On Mon, 3 Jan 2005, joanna bujes wrote:
> Here's where folks lose me. Why does this show that Lincoln was gay? Bi
> sexual maybe, if we have to put a label on things. Why do we have to label
> people this way. I think it's really weird.
>
> Joanna
Sorting people into types and subspecies is an important form of social control (Foucault is good on this; see Discipline and Punish). It's insidious: people treat personality/identity as a liberating expression of individuality, when in fact it is more or less a tool to create and stigmatize deviants. (It's no coincidence that the term "homosexual" was created by a medical doctor studying sexual perversion!)
And don't even get me started on the gross presentism of applying modern sexual categories to people in the past--
Miles