Yes, that very nineteenth-century idea is part of the problem. Another nineteenth-century idea, the idea of necessary stages of historical development, reinforces it in some liberal and Marxist minds (the liberal and Marxist traditions have an overlapping discourse of development, according to which capitalist modernity of the West is the future of nations outside it, and some Marxist variants of this narrative are accompanied by a strong version of economic determinism): if discourse of sexual orientations is now hegemonic in the West, so it will be in the rest, sooner or later. I am not saying that it never can, but I am saying that is neither necessary nor desirable. I hope that different peoples will develop different ways of taking liberty.
On 9/25/07, BklynMagus <magcomm at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> > Sexual happiness is essential to human liberation.
> > Personal rights and freedoms concerning sexuality,
> > however, may be achieved in other ways than one based
> > on the idea of sexual orientations, though certainly
> > the one based on that idea is the hegemonic one,
> > especially in the global North, and I believe our sexual
> > future is still open.
>
> What I have always found interesting is that the creation
> of sexual orientations often results from the criminalizing
> of specific sexual acts.
Yes. Repression is productive, as Michel Foucault argued. So, as long as the Islamic Republic, or any other Third World nation, legally and practically looks upon same-sex sex as an act, considering it to be an act that may be committed by _anyone_, rather than thinking, as is the norm in the West, that only a sexual _minority_ called "homosexuals" are the ones who really like same-sex sex, discourse of sexual orientations, and identity politics based on it, won't be the national norm there.
How did discourse of sexual orientations initially develop? Intervention of psychiatry, psychology, and related disciplines that posited the existence of a sexually deviant minority and the sexually normal majority. (Criminal justice changed through its intermingling with disciplines of the psyche, which, too, was an object of Foucault's investigation). How did this discourse become hegemonic in the USA? Ironically, in part through the armed forces during WW2. Psychiatric screening adopted during WW2 probably was the first time when masses of working-class men and women got asked questions about their sexual orientation (for more information about this, see Coming Out Under Fire by Allan Berube: <http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Under-Fire-Allan-Berube/dp/customer-reviews/0743210719>.)
On 9/25/07, James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> I could almost say that I am looking forward to seeing the US Marines
> ('don't ask, don't tell') going to war for the rights of
>
> > men in Iran who suck cock
> > and women who munch box.
>
> I would say that it would be good to see that slogan scrawled on the side of
> a bomb, nestling in the womb of a B-52 - but that the day might come sooner
> than one would think.
>
> After all, who would have expected Vietnam War hero Wes Clark fighting a war
> to set up a rape crisis centre in Kosovo.
If the European power elite, rather than the US power elite, had taken hegemony of the multinational empire, a scenario that you picture might have already happened. The US power elite can't get as much political mileage out of the North-South sexual gap than the European power elite potentially can. But the North-South sexual gap does soften up liberals and leftists for humanitarian imperialism, if as yet having little impact on America's sexually confused majority.
On 9/25/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Sep 25, 2007, at 8:28 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > In Iran, too, some people, especially younger urbanites,
> > have adopted the aforementioned sexual categories whose origins Michel
> > Foucault traces back to nineteenth-century bourgeois culture of the
> > West.1 But a majority of Iranians, apparently including their
> > President, have not adopted the idea of sexual orientations, nor have
> > much of the rest of the Third World.
>
> I know you're trying to get your boy off the hook for saying
> something so transparently ludicrous, but if even a minority of
> Iranians have adopted the "Western" identity, then Ahmadinejad's
> statement is factually wrong. There *are* Western-style homos in his
> country, whether he likes it or not.
I have never said that there are no "Western-style homos" in Iran. My claim, as you can see above, is that getting identified or identifying oneself by sexual orientation is not the norm in Iran, nor in much of the rest of the Third World for that matter, unlike in the USA and Europe. Japan is neither like the West nor the Third World in this respect: Japan has never had sodomy laws, and homophobia did not exist there before modernity (far from it, male-male love and sex were famously celebrated in pre-modern Japanese art and literature); homophobia came to Japan with the discourse of sexual orientations developed in psychiatry and other sciences first developed under capitalist modernity in the West; today, sexual identity politics, Western-style, in response to homophobia therefore also exists in Japan; however, both the discourse of sexual orientations and identity politics based on it are weaker than their counterparts in the West, and they coexist with older sexual discourses and practices, some of which have been re-made in post-modern fashion. In some ways, people are sexually freer in Japan than in the West, and in other ways, they are less free in Japan than in the West. Why can't we have different paths of (political, economic, and cultural) development to different ends, rather than the same path to the same end?
> The passage that followed on women is especially uplifting:
>
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/24/
> AR2007092401042.html>
>
> > AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): Women are the best creatures
> > created by God. They represent the kindness, the beauty that God
> > instills in them. Women are respected in Iran. In Iran, every
> > family who is given a girl -- is given -- in every Iranian family
> > who has a girl, they are 10 times happier than having a son. Women
> > are respected more than men are.
> >
> > They are exempt from many responsibilities. Many of the legal
> > responsibilities rest on the shoulders of men in our society
> > because of the respect, culturally given, to women, to the future
> > mothers. In Iranian culture, men and sons and girls constantly kiss
> > the hands of their mothers as a sign of respect, respect for women.
> > And we are proud of this culture.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the President of Iran, not of the USA, and therefore he is supposed to represent _the general will of the majority of Iranians_, not that of the majority of the American people -- let alone the ideas of American liberals and leftists! -- regarding what to do about gender and sexuality. His ideas about gender and sexuality are just about the same as the mainstream of the Iranian people, and quite a bit more flexible than those of many other politicians in his country, not to mention Ali Khamenei. In short, people can't have a government that is much better than themselves, except in a country run by an enlightened despot. -- Yoshie