My point is a basic Marxist one, I guess: social relations create certain categories of people. Just as there must be certain social relations and practices in place for a person to be a capitalist or a wage laborer, there must be certain social relations and practices in place for a person to define themselves and others in terms of stable sexual categories. I know this is hard for us to imagine, but people in many societies have sex and feel no compulsion to identify themselves or others as "gay" or "straight". In those societies, sure, there are behaviors we would label "heterosexual", but there are no "heterosexuals" according to our modern definition of the term.
Miles
> 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
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>>
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