[lbo-talk] Gore Vidal: Lincoln Was, Like, Totally Gay

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Miles Jackson cqmv at pdx.edu, Wed Jan 5 11:10:03 PST 2005:
>  > Maybe instead of getting so worked up about categeories et al,
>>  we should concentrate on understanding what constitutes the
>>  non-harmful use of an object or idea, and what constitutes its
>>  harmful use.  Seems much more pragmatic and useful, as well
>  > as much easier to communicate and discuss with other people.
>
>Try this on: the existence of the category itself is the harmful 
>thing.  The analogy with race here is appropos: just as racism 
>cannot exist in a society that does not recognize the existence or 
>validity of different racial groupings, heterosexism cannot exist in 
>a society that does not enforce the rigid categorization of people 
>as gay or heterosexual.
>
>Why not just celebrate the well documented plasticity of sexual 
>desire and behavior?

We wouldn't be celebrating "the well documented plasticity of sexual 
desire and behavior" if pioneering activism and scholarship of gay 
men and lesbians had not taken on the categories that made them 
"deviant" and redefined themselves as oppressed communities (who are 
distinct from straights) fighting for equal rights.  (The same is 
true for Blacks, Latinos, Asians, women, the disabled, and other 
categories of oppressed people.)  There has not been any straight 
path from polymorphous perversity of pre-capitalist ways to 
polymorphous perversity of post-capitalist ways in rich industrial 
nations.  The path of our sexual development has, instead, been a 
dialectical one, including the necessary tarrying with the negative, 
or, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak puts it, the moment of "strategic 
essentialism."  Whether sexual development in poorer nations will 
follow the same dialectical path or cut a new path of "sexual 
permanent revolution" remains to be seen.
-- 
Yoshie

* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
* "Proud of Britain": <http://www.proudofbritain.net/ > and 
<http://www.proud-of-britain.org.uk/>