"There seems to be no advantage to suppress people's desire. And unlike race, gender, ethnicity, etc., sexual desire is not socailly constructed."
he wanted to cordon off gayness as a special case. everything else is socially constructed, according to the assertion, but sexual desire is not. The problem, it seems to me, is that such an assumption fundamentally misunderstands--as Katha Pollitt seems to have done on this list a while back--what people mean when they talk about how things are "socially constructed." (see the archives. search terms katha, barbara ehrenreich, time magazine)
why can there be no advantage to suppressing desire? answer: because desire is understood as the freudo-marxists see it: it's a natural force, existing in the social/body, that can only be repressed so long before it tries to escape and assert itself. See Foucault's critique of F-Mists in The History of SExuality, Vol 1.
As you point out, just because something is a biological "fact" it does not follow that humans express their biological "facts" "naturally" and somehow magically free of the social. What makes sexual desire special?
I think that discussion would be interesting, especially if Cat could join in.
I guess what disturbed me when I heard Brian claim that sexual desire was "natural" in a way that gender, race, ethnicity was not was that it seemed to contradict his other statements. For instance, when he mentioned that "Queer Theory" had an influence on the recent SC decision, he seemed to understand how sexual desire was socially constructed. Queer Theory, btw, is a critique of the biological approach to sexual identity. It is very much about sexual desire as "socially constrcuted."
kelley
At 09:20 AM 10/6/03 -0700, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>There area number of really fundamental confusions in
>this discussion. Ever since what's-is-name's work on
>"gay brains," it has become increasingly popular among
>some GLB people to insist that being gay is
>biologically determined. The idea that it's not a
>matter of choice is supposed to remove sexual
>orientation from the realm of moral evaluation. Being
>GLB is supposed to be something one can't help.
><...>