homosexuality to be deeply rooted in childhood and thus unconditioned by cultural categories or norms. Your argument seems to contradict what many people claim to “know” intuitively about themselves—does it not? Halperin. 1 don’t think so. The more we become aware of the contingency of all forms of erotic life, the more we are disinclined to believe in such a thing as a “natural” sexuality, something we are simply born into. Now gay sub-cultures provide abundant evidence for the vast plurality of possible sexual styles. Many gay people must know, therefore, that “sexuality” is not the sort of thing that comes in only two kinds (i.c., “hetero-” and “homo-”). “Nature” is not exhausted by these two possibilities of sexual object-choice, The better we get to know ourselves and our friends, tle more we realize—at least, 1 do—how idiosyncratic and various, how unsystematic sexuality is: is a gay woman into S/M more like a gay woman who is not or a straight woman who is? And to the extent that we define “gayness” as a kind of lifestyle or outlook or set of values rather than as the performance of certain sexual acts, to that extent we acknowledge that it is something more than a sexual reflex, But perhaps I am dodging your question. Perhaps there is a sense in which the constructionist thesis is not only counter-intuitive but is necessarily so. The cultural construction of our sexuality is almost surely bound to be beyond the reach of intuitive recall. For our intuitions about the world and. about ourselves are no doubt constituted at the same time as our sexuality itself: both are part of the process whereby we gain access to ourselves as self-conscious beings through language and culture. If we could recover the steps by which we were acculturated, we would not have been very securely acculturated in the first place, inasmuch as acculturation consists precisely in learning to accept as natural, normal, and inevitable what is in fact conventional and arbitrary. The arbitrary character of sexual acculturation is perhaps clearest in the case of heterosexuality: the production of a popula- tion of human males who are (supposedly) incapable of being sexually excited by a person of their own sex under any circuimstances is itself a cultural event without, so far as 1 know, either precedent or parallel, and cries out for an explanation. No inquiry into the origins of homosexuality can therefore be divorced from an inquiry into the origins of heterosexuality. Although the explicit conceptualization of homosexuality precedes that of heterosexuality—which was a ate and rather hasty appendix to it—the cultural construction of homosexuality is probably a mere reflex of the “Homosexuality”: A Cultural Coustruct / 45 social processes that produced the (comparatively speaking) strange and distinctively bourgeois formation represented by exclusive heterosexuality. In other words, | think the cultural production of “the homosextal” is an incidental result of the social changes responsible for the formation of “the heterosexual”: in the course of constructing “the heterosexual,” of producing sexual subjects constituted according to an exclusive (cross-sex) sexual ob- Ject-choice, western European societies also created, as a kind of by-product of that imperfect process, other sexual subjects defined by a similarly exclu- sive, but same-sex, sexual object-choice. Homosexuals are, in this sense, casualties of the cultural construction of exclusive heterosexuality. For that reason, I don’t think it makes any sense to ask what “causes” homosexuality while ignoring heterosexuality, and any account that purports to “explain” homosexuality in isolation from heterosexuality is bound to be inadequate and should arouse immediate suspicion on political grounds—as a maneuver designed to reassert the “normativity” of heterosexuality. Homosexuality and heterosexuality are part of the same system; they are equally problem- atic, and each stands in just as much need of analysis and understanding as the other.’ Schneider, In arguing that “homo-” and “heterosexual” are role categories peculiar to modern Western society, are you saying that homosexuality itself does not exist in other societies? Halperin, My claim is considerably more radical than that. J am claiming that there is no such thing as “homosexuality isself™ or “heterosexuality itself.” Those words do not name independent modes of sexual being, leading some sort of ideal existence apart from particular human societies, outside of history or culture. Homosexuality and heterosexuality are not the atomic constituents of erotic desire, the basic building-blocks out of which every person's sexual nature is constructed. ‘hey just represent one of the many patterns according to which human living-groups, in the course of reproducing themselves and their social structures, have drawn the bound- aries that define the scope of what can qualify—and to whom—as sexually attractive. Because they happen to be the dominant organizing principles of sexual pleasure and sexual desire in our culture, homosexuality and hetero- sexuality also represent those categories of sexual psychology and behavior that we find most obvious and compelling, and so we interpret in terms of them the sexual phenomena that we encounter on our ethnographic excur- sions through other cultures. Because we do not tend to sce our own sexual categories as arbitrary or conventional, and because we regard them accordingly as empty of ideological content, we consider “homosexual” and “heterosexual” to be purely descriptive, trans-cultural, and trans-historical terms, equally applicable to every culture and period. Now there is nothing

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