Did everyone get hit with the stupid stick today, or did I lose the capacity to write English? If Miles' point is just that there are more or less great or small, subtle or blatant, differences in concepts like homosexual, queer, gay, sodomite, etc., _within_ and among cultures, and we have to be sensitive to them, no duh. Obvious.
If you think that Michelangelo's sexual identity is exactly that that of a post-Stonewall queer in Tribeca or Castro Street, you are making a mistake.
But no one thinks that. That is a straw man. No one (hereabouts) imagines that exactly the framework of concepts we contingently use at this particular historical moment is an unchangeable universal framework applicable without change in all times and place to all people in all circumstances -- least of all me, a neopragmatist student of Rorty.
If, however, you think there is no continuity, analogy, similarity between concepts like queer in Tribeca or Castro today, fag in Nebraska or Indiana (most parts of them), sodomite in quintocentro Florence, you are also making a mistake. These are not incommensurable concepts. They are different ways of conceiving similar, closely related, possibly and arguably even the same (in some important sense) things.
So, basically, what you do is identify similarities and differences, compare, distinguish, and analyze.
What you do not do is beat the very dead horse of the sort of essentialism that postmodernists and Rortyians spent the last 25 years killing and making into dogfood, or trying to resurrect the dumbest and least defensible interpretation of Foucault and Kuhn as asserting that there is no communication, translation, comparison, or analysis possible across different "cultures," a notion thoroughly devastated by the last 35 years of philosophy of science as well as by every attempt to illustrate itself.
Both of the "don'ts" are a total waste of time and very annoying.
--- joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> Miles Jackson wrote:
>
> >This illustrates my point: there are dramatic
> differences between
> >calling someone "gay" and calling them a
> "sodomite". First of all, a
> >man and a woman can commit sodomy. Second, sodomy
> refers to a specific
> >sexual behavior, not a sexual "type" of person.
> Third, a person can be
> >"gay" according to our modern definition and never
> engage in sodomy. I
> >just don't see how a reasonable person can conflate
> the categories
> >"sodomite" and "homosexual".
> >
> >
> Remembering my parents' talk about
> aquaintances/friends who preferred
> same-sex partners, I do not ever remember their
> equating that preference
> with a sexual type of person. "Era curist" --
> roughly translated "He was
> an asser" -- was the idiomatic way to say he was a
> sodomite and, at
> least for them, this was not a term of condemnation,
> but merely descriptive.
>
> From my vast aquaintance with Western lit, I would
> say that the term
> "queer," such as we've known it since the seventies,
> is new. And to say,
> in that sense, that Michelango was queer is a
> misrepresentation.
>
> Joanna
>
>
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