| Jack_ |
21-05-2018 12:36 AM |
Before you can even begin to unpack this question, one has to understand that the very notion of "having" a sexual orientation in the first place is not an inherent truth, but something which has been discursively produced over the last three centuries. All sexualities (and their parameters) have been created - and that's a key point.
Consider this too - there are a multitude of things that can encompass one's sexuality, narrowing it down solely to gender and/or genitalia preference is actually very delimiting. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet is an enlightening and thought-provoking read on this matter:
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It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from that of another (dimensions that include preference for certain acts, certain zones or sensations, certain physical types, a certain frequency, certain symbolic investments, certain relations of age or power, a certain species, a certain number of participants, etc. etc. etc.), precisely one, the gender of object choice, emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, as the dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of "sexual orientation". This is not a development that would have been foreseen from the viewpoint of the fin de siècle itself, where a rich stew of male algolagnia, child-love, and autoeroticism, to mention no more of its components, seemed to have as indicative a relation as did homosexuality to the whole, obsessively entertained problematic of sexual "prevision" or, more broadly, "decadence". Foucault, for instance, mentions the hysterical woman and the masturbating child, along with the "entomologized" sexological categories such as zoophiles, zooerasts, auto-monosexualists, and gynecomasts, as typifying the new sexual taxonomies, the "specification of individuals" that facilitated the modern freighting of sexual definition with epistemological and power relations. True as his notation is, it suggests without beginning to answer the further question: why the category of "the masturbator", to choose only one example, should by now have entirely lost its diacritical potential for specifying a particular kind of person, an identity, at the same time as it continues to be true - becomes increasingly true - that, for a crucial strain of Western discourse, in Foucault's words "the homosexual was now a species". So, as a result, is the heterosexual, and between these species the human species has come more and more to be divided.
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(pp. 8-9)
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It is certainly true that without a concept of gender there could be, quite simply, no concept of homo- or heterosexuality. But many other dimensions of sexual choice (auto- or alloerotic, within or between generations, species, etc.) have no such distinctive, explicit definitional connection with gender; indeed, some dimensions of sexuality might be tied, not to gender, but instead to differences or similarities of race or class. The definitional narrowing-down in this century of sexuality as a whole to a binarized calculus of homo- or heterosexuality is a weighty fact but an entirely historical one.
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(p. 31)
So...here's where I stand. I actually agree with whoever it was that said labels cause more problems than they solve. In an ideal world, we'd completely destabilise and deconstruct sexuality (and gender too) so that it wasn't even a necessary marker of identity. The problem is that this isn't going to happen for the foreseeable future - and what's more is for hundreds of years those who have been criminalised for their sexual transgressions have sought to demand legitimacy through reclaiming the same terms by which they were marginalised in the first place (what's known as reverse discourse). And so what are we left with? The bizarre realisation that all of the normative sexualities have themselves been constructed, and yet a firm opposition to the creation of anymore? That doesn't really check out for me, it's an all or nothing deal.
I once identified as pan because I thought it was the closest thing to 'open minded' or 'not needing a label', then I realised how unbelievably ironic that was. Now? It's probably bicurious for ease-of-explanation, but even then that doesn't begin to cover the nuances. The truth is that I am That Guy who's all ~I don't like labels~ but that's only because I don't think the complexities of human sexuality can be narrowed down to convenient boxes we've created to help understand the world. But hey, if labels work for you, great! All power to you. Identify however you like...or don't at all...either way it doesn't really matter. |
