[Introduction by SL: Lorenzo is a blogger I admire; he writes quite a bit on Queer history, and also very wisely and thoughtfully on the 'method' of history and scholarship. His home blog is here. Now, I'm just a humble linguist and lawyer, but I've long suspected that a lot of historians have been led up the garden path by various forms of what people in both Law and Classics over here call 'Francophonie'. I first spotted it reading classics in my misspent youth: 'tribas' meant 'lesbian', not 'woman who wanted to be top'. As archaeologists have extensively documented, heterosexual Romans weren't into missionary. By showing how bad history has become in one confined area (sexuality), Lorenzo shows that it may be possible to get people to think critically about history more generally. Enjoy].
Michel Foucault, archetypal postwar French thinker—one of the gang of four that Stephen Hicks dissects in his excellent Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (which I review here)—was notorious for his social constructionist analysis of history and for his avid embrace of a homoerotic hedonism, extending to BDSM (bondage-dominance sado-masochism). That embrace of homoerotic hedonism led to his death from AIDS: one of the early, prominent fatalities from the “gay plague”.
There is a certain irony, therefore, in one of the most trenchant criticisms of Foucault’s social constructionism being mounted by a historian of homosexuality. Rictor Norton’s The Myth of the Modern Homosexual: Queer History and the Search for Cultural Unity (which I review here) is a direct assault on Foucault’s intellectual legacy.
Queer realism
Rictor Norton’s intellectual assault is quite upfront—Part One of the book is entitled Social Constructionism and Other Myths—and is set out in the first Chapter The Search for Cultural Unity. He identifies a range of social constructionist (or cultural constructivist) thinkers (p.6), gives a brief outline of their (highly political) position before moving on to some great quotes from historian Arthur Marwick, public intellectual Camille Paglia and constructionism-influenced David F. Greenberg. Marwick attacks Foucault’s bad history, Paglia (with her usual rhetorical verve) the lack of intellectual quality of what constructionists produce but there is vast amusement to be had in Greenberg’s quoted comment that:
Foucault, who held a chair in the history of ideas, assumed too readily that intellectuals are the sole repository of conceptual invention and simply imposed a new hegemonic discourse on passive recipients (p.10).
Take that, you oppressive imposer of hegemonic discourse!
Norton’s own position is set out with admirable clarity:
My aim in the present book will be to examine the nature of queer history, with a focus upon historiographical issues that have not been adequately addressed by historians in the 1980s and 1990s, who have largely failed to recognise the difference between attitudes towards homosexuals and the experience of queers, and who have built up theories that have no empirical foundations in history. The myth that the homosexual was born circa 1869 is easily demolished, but beyond that I will aim to show that the social constructionist emperor has no clothes. I will argue that a typology of queer personalities and relationships and the characteristic features of a queer culture arise from a core of queer desire and are not wholly configured by the regulation of that desire. Queer history properly considered is the attempt to recover the authentic voice of queer experience rather than simply to document suppression or oppression (p.11)
In other words, evidence matters: evidence of what people did, thought, felt. And such evidence and experience has power in its own right, and is not merely framed, determined or dominated by the language and conceptual apparatus that is used to describe or express it (and do so well, less well or badly).
Norton explicitly sites himself within the essentialist camp. My reading in the natural law origins of the Christian anathematising of same-sex activity has led me to be leary of essentialism. But the natural law essentialism that underpins such anathematisation is a normative essentialism, a division of the universe (including humans) into the “proper” and “improper” forms of things. Once you have “improper” versions of the human, then the path to the exterminationist option opens wide, for clearly “improper” forms of things should not exist. Just such extermination was, under Philo of Alexandria’s marriage of natural law thinking with scriptural revelation, what God was about in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Which creates the notion of God-the-Virtuous-Exterminator of the different, of the morally quarantined (given most folk are not much interested in having sex with members of their own sex), avidly taken up by patristic Christianity (notably in The Golden Legend, as in its description of the Nativity). So the pink triangles of the death camps provide exactly the same lesson as the yellow stars of the death camps. Indeed, I would argue, the identification of “sodomites” as a morally quarantined group fit for extermination leads directly to the murderous anathematisation of Jews: it was not a case of first they came for the Jews, but that first they came for the “sodomites”.
What Norton is arguing for is not a normative but a descriptive essentialism. Of taking the people seriously as not being mere integers in some controlling discourse. As Norton writes:
… it is tragic that homosexuals have been subsumed totally under the idea of the homosexual. The result is little better than intellectual ethnic cleansing. In the social constructionist view, knowledge is constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed through ideological discourse. In my essentialist view, knowledge is discovered, repressed, suppressed and recovered through history and experience (Pp11-12).
His position is that homosexuals are born, not made: that there is a underlying consistency of desire however variable its expression. Out of this consistency, queers construct, again and again, queer cultures whose common features are identifiable across time and space (p.12).
The notion that public and scholarly discourse captures, let alone moulds, all of social reality is something Norton treats with the contempt it deserves:
There are also many cases in which the authorities, those who supposedly define and create the homosexual construct, began an investigation which suddenly revealed to their astonishment a large underworld, which becomes so threatening that it put a halt to the enquiry (p.25)
As Norton notes, a perennial for queer fok is having desires they cannot name: leading to experiences of dawning recognition of “hey, that’s me”.
Norton has fun using the citations used by scholars who, to their credit, do go to the sources, to contradict their constructionist conclusions. So David Halperin’s claim the classical civilisations categorised only sex acts, not orientation, is contradicted by a wide variety of quotes talking of sexual direction or preferences Halperin himself cites. That different terms with different ideological underpinnings can, nevertheless, refer to the same phenomena seems to confuse Halperin. To the extent that Norton wonders:
Has Halperin never read any tabloid newspapers? They contain as much ‘ideology’ and ‘discourse’ as Freud or Foucault.
But the discounting of popular language and experience is pervasive in social constructionism.
Norton keeps coming back to the evidence:
The records of the Inquisition in Spain, Portugal and Brazil; the police archives of early eighteenth-century Paris; the records of the Officers of the Night of sixteenth-century Venice – all clearly document a preponderance of bachelor men who prefer their own sex (p.37).
The same records also document long-term couples. All part of a long history: pace Foucault:
The truth is that a homosexual category existed many centuries before the nineteenth century (p.38).
Including homosexual characters in fiction.
The triumph of theory over fact is pervasive:
One cannot help but feel that Foucault has wilfully suppressed the fact that since the 1730s the most common French term for homosexual has been pederast rather than sodomite, a clear indication that it was recognised as a secular cultural identity rather than biblical sinful behaviour (Rey, 1985) (p.38)
Norton is attempting to reclaim for queer folk the history that has been denied to them:
Assertions that the modern homosexual and modern gay subcultures are significantly different from the past are based primarily on ignorance of that past (p.61).
It is bad enough that anti-gay activists and commentators treat homosexuals having social spaces as some dire modern corruption, it is pathetic that allegedly “progressive” academics play into the same game.
As Norton points out, the social constructionist viewpoint is not only parochial in its obsession of with public/intellectual discourse, it is often highly parochial in its treating of modern Western—or even specifically American—experience as if it some revealing benchmark (Pp61-62). But if you do not base analysis of careful examination of evidence and taking the breadth of human experience and aspirations seriously, where else are you going to end up but glib assumptions arising from the experience of the theorist, even if cast in allegedly ideologically sophisticated terms?
The reality of how people are and acted keeps contradicting the grander claims of social constructionism. Against Foucault’s notion that doctors imposed a medicalised category of homosexuality, Norton notes doctors’ regular astonishment about how “inverts” would refuse their “help” (p.63). Homosexuals already existed:
… the genuine social construct is paramedical homophobia (p.63).
Social constructionism can be useful in talking about public language: it is in the analysis of origins of identity for which it is, in Norton’s words, “woefully inadequate”.
But even in dealing with official language social constructionism is often inadequate. Far from trying to draw public boundaries, officials were often concerned to keep things quiet. Sodomy was the crimen nefandum or peccatum mutum, the “silent sin”, with trials and executions often being secret affairs (unlike with other crimes) and solitary confinement being regularly used. One Jan Jansz, convicted of sodomy in 1741 at the age of 17, spent the remainder of his life—57 years—in solitary confinement (Pp 63-64). Foucault’s theory, far from being liberating, gives the oppressors all the power and denies the victims their own identity:
What Foucault regards as the formation of non-procreative sexualities was in reality the warping of pre-existing identities: natural born queers were turned into perverts (p.64).
Recognising oneself
Norton is particularly scathing about the mystification of 1869, the date that the term ‘homosexual’ was coined. (Also the year John Stuart Mill published The Subjection of Women, a striking historical conjunction.) People could read Walt Whitman and recognize their common sensibility—a recurring epiphanic moment for gay men for decades—regardless of whether they were familiar with the new term ‘homosexual’ or not (Pp71-2).
Works such as Whitman’s poetry, or Edward Carpenter’s The Intermediate Sex, could have an impact precisely because they articulated identities, sensibilities, yearnings that already existed. The identity brought forth and responded to the words, it was not created by them. Just as medical folk were responding to pre-existing identities, and trying to make sense of them in terms of their theories and presumptions. The regulation of homosexuality was not an area where doctors had much role (p.77). Hardly surprising, since such legal regulation was overwhelmingly driven by religious notions.
Law as such
On the matter of regulation, Norton is also nicely scornful about arguments that, since laws regulated acts, this meant that there was no social concept of same-sex orientation. Laws regulate acts, that is what they do. The notion that legal definitions are exactly equivalent of social definitions is one of Foucault’s perennial mistakes (p.136). Literature is far more revealing of social definitions, as one would expect:
Virtually all ancient and medieval satires were invariably aimed at sodomites and catamites as persons rather than sodomy and anal intercourse per se p.136.
Laws and legal definitions are particularly unrevealing if there are no actual prosecutions or trials, for trials are where law meets social reality. There is a mass of material on such laws from early medieval Europe: but they do not reveal homosexual subcultures (or not) because there were so few trials (p.137). Norton notes that prosecutions under anti-sodomy laws were extremely erratic and have been generally driven by particular moral crusaders—the brute reality being that such acts threaten no one and imperil nothing in the functioning of society, so can go on happening unless someone decides, and has the levers to, to crusade on the matter.
There is a great deal to philosopher Richard Mohr’s comment that:
… sodomy laws are the chief systematic way that society as a whole tells gays they are scum.
Norton’s last word on Foucault sums up the fundamental inanity of his social constructionist theories quite nicely:
It is odd that in the history of the love that dared not speak its name the authorities did not try to achieve social control by the widespread public naming of these crimes, which is what social constructionists propose that they ought to have done. On the contrary they endeavoured to suppress all knowledge of such people and such acts, whether from the fear they would have the power to encourage similar behaviour or because they were felt to be too scandalous and shameful to be made public. This is a basic contradiction in Foucault’s naming theory. The very high level of censorship applied to this field of study is sufficient indication that homosexual experience was not allowed to become part of the discourse. But to rest content with deconstructing the discourse, by revealing that it is wildly skewed and wacky , without endeavouring to recover what has been suppressed, is to conspire with the censors (p.178).
This suppression of evidence is not, however, a counsel of historiographical despair:
… for we often have abundant evidence of suppression which in itself is sufficient confirmation of the likelihood of queer interpretation (p.179).
Hence the importance of attending to subtext. But what is subtext but meanings beyond the text? Meanings that point to realities the text is precisely not treating literally, so is not defining. Only by having a sense of realities and possibilities beyond the text can sub-text even exist: yet another manifestation of how reality trumps text, and escapes being being—let alone moulded—by it.
The claims of queer folk, like marginalized groups everywhere, are claims of truth against the stories others tell, against official suppression. As Norman Geras so powerfully puts it:
If there is no truth, there is no injustice. Stated less simplistically, if truth is wholly relativized or internalized to particular discourses or language games or social practices, there is no injustice. The victims and protesters of any putative injustice are deprived of their last and often best weapon, that of telling what really happened. They can only tell their story, which is something else. Morally and politically, therefore, anything goes.
Such morally powerful truth must include truth about themselves: about who they are and what they feel.
Much of the discounting of claims on behalf of the same-sex attracted comes from a denial of their existence: either at all (that no one is “really” homosexual) or that they are, at most, a tiny minority.
Mr Justice Powell, the swing vote in the Bowers v. Hardwick decision that upheld sodomy laws, claimed that he had never met a homosexual. This despite one of his law clerks at the time being gay: indeed Mr Justice Powell had a history of employing—apparently unwittingly—gay law clerks. His (gay) law clerk at the time of Bowers v. Hardwick decision apparently suffered some personal anguish about not having revealed his sexuality to his boss. Mr Justice Powell, in retirement, stated that his decision in Bowers v. Hardwick was one he had come to regret.
The US Supreme Court later overturned Bowers v. Hardwick in Lawrence v. Texas. One enterprising friend of liberty has even argued that the decision has quite subversive implications because it is founded on liberty, making the very sensible point that:
The more specifically you define the liberty at issue, however, the more difficult a burden this is to meet — and the more easily the rights claim can be ridiculed. “Liberty” is obviously deeply rooted in our history and traditions. A right to use contraceptives is not. Nor is almost any particular exercise of liberty, especially if it was a practice unknown at the Founding. Whenever a particular liberty is specified, therefore, it is always subject to the easy rejoinder: “Just where in the Constitution does it say that?” even though the Ninth Amendment specifies that “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” … Liberty is — and has always been — the properly defined exercise of freedom that does not violate the rights of others. Your right to liberty is not violated by restrictions on your freedom to rape and murder, because you have no such right in the first place.
But that protecting freedom of action has wide implications is hardly a new point. Consider the speech of Pausanias in Plato’s Symposium:
In Ionia and other places, and generally in countries which are subject to the barbarians, the custom is held to be dishonourable; loves of youths share the evil repute in which philosophy and gymnastics are held because they are inimical to tyranny; for the interests of rulers require that their subjects should be poor in spirit and that there should be no strong bond of friendship or society among them, which love, above all other motives, is likely to inspire, as our Athenian tyrants-learned by experience; for the love of Aristogeiton and the constancy of Harmodius had strength which undid their power.
It is the converse of the notion that denying the freedom of one group threatens the freedom of others. It is a matter of historical record that Christian thinkers such as St John Chrysostom accepting Philo of Alexandria’s notion of God-the-virtuous-exterminator of the morally quarantined (even to the extent of adapting Philo’s metaphors) had grim implications for Philo’s own people: St John Chrysostom being a notorious preacher against the Jews and Judaizing tendencies. Once the notion of “treason against God” and degradation of the morally quarantined had been accepted, it was just a case of “fill in the blank”. Christianity may have had its founding principles as:
Jesus replied: ” ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
but once one group had been defined out of the category of (moral) neighbour, so could another. And were. Alexandria became a city where Christian thugs led by the local bishop murdered Jews, pagans and, famously, the philosopher Hypatia. That the natural law interpretation of the only permissible sexual activity being procreative acts is known as the “Alexandrian interpretation”, due to St Clement of Alexandria developing the (homicidally intolerant) ideas of Philo of Alexandria, has many levels of irony to it.
Social conservatives are often highly scornful of judicial action in favour of the rights of the same-sex attracted. But if judges come to decide that presumptions of heterosexuality are no longer a tenable legal understanding of what it is to be human, clearly that will change interpretation of law: constitutional or otherwise. If our concept of “the human” changes, then the law changes.
Queers as human too
So much of history of dealing (or not) with human sexual diversity is about defending a certain concept of the human. Having sex with members of your own sex was regarded as a betrayal of human nature: in particular, a betrayal of masculinity. Two men having sex were regarded as committing a form of treason against the purposes of God, as Creator of nature.
Since it was held to be a betrayal of the nature of things—the nature of sex, the nature of the human—it was so outside the realm of the acceptable that even access to discourse was denied, sodomites being struck dumb before the Throne of God. Even talking about the sin was held to be dubious. Some penitentials would be deliberately obscure on the details of the sin. It was often held to be important not to translate descriptive passages into the vernacular, a view one can still see on some websites.
This was a sexual manifestation of a wider pattern: if something or someone was outside the realm of the properly human, who knows what strange powers/fascination they may have? The problem of “I have no positive framework I am with in which to think about these things” is still a major barrier to achieving either legal equality or full social acceptance.
Hence, the Vatican describing the same-sex attracted as as being “ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil” and thus “objectively disordered” so as to ensure their aspirations are discounted. Given the natural law thinking underlying much Catholic moral thought, this is not a difficult move, as the notion of proper nature also implies improper nature. As a relatively small, historically easily isolated, minority, the same-sex attracted are a very useful target group to preach against, thereby selling effortless virtue to the large majority who are not same-sex attracted. So many clerics—in their role as “gatekeepers of righteousness”—do just that. An easy option for the hucksters of faith.
So there is something to social constructionism in the sense of accepted concepts matter: particularly notions of the “proper” form of the human. Norton is perfectly comfortable with deconstructing discourses of “compulsory heterosexuality”, for example (p.7). Yet that is very different from claiming that accepted concepts “go all the way down”: that human reality is plastic to accepted prevailing discourse. (Accepted by whom? Prevailing where? Moulding social reality and personal identity by what mechanisms?)
As Norton documents, claims about the defining power of words, of language do not sit with how things are. The diversity, indeed the contingency, of allegedly defining conceptions sits rather poorly with the much greater persistence of phenomena. Hence, the reality of the deliberate suppression of homosexuals and homosexual experience goes utterly against Foucault’s notion of creating a concept of homosexuality by naming it (p.178).
As Norman Geras points out more generally, and Norton documents in the specific case of homosexuals, the claims of the marginalised to justice are claims about truth, about reality, about how things are. Foucault’s games with words are profoundly empty: empty both of connection to how things are and empty of any genuine moral power. People, and people’s experiences, are not defined by the words used about them, they are merely expressed (or not) by such. Academics may find the empty self-importance of social constructionist theory attractive, but it should not be mistaken for anything that is worthwhile: either in moral or in scholarly terms.
69 Comments
Both my parents had close friends from high school who were gay and lesbian. I don’t recall my parents ever explaining this to me. It was simply that we went to “John” and “Dave’s” house or “Jane” and “Daisy” came to stay with us for a week. It was all very matter of fact – a great way of teaching a small kid that these were just normal varieties of human relationship.
I might not have had the words to explain what these relationships were, but it doesn’t mean that they didn’t exist or that I wasn’t aware of them.
So basically we’re returning to the repressive hypothesis then?
Nobody’s mentioned repression… indeed, what we’re looking at here is a respect for the historical record. Norton does a fabulous job of documenting the deliberate destruction of the past, something that it has become unfashionable to highlight in recent times. Trying to build a theory out of whole cloth (which is what Foucault and friends try to do) out of what remains is fraught with danger.
/Lawyer who knows what happens in certain law firms which shall remain nameless when they want to arse-cover…
The expression ‘Foucault and friends’ is telling, I think. As is the fact that you don’t recognise the significance of the repressive hypothesis or how it is being reproduced in the review above.
Actually, I retract that comment and offer my apologies for its tone.
I would like to note, however, that I don’t think Norton (or ‘Lorenzo’) have done a particularly good job taking on the central Foucaultian ideas, in part because that would mean picking apart Foucault’s detailed historical and philosophical research – out of which all of his theoretical positions emerged – and not just countering some hastily sketched version of what either author imagines Foucault’s position to be.
Out of curiosity, what is the repressive hypothesis?
The repressive hypothesis is the idea that the modern age has been subject to pervasive censorship and repression of sexuality, peaking with Victorianism. Norton is implicitly recuperating this in his version of queer history, but extending it, or so it seems, across the history of western civilisation. Necessarily counterposed – and Norton does this also – is the idea of an essential or unmediated sexual identity that can and must be revealed against this repression.
What amazes me is that, where we might usually expect attacks on theorists for using contemporary categories to assess past actions and actors, here it seems the opposite is the case. Against an attentive (if not always correct) historian like Foucault is being posed an ahistorical concept of ‘queerness’.
Most of all though this seems to be a very misguided attack on Foucault, whose claims are far more limited and carefully applied (in spite of his mid-century French style) than any of the ideas attributed to him here.
Nasty story, the story of Hypatia’s down fall. Adds a new dimension the concept of “getting into a scrape”.
L.E – thanks for asking the question & AG, terrifically clear answer, much appreciated.
I adore Foucault. His work is so valuable, yet he’s no longer fashionable in the ivory tower. Modern sociologists have not come up with anything more lucid or enlightening (to replace the areas of concern to Foucault) but why hold onto the old when you can just chuck it out, right?
This review is a rollicking great read, wonderful to have ready access to a point of view that I wouldn’t go in search of. I’ll have to read this again on the weekend, too much to mull over in a single sitting.
Maybe Foucault should have stuck to the 19th century, then, because his reading of classical antiquity is wrong from bow to stern, and complicated by his accessing the relevant material in translation (this is a common flaw among historians — they don’t do enough language study).
He is still fashionable, Caz — as is (lamentably) Judith Butler, who badly needs a class in BIOL101.
AG says:
“Against an attentive (if not always correct) historian like Foucault is being posed an ahistorical concept of ‘queerness’.”
As someone whose identity has changed numerous times over the years I’d like to put in my two cents worth. I’ve traveled a lot throughout SE Asia in particular since my teens and I’m well aware that a homosexual identity can exist anywhere, even the tiniest village virtually untouched by western influence.
Foucault’s emphasis on social construction and denial of “ahistorical essentialism” is very much falsified by my lived experience.
It is my observation that an embryonic and mostly hidden homosexual identity will emerge in any environment where same sex orientated men come into contact. It is thus unsurprising that same sex orientated men from all cultural backgrounds are able to slide into much more open gay subcultures like that in Sydney much like ducks take to water.
Foucault would’ve drawn much more realistic conclusions if he’d traveled the globe and mingled with ordinary folk rather than being just another lazy housebound academic.
Sigh. On Judith Butler:
“In response to Dutton’s criticism, Butler wrote a letter to the London Review of Books and an op-ed piece in the New York Times, in which she argued that writing clearly can make the author too reliant on common sense and as such make language lose its potential to “shape the world” and shake up the status quo.[27][28] Alan Sokal, in turn, argued against Butler’s op-ed by letter, stating that “Bad Writing Has No Defense”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Butler
Our academic boroughs are truly rotten.
AG, thank you for that answer. I’m afraid that all I could remember of Foucault from my undergraduate days was the panopticon (a vivid image which always impressed me).
I’d say that whether or not one was repressed for one’s sexuality in Classical times very much depends upon the community one lived in. Obviously the Ancient Greeks and Romans had few problems with homosexuality. I understand it was also acceptable in Classical China and Japan. (A friend who grew up in China said it was really funny when they had to study classical Chinese texts and the teachers were trying to explain away the various homosexual relationships in them.)
However, it would have been a totally different kettle of fish in some other communities. In early Christianity, St Paul said that homosexual and lesbian sex were not allowed. I was fascinated to learn that Bishop Shelby Spong has theorised that Paul himself may have had homosexual desires which he repressed – hence his very negative attitude to sex generally and his dismissiveness to women. Of course, Spong got himself into tremendous trouble with that one…
Judaism forbade homosexual sex in Leviticus, and of course the story of Sodom and Gomorrah was from the Tanakh. The Talmud displays an attitude that Jews don’t do that kind of thing anyway so it’s not worth outlawing… (reminds me of Mr Justice Powell in Lorenzo’s post…)
So I don’t think one can generalise about repression or lack thereof in ancient times. It very much depends upon the culture/religion/government at the time. I don’t know enough about Foucault to know whether he says that repression is a modern phenomenon only, but I’d say that it’s something which comes up sporadically, in different communities at different times.
.I don’t know enough about Foucault to know whether he says that repression is a modern phenomenon only, but I’d say that it’s something which comes up sporadically, in different communities at different times.
Treatment of climate scpetics perhaps
see Rudd’s comments.
http://news.theage.com.au/breaking-news-national/rudd-attacks-climate-change-sceptics-20091106-i1tp.html
JC, I was thinking specifically of repression of same-sex activities, not climate sceptics.
Nonetheless, if Rudd is arguing climate sceptics should not even be able to express a point of view in the national media – that’s dangerous stuff, regardless of what one’s views are about climate change.
Curious how the focus on one thing, and only one thing, negates Foucault’s – and other’s – life work.
Aren’t we clever.
Forget gay men for a second:
- crime
- mental illness
- social norms (broader than being gay!)
Not socially constructed?
Truly.
It was only after homosexuality was largely decriminalized that room was found to take seriously the notion that children were, in fact, sexually abused (not just lies told by imaginative and naughty kiddies), and to acknowledge and apply laws a tad more vigorously. Child sexual abuse always existed, but largely denied, socially and by the law.
That’s just a quick & simple example.
Mental health – ah, where to start! There are no quick examples.
Not socially constructed? Look at what they’re doing with the latest revision of the bible of mental health.
We all know better than to make sweeping statements, but dismissing Foucault based on the gay thing?
Our lives are mediated by language, which in itself is a social construct!
Perhaps the critiques of M.F are too colored by the modern sensibility.
And oh dear, anyone thinking that sex isn’t a social construct should have a chat with a few feminists, young and old, and a gaggle of pole dancers.
In advance – sorry if I’m mis-reading comments & jumping to wrong conclusions, am rushed, so would not surprise if I’ve grabbed wrong end of a stick ,or such.
What’s interesting about Paul is that he explicitly went after lesbians as well. As this site shows (scroll down to the section on homosexuality), before the Rambam, Judaism didn’t particularly care about lesbianism (it was ‘mere licentiousness’, apparently). The stinger is Romans 1:26-27:
In the context of classical antiquity generally and Judaism specifically, that is completely new.
“And oh dear, anyone thinking that sex isn’t a social construct should have a chat with a few feminists, young and old, and a gaggle of pole dancers.”
Since when have feminists been the font of all wisdom? In any event feminism is as broad a church as any other “ism”. Some, like Beatrice Faust in “Women, Sex and Pornography” for example, do pay serious attention to our biological endowment.
But the killer argument is this as far as I am concerned- we see broadly similar patterns cropping up with monotonous regularity across time and space in unique cultures. For example every society that has ever existed whether it be hunter-gatherer (Australian Aboriginal nations), horticultural (PNG tribes), agrarian (Chinese circa 1500) or post-industrial (Western nations today) could rightly be described as a patriarchy.
Having said that, and in order to head off unwarranted claims that I’m a sexist, let me also point out that those societies with a much more equal distribution of gender power are better places in which to live for both men and women.
Extreme “social constructionist” stances, like those of Foucault and Butler, that construe us as minds sans biological endowment, are observably wrong (obviously the same goes for the biology sans culture extreme.)
Oops caught by the spamulator. Pls set me free.
You’re out of the spammer, Mel, Have no idea why it trapped you, you didn’t even have a link. It’s got a mind of its own, truly.
I know little if anything of value about Foucault so would appreciate a response to the following.
My understanding is that Foucault made his reputation with “Civilisation and Madness” wherein he argued that madness is predominantly a social construct. It appears he may have paved the way for the anti-psychiatry school in promoting madness as just a different way of perceiving the world.
I hope the above isn’t true because while in the 19th century it may have been true that many deemed mad were just eccentric in this day and age that doesn’t wash. However it appears that certain segments in society still perceive mental illness as a “social construction”. I wish it were that easy!
Caz
On the one hand, you make a very valid defence of Foucault, but it is precisely that defence that has always most irked me about Foucault. And that is he is/was only capable psychologically of viewing power as something negative, evil, unjust, to be “resisted”. And yet, in his schema, “power” is omnipresent, even more so than oxygen!
In Foucault, there is no sense of the “power” wielded by the Gates Foundation, for example; there is no acknowledgement of the “good” power a parent exercises over an infant, and on, and on.
What I have never understood is how academic feminism embraced him so deisitically. Now, I have not read anywhere near everything he has written, but there ain’t too many chicks in his writings. Well actually I do understand only too well.
You would really have to be a western gay man to understand where Foucault’s notion of power and its unmitigating darkness is coming from. It is clearly a psychological projection of a gay man born too early to benefit properly from “gay lib”. All that repression channeled into a preternaturally sado-masochist sex drive is so obviously projected onto every page he writes.
The fact is, Foucault loved being the bottom/victim role of psycho-sexual activities. He spent a great deal of his time several feet under the streets of San Fran’s Castro district in a sling with a gutful of drugs, particularly LSD, being banged like a dunny-door in a cyclone. It was the availability of such delights that hastened his move to Berkeley. He projects these same notions onto the ancient Greco-Roman world as well.
Feminists never clicked to this. I have known gay men like this. Once I peeked in one’s telephone book. Only two female names out of dozens; his mother’s and his sister’s.
My opinion as to whether sexuality is socially constructed is: yes and no. I think there’s all kinds of hardwired urges which operate on human beings – including natural selection and sexual selection (which are quite different).
And I think that some people are just born gay or lesbian – these orientations arise in every society. Some people are naturally bisexual. And some people are heterosexual.
But people do try to change the way we’re hardwired and construct different sexualities. So people try to outlaw gays and lesbians, for example, trying to reconstruct sexuality in a particular kind of way.
The thing is that if these “reconstructions” don’t square with the way humans basically work, then you’re pushing a boulder uphill. Often, sexual stuff comes out in weird ways because it’s been repressed. I was reading about early Christian communities which were celibate, and were shocked to find that rather than one’s thoughts becoming more “pure”, one’s dreams became more racy and one was more likely to have “nocturnal emissions”. So then they fasted more and punished themselves more. Really the thing is that they are acting against the way humans are supposed act, so then these urges pop up in other odd ways.
Likewise if you repress a gay man like Foucault, it will all come out a bit oddly (as detailed by JG above in his very interesting observations).
Very interesting observations, JG. Thanks.
I would like to thank everyone for their thoughtful comments. I would point out that I do not claim to be any sort of expert on Foucault, I was merely presenting Norton’s thesis. (Though what little I have read of Foucault did not impress.)
Caz: I often find that what people say about homosexuality is a good test of their general thesis, where homosexuality is a relevant case. So, for example, when The Nurture Assumption Harris says some silly things about homosexuality, it makes me wonder about her general thesis. Similarly with They F*** You Up Oliver James. (Particularly good examples, as they are arguing for diametrically opposed positions.)
Conversely, when LeRoy Ladurie takes a rather doubtful construction of homosexuality in Montaillou, that really does not affect the worth of his general thesis at all.
Also, I agree with melaleuca: that things are socially manifested does not mean they are socially constructed all the way down. It is not an either-or. As it happens, my latest post reviews a book on the study of religion as it is which is very critical of cultural explanations.
Skepticlawyer: my take on St Paul is that he is a disciple of two people. Jesus of Nazareth and Philo of Alexandria, and its Philo’s form-obsessed natural law which leads St Paul to, for example, be the only Biblical source to even mention female-female sex and to be the only New Testament source who mentions same-sex activity at all.
Sorry about the double comment, there were a couple of formatting errors in the first one.
Lorenzo, I’ve removed the dodgy comment and left the intact one… I hope okay.
There are some rather wild misrepresentations of Foucault here. The guy had his flaws, but he deserves better than this rubbish.
First, Foucault never denied that biology existed. His argument was more that the biological was hardly untainted with social and cultural practices. This should be an obvious and uncontroversial point. Italians like prosciutto; Tunisians, not so much.
As someone whose identity has changed numerous times over the years I’d like to put in my two cents worth. I’ve traveled a lot throughout SE Asia in particular since my teens and I’m well aware that a homosexual identity can exist anywhere, even the tiniest village virtually untouched by western influence.
‘Homosexuality’ exists, and has always existed. The ‘identity’ aspect varies widely across time and place. How many gay mardi gras are there in Vietnam, or in 19th century Europe?
Foucault would’ve drawn much more realistic conclusions if he’d traveled the globe and mingled with ordinary folk rather than being just another lazy housebound academic.
He travelled to communist Poland and revolutionary Iran. He was probably less ‘housebound’ than some of the people on this thread.
My understanding is that Foucault made his reputation with “Civilisation and Madness” wherein he argued that madness is predominantly a social construct. It appears he may have paved the way for the anti-psychiatry school in promoting madness as just a different way of perceiving the world.
Madness and Civ advances a number of theses, none of which you’ve captured here. Firstly, Foucault argued that what we might call ‘psychatric epistemology’ changed from the Renaissance to the 19th Century. Madness moved from popular discourse to medical specialisation, and the mad were imprisoned. Secondly, Foucault argued that as psychiatry became more ‘enlightened’, it relinquished its prisons and shackles, but only to find more subtle and insidious means of control.
On the one hand, you make a very valid defence of Foucault, but it is precisely that defence that has always most irked me about Foucault. And that is he is/was only capable psychologically of viewing power as something negative, evil, unjust, to be “resisted”. And yet, in his schema, “power” is omnipresent, even more so than oxygen!
Foucault explicitly and repeatedly said that power was not merely negative. And he never sought recourse to moral categories like ‘evil’.
This idea that Foucault was some idiot with nothing more than a glorified version of the nurture argument is false, and suggests Francophobia more than anything else.
Carlos says:
“‘Homosexuality’ exists, and has always existed. The ‘identity’ aspect varies widely across time and place. How many gay mardi gras are there in Vietnam, or in 19th century Europe?”
Whether Vietnamese gays have a mardi gras or not is beside the point. The point is that the impulse to be flamboyant, dramatic, theatrical etc that has culminated in the mardi gras exists where ever homosexual men get together.
Let me give an example. My first Vietnamese boyfriend and three of his friends formed a dance/theatre group and put on shows while in their early teens. They all wore makeup and dressed as girls. They were considered so good that Vietnamese Communist Party officials wanted to send them off on a tour of Moscow. This was in the early 80s when Vietnam was sealed off from the West by the bamboo curtain. They had never heard of the mardi gras or Western gay culture but they nonetheless shared behavioural characteristics they were identifiably gay.
As I said previously and it is worth repeating, the existence of universal shared tendencies and characteristics explain why it is so easy for gay men from all four corners of the globe to take to the Sydney gay scene like ducks to water.
I suppose I should be more sympathetic with a Foucaultian type outlook because I put away my frock and pink shoes and got married two years ago
Spamulated again guys.
Carlos
As I said, I have read nowhere near a lot of Foucault. But everything I have of both Foucault and those who use his methods – Foucaultians if you like – has never revealed this non-negative notion of power. If you could direct me to some literature that might contradict the current view I have of Foucault and power, I would be very grateful.
mel
I’m a little on Foucault’s side in distinguishing between man-on-man sex/love and “homosexuality”. I do largely agree with Foucuault that in the 19th century, “science” colonised man-on-man sex/love.
It was this ‘scientific turn’ that largely determined the social position/status /attitude-towards man-on-man sex/love up until basically when the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove “homosexuality” from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1974, meaning it was not not until DSM-III was published in 1980 that “science” lost its grip over not only reducing man-on-man sex/love to this “homsexuality” but also on how hoi polloi started to regard same-sex relationships; and MOST importantly how individual men and women started to think and feel about their own same-sex urges and desires.
I agree that what you say is an important part of the picture, JG, but critiques of Foucault point out that there is a other layers to reality outside of those facts.
For example, in spite of your comments about the hoi polloi I’m aware that in a significant number of families there was an unmarried aunt or uncle somewhere in the family tree who lived with his/her lifelong friend and never married. They were accepted into the family but their homosexuality was never discussed. Who recorded their histories? Answer- no one.
Realities like this shouldn’t be ignored but they are largely ignored because they do not tend to get documented by the historian, not least because such things are extremely difficult to study. It is far easier for the historian or culti studies person to instead access police, newspaper and court records and present a laura norder version of gay history, or to access the publications of psychiatrists and produce a medical version of gay history.
Yes, the bachelor uncles and maiden aunts phenomenon — they’ve been documented since Roman times, to be fair (usually with sly comments at the time about such and such senior person never getting married, nudge nudge, wink wink).
It turns up in discussion of Roman legislation (the Lex Papia Poppaea, about the two bachelor consuls of that year) and in Juvenal (about unmarried women who descend on the gym in a body and train as gladiators). And that’s just two I can think of off the top of my head…
So sorry I wasn’t around to let everyone out of the spambulator. Spent the afternoon at Mum and Dad’s marking – didn’t check blog until now. The main PC is totally kaput – got a man to take it away to try and fix it. Once he’s worked out what’s wrong with it (prima facie a problem with the graphics card), I’ll have to work out what I want to do to fix it (get a new one? patch up the old beast one last time?)
Good news is – have now marked 35 papers (over 1/3 of the way to completion). Life will soon regain normalcy (or as much normalcy as I can manage).
Mel, I’d totally agree with you re the “unmarried uncle”. One of my mates comes from a farming family. His uncle is “unmarried” (for which read, has a long term male partner who was invited to my friend’s wedding with his uncle). No one mentions it, but no one speaks out against it either. It’s just accepted. No one ever says, “Uncle Blah is gay.” Damn hard to identify and study unless you know the family.
Mel raises a good point that reminds me of a doco I saw on homosexuals in the military during WW2. They were there, they were tolerated, they did their job. Now in the USA this huge ruckus over homosexuals in the military. My how things have changed.
The point is that the impulse to be flamboyant, dramatic, theatrical etc that has culminated in the mardi gras exists where ever homosexual men get together.
I’m not entirely sure that’s true. There are gay males who like hunting and fishing and who read Hemingway. There may be a history of camp/kitsch and homosexuality going hand in hand, but that doesn’t mean we ought to see camp as some kind of Platonic ideal here.
If you could direct me to some literature that might contradict the current view I have of Foucault and power, I would be very grateful.
Things should be reversed a bit here. Foucault, as far as I’m aware, never said that power was negative. He always attributed to ti a structuring, positive quality. If you wants a basic start, try the book ‘Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings’. On p. 140, Foucault explicitly sets out a critique of power as negative, appended to a broader critique law and power being reducible to a ‘master’. On p. 52 of the same text, Foucault argues that power is inextricably linked to knowledge. This is a theme that recurs continually through Foucault’s works.
Carlos says:
“There are gay males who like hunting and fishing … ”
I know that honeybunches, but I submit that there have always been artistic, dramatic and flamboyant gay men. No doubt many of them were hairdressers in Ancient Rome.
Also note SL’s #35 “… It turns up in discussion of Roman legislation … and in Juvenal (about unmarried women who descend on the gym in a body and train as gladiators).”
They sound like the kind of butch dykes who’d rip you a new arsehole if you dared get between them and the pool table at a contemporaneous gay venue.
LOL. This took me back to a time when three of my close friends came out as lesbian within a period of about a month. I accompanied them on a few pub outings. Don’t mess with those dykes at the pool table.
LE: There is a great scene in Flawless when some trouble starts, the queer organiser calls for security saying I need some really butch faggots and, when things get worse, moves on to I need some dykes here.
SL: Yes, removing that comment was fine.
Foucault obviously draws some strong reactions. Norton does not make a general critique of Foucault or social constructionism, his argument is focused on the issue of homosexuality and homosexual identity.
That C19th medicine pathologised homosexuality is clearly true. This is a debate that extends to our time and is not entirely dead yet.
That there are power relations involved is also clearly true. The authority of certain perspectives, the ease with which the same-sex attracted and active could be excluded, the significance of rising activism by the same: these are all parts of the story.
Norton’s point is that people’s behaviour, and even their self-conceptions, simply did not conform to the “authoritative” patterns. That one can see persistent social patterns and individual behaviours down the millennia. So, when Philo of Alexandria writes:
We understand perfectly well what he is complaining about: what we would call a “gay subculture” in Alexandria at the time of Christ.
Now, there will obviously be some specific social constructions put on the underlying phenomena (for example, manifesting in part through worship of certain pagan deities which involved cross gender lines), but we are clearly talking of specific forms of human diversity (and manifestations there of) which re-occur again and again.
So when Montaigne writes of same-sex marriages in C16th Papal Rome (also referred to by the Venetian Ambassador of the day) we are clearly looking a persistent human aspirations, regardless of what power and legitimate authority may have theorised. As Norton writes, he supports same-sex marriage not because it is new, but precisely because it is not, it is part of a continuing homosexual history–a culture of adoption rather than procreation, but one based on continuing patterns of human diversity rooted in human nature, manifesting under a wide variety of public discourses which, far from defining such, are regularly confounded by such.
There’s an obsession with appearance in that passage from Philo, isn’t there? I can’t comment on Philo directly, but one thing I’ve noticed with the Romans (obviously I have access to their literature in the original) is the obsession with fama.
That is, you are not what you think you are, but what other people think you are. So Juvenal’s whinges about the women training as gladiators at the local baths wasn’t about the fact that they were tribades, what shat him off was the training as gladiators, and looking like blokes (part of one scene involves one of them, armored up, using the men’s loos — Roman baths were mixed but the dunnies, as ours are, were segregated).
Similarly, you get the same thing with men into the ‘Greek vice’. It’s all fine and dandy as long as you manifest like a man outside (no problems with being queer and a brave soldier, but ffs don’t grow your hair, the Roman male ideal being variations on this).
I copped that Juvenal passage as an unseen, so I’ve never forgotten it, but the image recurs throughout their literature. Often, there’s no mention of ‘taking it’ either (referring to men) — the focus is on appearance. So for the Romans, bears and lipstick lesbians were fine, but cross-dressing was out… unless it was a religious festival (Megalesia usually), where people were encouraged to ‘dress their opposite gender’.
There’s a very funny passage in Ramsay Macmullen’s Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries where he describes the soldiers on a military base swapping clothes with their girlfriends and ‘hamming it up’ like nobody’s business. The Christians, of course, are appalled by it — but then they loathed Cybele and everything she stood for.
As Mary Douglas or Victor Turner would tell you, this is just an example of entry into a ‘liminal state’. Once Cybele’s festival was over, the girls went back to looking feminine and the boys went back to looking manly, as was socially expected.
Bravo Lorenzo. Very informative and well said.
Mel
I am not aware of much – if any – evidence of lesbianism in the Greco-Roman world. I would be delighted to be educated otherwise.
mel
On the spinster/bachelor uncle/aunt being accepted by some families, I agree. In my own extended biological family, there are 20 aunts and uncles (ten of each), ALL married. But one of my Mum’s best BFF, “Aunty” Ruth was married to “Uncle” Ray. I had always been told that “Uncle” Ray, in my mother’s inimitable disregard for political correctness, a “wally woofter/shirt-lifter” but he was loved adored by all, including my father and uncles.
I, in particular, found his existence in our extended family to be a godsend. He was far wittier, suave, and naughty than all my biological staid uncles, what with their family-providing responsibilities, blue-collar jobs and so on.
Still,how many of these who were/are accepted/tolerated in silence also had been in mental hospitals, subject to life-long psychiatric treatment to “change” to become “normal”, had ECT, lobotomies, etc? And how many were not so accepted/tolerated? How ,any were bashed, often to death by river-sides, in cars, in the back-alleys of hotels?
It is not true that current-day historians ignore these aunts and uncles. There is a whole sub-discipline of history devoted to “history of sexualities” and much published research on poofs/dykes in Australia going back from the First Fleet right up to Mardi Gras.
I can give you a couple on lesbians, Jayjee, while I’m on the fly: from a work attributed to Lucian (but not, it would appear by him, but by a contemporary) praising same-sex love generally:
[Erotes 26]. Rufus (in Oribas 6.38), meanwhile, complains about ‘women who pursue other women with an almost masculine jealousy’, rather than being a bit more measured about it. In the latter case, a specific analogy is drawn to men who look and sound awfully like the ones in the passage of Philo Lorenzo has quoted. Can’t have people behaving like their opposite gender, now, even when it’s clear they prefer their own.
On evidence outside of literature, there are the charms and spells from places as diverse as Bath and Egypt that are from women trying to get other women to fall in love with them. They use the same pro-formas, interestingly, as males chasing males, not heterosexuals pursuing each other. Sappho (as you’d expect) gets quoted a lot, and in some cases most of a poem has been reconstructed thanks to hopeful women leaning on her expressiveness (or Catullus’ versions, which were acknowledged to be excellent translations, even in antiquity).
This is a very sobering comment, and it does make you wonder that for every family with a tolerated person like this, how many others there were with a far less pleasant outcome…
“Still, how many of these who were/are accepted/tolerated in silence also had been in mental hospitals, subject to life-long psychiatric treatment to “change” to become “normal”, had ECT, lobotomies, etc? And how many were not so accepted/tolerated? How many were bashed, often to death by river-sides, in cars, in the back-alleys of hotels?”
I’m in agreement there as well. That is a part of the story that also must be told.
SL
Thanks for those sources; I’ll check ‘em out. My “expertise” (as much as a mature-aged type with an undergrad major in history CAN have an “expertise”, even if the ‘Special Topic’ is one close to his personal life
) is Greek sexuality. I am nowhere near as conversant in the Latin literature. And blast, the courses I did take in Roman history focused on Late Antiquity/Medieval period OR the Republic. So, from about 80BC to 300AD, there’s a bit of a black hole. The one exception being I am quite up on the early steps taken by Xianity and their symbiosis with changes in the Late Empire period.
mel/SL
I think there would a tonne of data/sources for a thesis/book on comparing the tolerated/loved Spinster Aunt/Bachelor Uncle and their “friend” versus the pathologised, incarcerated, and/or murdered “queer” in Australia.
“All” you would have do is do what Foucault did. If you chose a time period – say 1930-1970 and researched the archives of loony bins, the main medical associations, and police/court records associated with the anti-sodomy and similar laws of the time, you would surely trawl a huge catch of data, from which you could ripple out to include the other sides of the story.
I imagine that once you start getting names – especially if those names are of prominent types who kept diaries, etc, you could tell quite a tale.
JG, I can’t read Greek, which is why I’ve tended to leave the Greeks alone. I can read Latin so am more confident there. If you love late antiquity and the fights between Christians and Pagans, then all I can recommend is Ramsay Macmullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (Yale, 1997). You will never think about religion (and its attitudes to sexuality and gender and — strangely enough — music and dance) in quite the same way after reading.
Half the book is footnotes, too, all of which are worth checking out.
“I think there would a tonne of data/sources for a thesis/book on comparing the tolerated/loved Spinster Aunt/Bachelor Uncle and their “friend” versus the pathologised, incarcerated, and/or murdered “queer” in Australia.”
At one stage during the 70s/early 80s something like 20% of all murders in NSW were anti-gay hate crimes.
mel
I have come across older guys on blogs who have talked about their youthful queer-bashing exercises with much remorse and regret. It still chilled me, even from the safety of an internet connection.
Mel, there’s a couple of provocation cases where the guy tried to argue he was “provoked” into killing the victim because the victim made a homosexual advance.
I wonder how much truth there is to the proposition that queer-bashers often have unresolved “issues” themselves (men hating gay men because they have gay feelings themselves and can’t stand it).
Ah yes, the gay panic ‘defence’. Whattacrockashit.
JJ
There is a useful discussion of Jewish attitudes to lesbianism from the classical period onwards here. Including reference to the Sifra criticising pagans for permitting same-sex marriage.
I have come across older guys on blogs who have talked about their youthful queer-bashing exercises with much remorse and regret. It still chilled me, even from the safety of an internet connection.
Not to mention getting fired for being a queer only as far back as the late 80s.
A dear friend of mine – an American – we later found out was fired from an American bank when they found out he was gay. He was later transferred to HK by the firm I worked for as that other bank “informed” on him.
He suicided in HK.
He was one of the most capable credit analysts the bank had ever hired.
I still feel pangs of sorrow for him and learnt a good lesson about the injustice of the mob.
Often the “homosexual panic” defence is actually morning-after regret.
wonder how much truth there is to the proposition that queer-bashers often have unresolved “issues” themselves (men hating gay men because they have gay feelings themselves and can’t stand it).
I don’t regard the issue as settled, and I think findings like the below are too often used to interpret any dislike of homosexuals as being indicative of latent homosexuality, but there does appear to be something of interest occurring there.
Modern imaging studies also show differential activation of the brain during sexual arousal, if it were found that the homphobic group demonstrated similiar activation patterns to homosexuals, that would be very interesting … .
CONCLUSION: Our findings indicate that different neural circuits are active during sexual arousal in homosexual and heterosexual men and may contribute to a better understanding of the neural basis of male sexual orientation.
PMID: 18768725 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
…
The authors investigated the role of homosexual arousal in exclusively heterosexual men who admitted negative affect toward homosexual individuals. Participants consisted of a group of homophobic men (n = 35) and a group of nonhomophobic men (n = 29); they were assigned to groups on the basis of their scores on the Index of Homophobia (W. W. Hudson & W. A. Ricketts, 1980). The men were exposed to sexually explicit erotic stimuli consisting of heterosexual, male homosexual, and lesbian videotapes, and changes in penile circumference were monitored. They also completed an Aggression Questionnaire (A. H. Buss & M. Perry, 1992). Both groups exhibited increases in penile circumference to the heterosexual and female homosexual videos. Only the homophobic men showed an increase in penile erection to male homosexual stimuli. The groups did not differ in aggression. Homophobia is apparently associated with homosexual arousal that the homophobic individual is either unaware of or denies.
PMID: 8772014 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
This study examined the relationship between homophobia (defined as self-reported negative affect, avoidance, and aggression toward homosexuals) and homosexual aggression. Self-identified heterosexual college men were assigned to homophobic (n = 26) and nonhomophobic (n = 26) groups on the basis of their scores on the Homophobia Scale (HS; L. W. Wright, H. E. Adams, & J. A. Bernat, 1999). Physical aggression was examined by having participants administer shocks to a fictitious opponent during a competitive reaction time (RT) task under the impression that the study was examining the relationship between sexually explicit material and RT. Participants were exposed to a male homosexual erotic videotape, their affective reactions were assessed, and they then competed in the RT task against either a heterosexual or a homosexual opponent. The homophobic group reported significantly more negative affect, anxiety, and anger-hostility after watching the homosexual erotic videotape than did the nonhomophobic group. Additionally, the homophobic group was significantly more aggressive toward the homosexual opponent, but the groups did not differ in aggression toward the heterosexual opponent.
PMID: 11261393 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
John, that is fascinating, and while not causative… is, perhaps, unsurprising.
John:
This study has to be a parody, no? It sounds awfully like a Sokal hoax.
I’m not trying to sound snarky by the way.
Both groups exhibited increases in penile circumference to the heterosexual and female homosexual videos. Only the homophobic men showed an increase in penile erection to male homosexual stimuli.
There wasn’t a good looking nurse carefully measuring circumferences? It sounds like a bad plot for a porno movie. LOl
No, jc, I’m sure I’ve read about it too, and it wasn’t a hoax. They had some kind of apparatus around…er hmm…yeah.
Having studied a bit of neuroscience and physiology, and having conducted even more “field” research myself, I long ago concluded that “scientists” never get anywhere near understanding these issues. The above is another example. There is more wisdom in a line I remember from an old gay porno flick. It was about a couple of American “redneck” types driving around the south picking up “queers”. Not to bash them, but to fuck them. At the end of one scene, the picked up queer says to the two “straight” rednecks. “Huh, you call us queer, you’re no different”. The redneck responded, “sure we are; we do this because we’re horny, you do it because you’re a sick queer”.
Make of that wisdom against the “peer-reviewed” scientists what you will.
Jayjee,
The reason I qualified my statements are:
The studies I saw did not exclude possible other causes. For example, homophobes may generally be more easily sexually aroused. Are there any studies indicating that homophobes become open homosexuals to a greater extent than controls? The differential CNS activation in homosexuals also points to a potential problem.
If the first eg is positive, good, if the second is positive, good, if the third is positive, good. Then the argument can move forward. Unfortunately people see studies like this and immediately conclude: you don’t like homosexuals eh … . I don’t know about women but most hetero men find the idea of homosexual sex repugnant so it is not surprising that people, extrapolating from the above studies, go on to assert that a great many are latent homosexuals.
If only human behavior were that simple!
Oh and I forgot, would be great to see studies on the hypothalamic nucleir INAH3(not sure if is 3, might be 2). There are differences there and in general there are a number of surprising differences between homosexuals and heterosexuals. For example, homosexual men display verbal iq that is higher than in controls and accords generally with female verbal iq.
Here’s the Liddle Homophobia Test. Take it. It’s very short.
My result?
i18 – Your score rates you as “high-grade non-homophobic.”
Given some of the queens I know, I think Mr. Liddle’s quiz overstates my case!
http://genderandhealth.ca/en/modules/sexandsexuality/gss-homophobia-01.jsp?r=
JJ
Strangely enough, I got the same score
John
As I understand it, there are various studies which indicate homosexuals to be cognitively cross-matched. That is, gay women tend to have various cognitive traits more characteristic of men and gay men tend to have various cognitive traits more characteristic of women. On reflection, not such a surprising result.
Lorenzo,
Yes, my impression is the same as yours. Strange mixture, fascinating and directly implies sex hormones influences on cerebral maturation. Makes me wonder if it provides a clue as to the creative potential seen in some homosexuals, both artistically and intellectually. I became interested in this a long time when I noted that Newton(probably gay), Wittgenstein(god yes), Turing(yes), Keynes(gay-bi), were ground breakers in their fields. Not to mention in the arts … . Interesting.
The queer folk are disproportionately intellectually creative/artistic is a long-time cross-cultural observation. It occurs in Amerindian cultures, for example (see book reviews here and here). Bruce Bawer expresses it vividly: