> I wrote a paper for my sociology of gender course that made many (if not
> all) of the same points you make in this post. However, the
> constructionists are at least as misguided as the essentialists: to discount
> the possibility that genetic or hormonal differences have anything to do
> with whether one becomes a homosexual is an act of faith.
So, you see a middle course between these two positions, or another position entirely?
I am curious - how is accepting one is partly determined by hormones not an act of faith? What is the meaning of 'hormone' for the person engaged in such self-determination? It's one thing to say 'this shape brain correlates with homosexuality' - it's another entirely to tell a story about yourself in which you cash homosexuality in terms of putative biological factors. Such 'essentialism' strikes me as the clearest form of 'constructivism'. (Sometimes in this dispute you find this weird notion that the building blocks from which one 'constructs' an identity must be false, ethereal, intangible, 'cultural' as opposed to 'real' - but that's a pretty serious bout of question-begging.)
Maybe the issue is not properly stated as an opposition of essentialist and constructivist camps - or rather, there might be some substance to that dispute, but it is overlaid by a set of problems that have a far more direct connection to people's self-experience and sexual politics. That is, the matter of control and choice. It isn't clear to me how this is substantiated or refuted by essentialist or constructivist arguments - a hardcore cultural constructivist could argue that a person has no control over her sexuality because of social determination. Someone could take a conservative view of this and arrive at much the same point garden-variety essentialists do. Conversely, homophobic essentialists have argued in the past that a person is responsible for altering her behavior despite it being an organic 'sickness.' Such combinations of views are uncommon, but not for any basic logical reason - rhetorical and political factors probably account for their absence.
Thiago Oppermann