A Critical Response ( = Hostility?)

[alixtii]

"Because the only thing that no straight man would do is be in a sexual relationship with another man."

Do I have to say I disagree with the above? If one's working definition of anything that is clear-cut and unproblematic, and one isn't doing math (and I'd have doubts even then), then chances are pretty good one's definition is wrong.  (Wait, am I being hostile? I linked to a public post.)

And then in the comments, Grace said "Yeah, I would word it as being attracted to the same sex, rather than simply having sex, makes you gay (or bi)," (I linked to a comment on a public post written by someone on my flist! OMG, I must have all kinds of hostility!) which in my IMHO is just as unidimensional and unsatisfying. For me (and I'm just repeating myself here, because I've said it plenty of times before in this journal), sexual orientation is a complicated interplay of behavior (of which both desire and sexual acts would be subsets, I suppose, although desire is really constructed in a way that sex as an act is not), self-identify, and social interpellation.

To ignore the socially constructed character of either homosexuality or heterosexuality (or bisexuality or . . .) is, IMHO, a mistake.

OTOH, "gay" is a much less fluid category than "queer" (as we saw in the most recent batch of "queer female space" discussions), so maybe it makes sense that a note of (biological?) essentialism might creep in. (And let's face it, there's a lot of sexual orientation essentialism in fandom, beginning but not ending with the seemingly uncritical use of the Kinsey scale and the "X isn't gay!" anti-slash arguments.) But embracing homonormativity isn't exactly something we want to do in any case, and should be resisted on those grounds, right?

Comments

[heyiya.livejournal.com]

I haven't weighed in on these discussions, but I agree with you 100%.

How you identify is more complex than who you sleep with, tied up with gender and desire and a whole lot else; while I generally think that it's always wrong to name someone else's sexuality or gender for them, I think that when it comes to the writerly readings of fanfic which are not (generally) about how or who the characters really, truly are, there is often more going on than the forcing of essentializing stereotypes onto unsuspecting characters. Feeling gay makes you gay; everything else is likely to depend. And I don't necessarily see fannish practices of reading queerness into/onto ostensibly heterosexual characters as contradicting that (although clearly I have a problem with the essentialism all round).

[fandrogyny.livejournal.com]

One of the strategies to combat any essentialism (but especially that pertaining to sexuality) is to offer up perspectives that are somewhere else on the spectrum. The only way that people will learn that an essentialist view is not meaningful for a number of people is if they hear what others have to say. So bully to you, I say.

Oh, and I read the queer female space chapter today. (Lots of reading was done today.) I can't wait to show you my notes.

Once when I was dating a bisexually-identified boy, friends asked me: "Do you think he'll cheat on you with another guy?" And I said: "Cheating is cheating. Being bisexual doesn't make him any more likely to cheat than if he were straight or gay or anything else." That was one of the first times I dealt with the social construction of labelled sexuality that I was fully aware of (instead of all the times it happened in childhood and I deemed it an awkward moment and nothing more).

[thirdblindmouse.livejournal.com]

To ignore the socially constructed character of either homosexuality or heterosexuality (or bisexuality or . . .) is, IMHO, a mistake.

Amen. I went through a period in my teens where I tried very hard to determine what I was "really". Eventually I realized that the terms were descriptors of trends of sexual behaviour and attraction and romance and so forth in an individual, and also the names of socially-defined groups, and gave up. When/if I get enough data points on my sex/love/attraction history to make a generalization about that, I'll do so.

To put it in a less navel-gazing and more *gasp* geeky context, I'd say that when discussing Xena as a product of and influence on the 90's it would be silly not to think of Xena and Gabrielle as ambiguously a lesbian couple, but if I had to give an in-universe analysis of their relationship, I would say that there was nothing ambiguous in the portrayal of their relationship: they were friends, they loved each other, they were committed to each other, they had a child together, and they had sex with and sometimes married other people. Them having sex with or not having sex with each other doesn't change any of that or make them fit more neatly into our categories of "lesbian lovers" or "straight friends".

...None of the above keeps me from looking at a show and being all "OMG so gay!" ;) Sitting around with friends snickeringly attributing unintended motives to screen characters has long been a past-time of mine, and if that traumatizing French film with the leopard didn't cure me of it, nothing will.