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).
at42 / 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 mystical44 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
Frankenstein, Susan, "The Phoenicians in The West: A Function of Neo-Assyrian Imperialism", Larson, M.G. Power and Propaganda. A Symposium in Ancient Empires, Mesopotamia 7