The legal and cultural category into which Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Bazzi (il Sodoma) would fall in 15-16th century Florence was "sodomite." That was what they called Bazzi and it was the name of the crime the elements of which were satisfied by having homosexual sex with a man.
I don't get Miles game with Foucauldian-Kuhnian inccomensurability, we pretend we cannot understand what sodomy meant in Renaissance Italy because it was too conceptually different from what we mean by gay, homosexual, and related concepts in our society. (as if that were unitary.)Obviously there were some differences, and in this case it's not very hard to point out differences and similarities; the similarities dominating.
If Miles is just pointing out that the meanings we give to various behaviors and identities vary to some degree over time and we have to be aware of that in classifying people historically, no duh, but he hasn't given any example of anyone here who has been "essentialist" in holding that there is a single transhistorical set of sexual behaviors and identities that rigidly fit all societies and all people in all times and places -- because no one here, an no one sensible, believes that.
But if Miles thinks it's some sort of profound error to raise the question of whether Michelangelo was homosexual, or predominantly so, he's wrong. Sodomy was a category well known and well understood in his time and not that differently understood from the way "we" understand homosexuality -- maybe not in Tribeca but in Bensonhurst or Merrillville -- it was thought of as unmanly, sinful, perverted, and criminal, and associated with child molesting.
Frankly, incommesurability talk is just tedious. We note various behaviors, point out similarities and differences, remark on how the meanings and understandings may differ, and sometimes they differ little enough for us to use words we'd use to describe behaviors or classification, sometimes not. Generally pronouncements that people Other Cultures are totally alien beings who concepts cannot be translated into ours area tiresome trope from the 1960s and 70s that have been generally knocked into a cocked hat. If necessary I will rehearse the totally devastating arguments that have taken incommensurability off the intellectual map as a thesis worth serious consideration.
--- Ted Winslow <egwinslow at rogers.com> wrote:
> Miles Jackson wrote:
>
> > Thought experiment: Michaelangelo (or whoever) 500
> years ago in Europe
> > has sex with a man. Does he wonder about his
> "real" sexual identity?
> > Does he fear or hope that he is a gay man? No,
> because he does not
> > draw any implications about his personality from
> the type of sexual
> > behavior he engages in. People can just fuck--and
> do in many
> > societies!--without labelling themselves or the
> people they have sex
> > with as stable sexual types of people. I know
> this is hard to imagine
> > in our society, but that's my point: we're
> socialized to automatically
> > jump from saying that people carrying out sexual
> acts to saying that
> > people have specific, stable sexual categories.
> This social process
> > of labelling people as stable sexual types is not
> a cultural or
> > historical universal; it is a social practice that
> has emerged in
> > specific types of human societies.
> >
> > So the whole issue of sexual identity is a far
> more complex and social
> > process than you suggest.
>
> On your understanding of "socialization", your
> beliefs about sexual
> identity must be just as much a product of
> "socialization" as those
> to which your objecting, one different apparently
> from everyone
> else's in "our society".
>
> As a psychological matter, the inability to see the
> self-
> contradiction to which this leads is linked to the
> associated idea
> that 'truth" claims have nothing to do with truth;
> they are masks for
> the will to power in Foucault's sense. Individuals
> making this claim
> also invariably ignore its implications for their
> own truth claims.
>
> Ironically, however, it is true of their own claims.
> This can be
> seen in the dystopia which such "materialists"
> imagine as ideal and
> mistakenly identity with Marx's "true realm of
> freedom". The former
> ignores and is radically inconsistent with the
> ontological and
> anthropological premises underpinning the latter.
>
> The Cockshott/Cottrell idea of "central planning" is
> a good example:
>
>
<http://www.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/calculation_debate.pdf>
>
> As I've many times pointed out, Marx himself makes
> these points about
> this kind of "materialism" in the third thesis on
> Feuerbach.
>
> Ted
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
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