The SAGE Handbook of Identities

The SAGE Handbook of Identities Sexualities Contributors: Cindy Patton Edited by: Margaret Wetherell & Chandra Talpade Mohanty Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Identities Chapter Title: "Sexualities" Pub. Date: 2010 Access Date: January 26, 2016 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: London Print ISBN: 9781412934114 Online ISBN: 9781446200889 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446200889.n20 Print pages: 360-378 ©2010 SAGE Publications Ltd. All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book. Sexualities A Fashion for Self-Fashioning Most everyone in the Commonwealth, Europe, or North America can tell you what they are gay, straight, bisexual, bicurious. The categories of sexual identity subdivide as their capacity to designate fails some individuals. In our current context, it seems natural that everyone has a sexual identity; indeed, we feel a certain amount of pity toward those who disclaim a sexual identity, and relieved when those who held one at odds with our own perception of them finally ‘come out’ as whatever they have determined themselves truly to be. But how did it happen that something so clearly variable across cultures, places, times, and even individual life spans should be taken as not only a natural possession of each individual psyche but also universal? Sexual identity may be the example par excellence of the research object constituted by its own investigation, or in this case, doubly constituted; it is almost impossible to talk about sexual identity without also talking about sexuality, an object of study necessitated by investigation of the elusive category, desire, and its tawdry side kick, practice. To understand the trajectory of research on sexual identity, it is important to recognize that the past century of work that is plainly ‘about’ sexual identity that is, about the rise, nature, and use of sex, as opposed to research or philosophizing about, say, eros tracks alongside, and is often contingent on, shifting definitions of what counts as a sexual act, ideas about the source of sexual desire, and theories about the place of social structure in the production, recognition, and regulation of bodies, acts, and desires. Because its object is so uncertain (more likely a series of different objects), research on sexuality and sexual identity is uniquely interdisciplinary, conjoining work on art and literature, history, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, biology, and genetics. This work is also uniquely political: from Hirschfeld and Freud to Kinsey to current queer theorists and somatechnicians, leading researchers, clinicians, and educators have conducted their work largely with the aim of reducing the suffering of people they believed to be unfairly burdened (personally or socially) by the composition or direction of their erotic feelings. Because research on sexuality is so regularly at odds with the social, cultural, and legal structures that govern personal conduct, those who engage in this research have often been accused of being ‘perverts’ themselves. To a degree unknown in other academic specialties, research on sexuality (in the inaugural years, and, still foremost, deviant sexualities) is haunted by the demand to justify the study of its object: ‘the love that dare not speak its name’ is thought capable of contaminating those who study it. It is tempting to think of sexual identity as something of a postscript to the bigger and bolder forms of identity (e.g., cultural, national, racial); indeed, many people consider sexual identity to be the most recent, ‘personal’, and least important parsing of the aspects of human diversity around which one might form a sense of self. However, historian and philosopher Michel Foucault suggested that the now widely held conviction that identity lies within is the historical culmination of the west's long and circuitous contemplation of the flesh. In his Introduction to a History of Sexuality (1990 [1977]) and The Uses of Pleasure (1990[1985]), Foucault argues against the idea that there is a bedrock sexuality that an individual uncovers and then embraces as their sexual identity. Instead, in those volumes, and in the earlier Discipline and Punish (1977) and the later Care of the Self (1990[1986]), Foucault demonstrates the incremental shift in the west from overt mechanisms of control toward practices of self- regulation. This shift from power to knowledge/power necessitated the constitution of a ‘self’, complete with subjectivity capable of inner dialogue (‘I searched my soul’, ‘I asked myself’), which could serve as the locus for organizing and cultivating practices of self- regulation. Because (sexual) reproduction and sexual play cross paths with population control and the political consolidation it allows, we should not be surprised that sexual desire and sexual alterity were invented, then recursively linked. As I hope to chronicle here, sexual identity remains an ontologically contentious category, which means I necessarily occupy a position in the debate once framed as essentialism versus social construction. Although this framing gradually disappeared (not least because ‘essentialist’ became a nasty epithet), the fundamental issues remain and in polarized form: what is the ontological status of any or all of the cascade of potentially linked objects the desiring body (potentially intrinsic), sexual acts (almost necessarily extrinsic, except, perhaps as unspoken sexual fantasy or sexual memory), and sexual identity (argued to be intrinsic, but as Janet Halley (1993, 1999) shows in her research on homosexuality and employment law, communicated extrinsically, except in the case of ‘coming out to oneself’, an act that requires the form of interiority whose genealogy Foucault traced)? It is no doubt already obvious that I adopt Foucault's position as I side step the question of what sexual identity is in favor considering how the concept arose and has been worked out within western research. I first lay out the early murmurings of the research object ‘sexual identity’, work which struggles with the moral and biological nature of ‘sexuality’. I then identify the successors whose mid-twentieth-century work in the social sciences enabled the emergence of sexual identity in parallel with the other identities in the political agon of identity politics. I move on quickly to the historical research that the social science projects enabled, focusing on the political context that made particular styles of research on sexual identity the so-called essentialist work seem so urgent and plausible. This approach to the history of sexual identity should go some distance in explaining why the seemingly ‘essentialist’ identity related to the gay civil rights movements of the 1970s and 1980s lost its shock value, opening up the space for queer and performative sexual identities. This style of linking an interiority with practices and calling it ‘identity’ is what I believe most people mean when they speak of ‘sexual identity’. While apparently stable, it rests on an ongoing and uneasy compromise between opposing ontologies of sexuality: the ‘sexual identity’ that becomes globalized, significantly through the activism in relation to and management of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, is simultaneously conceived of as the product of fixed drives and as a social construction. This identity arose as the most personal complement of and in parallel with other now well accepted identities (black, Chicano, disabled, etc.) that were part of the larger rainbow of progressive identity-based social movements, a history well- documented in John D'Emilio's (1983) Sexual Politics/Sexual Communities. In the final section of this chapter, I consider how the historically and culturally circumscribed notion of sexual identity that was forged in the crucible of identity politics, by the 1990s, under the pressure of late modern globalization, especially in the vehicle of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, became recognizably international, even as it marked divergent people and practices. There are so many works from which to select, and such charged academic and political debates about sexuality and sexual identity that it is almost impossible not to fling myself into these debates. Instead, I trace particular academic and activist uses of the idea of sexual identity. It is not, contra the ongoing claim of most social researchers, that we do not understand sexuality very well, but rather, that we have so many uses for the idea of sexual identity that avenues of research continually open up. For example, in the 1980s US, changes in the law made it seem possible for homosexuals to be recognized as a type of citizen in a plurality of differences. Lesbian and gay historians took up the political task of finding not only homosexual forebearers, but also homosexual communities, the evidence necessary to prove that lesbians and gay men had always been part of America, and, because they were oppressed for their sexuality, should find their place alongside groups who were to attain civil rights and protections. Is this work an example of intellectually bankrupt essentialism, or of historically bound interpretations of complicated evidence in a politically charged context? To undercut the ontological status of one's difference was risky business in the civil rights era. These activist-academics are but one chapter in an incoherent story of research on sexual identity in the

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