Valentine's Day Article to Ponder
Sat, 02/14/2009 - 14:22 — Lee Quinby
Here is an article entitled "Anti-Love Drug May be the Ticket to Bliss" from last month's New York Times that I thought might be of interest on this strange day of celebrating all things romantic:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/science/13tier.html?n=Top%2fNews%2fScience%2fColumns%2fFindings
Happy Valentine's Day to all of you! Lee
Comments
Patrick, you bring up a great
Patrick, you bring up a great point about the marginalization and oppression that would inevitably result if "love potions" were prescribed. It seemed to me that the doctor interviewed for this article was speaking of love in very traditional, heteronormative terms; he speaks specifically of "female-male bonds" and makes a generalization about "males' erotic fascination with breasts." (Although it was unclear to me if the latter quote was worded in that particular manner by the doctor of if it was coming more from the author of the article.) Would "love potions" seek to enforce this conventional mold? Or would they be prescribed fairly to conventional and non-conventional forms of love alike?
I think that this article
I think that this article brings up a lot of really important issues for us. In particular: science's role as an authority in the standardization and perpetuation of specific cultural values and practices pertaining to sexuality.
Scientific discourse has been particularly powerful in this respect because of its claim to "objectivity." How can anybody argue with science? Here it is important to emphasize that scientific observation and experimentation are always carried out under a cultural lens, and, therefore, scientific discovery (which makes claim to universalism) is informed by culture (which can vary tremendously). This makes any such "grand unified theory of love" inherently problematic. Such a theory objectifies love as something independent of culture while assuming numerous cultural values and practices in every aspect of its inquiry--the questions being asked (the peculiarity of breasts, why monogamy, etc.), the type of animals being experimented on (only those that have a "propensity for monogamy"), as well as the conclusions being made. One only needs to know that there have been numerous polygamist societies throughout history in order to see that such a theory is neither "grand" nor "unified." By establishing a variable cultural peculiarity as a scientific standard, a necessity for dichotomy (proliferation of perversions) such as "normal" and "abnormal," "right" and "wrong," "civilized" and "savage," emerges as a means of reinforcement. What is worriesome about such a pattern is that it can (and most certainly has) resulted in alienation, marginalization, and opression (namely, biological difference being applied as a politically and economically marginalizing force to women).