[lbo-talk] Political Liberalism and Biological Determinism

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 8/27/07, Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 27 Aug 2007, Brian Charles  Dauth wrote:
>
> > I always wonder if you can be gay and not have sex.
>
> Hmm.  You're a gay activist, so you know the party line.  The current way
> of defining gay, straight and bi is in terms of orientation: when you
> fall in love or are overcome with lust, is it with people of the same
> gender, the opposite, or both?
>
> The big reason of course why the essence of gayness isn't defined in terms
> of behavior is because behavior is obviously a choice -- you can do it or
> not.  But orientation is beyond your control.  And legally that's got huge
> implications.

Political liberalism supports biological determinism and vice versa.
That's a little recognized social fact, much less politically and
intellectually challenged, except by Michel Foucault and those who
think like him, or rather those who thought like him -- radical queer
intellectuals of his generation were probably the first and last of
their kind.  Today, both the ideology of political liberalism and that
of sexual orientations as transcultural and transhistorical universals
are decidedly hegemonic, especially in the richest nations in the
world, reinforced by the myth of "the West" (not so much the West as a
historical construct as a fantasy of it) as the telos of human
development.
-- 
Yoshie