>Chris's warning to avoid simplistic explanations of the figures below
is
>is well made, not least because of the ambiguities of self-reported
>statistics.
>
>But it is worth bearing in mind the argument of John D'Emilio that the
>possibilities of homosexuality only really open up with market
>cosmopolitanism and the emergence of a non-familial sphere of life.
I know I included some of the following in a former E. Sedgwick post, but it's pertinent here, so I thought I'd post it again. I haven't read D'Emilio, but surely "the possibilities of homosexuality," and the "possibilities of heterosexuality", and the definitional assumptions and questionable methodology of such a study, could use problematization. For instance, "the possibilites of homosexuality" assumes a juridical ("non-familial sphere of life") taxonomic position against types of sexual behavior, no? From _Epistemology of the Closet_:
The word "homosexual" Euro-American discourse during the last third of the nineteenth century--its popularization preceding, as it happens, even that of the word "heterosexual." It seems clear that the sexual behaviors, and even for some people the conscious identities, denoted by the new term "homosexual" and its contemporary variants already had a long, rich history. So, indeed, did a wide range of other sexual behaviors and behavioral clusters. What *was* new from the turn of the century was the world-mapping by which every given person, just as he or she was necessarily assignable to a male or a female gender, was now considered necessarily assignable as well to a homo- or a hetero-sexuality, a binarized identity that was full of implications, however confusing, for even the ostensibly least sexual aspects of personal existence. It was this new development that left no space in the culture exempt from the potent incoherences of homo/heterosexual definition. (p.2)
Under this hypothesis, then, just as one has learned to assume that every issue of racial meaning must be embodied through the specificity of a particular class position--and every issue of class, for instance, through the specificity of a particular gender position--so every issue of gender would necessarily be embodied through the specificity of a particular sexuality, and vice versa; but nonetheless there could be use in keeping the analytic axes distinct.
An objection to this analogy might be that gender is *definitionally* built into determinations of sexuality, in a way that neither of them is definitionally intertwined with, for instance, determinations of class or race. 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 class or race. The definitional narrowing-down in this century of sexuality as a whole to a binarized calculus of *homo-* or *hetero*sexuality is a weighty fact but an entirely historical one. To use that fait accompli as a reason for analytically conflating sexuality per se with gender would obscure the degree to which the fact itself requires explantation. It would also, I think, risk obscuring yet again all the extreme intimacy with which all these available analytic axes do after all mutually constitute one another: to assume the distinctiveness of the *intimacy* between sexuality and gender might well risk assuming too much about the definitional *separability* of either of them from determinations of, say, class or race. (pp 30-31)
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