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/>