Brilliant Title Here — Weeks & Norton
The two essays we read for this week from Kathy Peiss’s book, by Weeks and Norton respectively, seem to be a case of social constructivism versus essentialism. Weeks argues that sexuality – not the less ambiguous word “sex” – is not something natural, a biological function to be examined by scientists (as Foucault’s scientia sexualis, for example), but rather “a historical construction” (4), something enmeshed in a “tangled web of influence and forces” (5) – and not just a biological function. This, of course, has many implications for the many kinds of people in many different countries, all of whom engage in sexual activities in one way or another. If sexuality is cultural-specific, then the people of each culture will have different ways of expressing themselves sexually. The theory also means that the ways we express ourselves are not just natural; they are learned behaviors, incumbent upon the culture in which we live. Take flirting. I usually imagine a young girl, with heavy eye-makeup, batting her eyelashes in a manner she considers seductive, trying to “trap” the unwitting boy who is her prey. But in other cultures, flirting (if indeed, the people there do flirt) takes on different styles. I was imagining two US teenagers in the above scenario. It was cultural-specific. But as I saw in an exhibit in the Brooklyn Museum, in one part of Africa (unfortunately I don’t remember where), the men line up, their faces painted in abstract patters, and perform a dance before the bashful girls and confident women. The dance includes widening their eyes and clicking their teeth in a manner that actually made a little girl, who was standing next to me watching the film clip, cry for her mother. I wonder how puzzled – and frightened – those group of African people would be by our mating rituals, with all its attendant elaborate costumes, torturous grooming, and blaring music. In other words, a dance party.
But even talking about two different countries on two different continents does not encompass all that Week’s theory of social constructivism touches. Even within the US, there are arguably many cultures of sexuality – based on region, religion, ancestry, and orientation. That last culture is most important here, because Norton, who argues against Weeks and proposes a sexuality that is beyond culture – an idea he calls essentialism – bases his whole argument on the theory that homosexual behavior is similar cross-culture.
Norton’s beliefs seem to clash entirely with Weeks, until you look a bit deeper. Norton’s first argument in regards to social constructivism – that it envisions a pre-Industrial world where gay culture did not exist – does not seem to disagree so much with the entire of Weeks’ theory as with one part of it. Saying that there has always been a gay culture does not seem to be problematic for Weeks. Saying that there has been a consistently uniform gay culture, over centuries and across countries, however, would mess with Weeks’ theory. So Norton goes on to say exactly that. “[T]he characteristic features of a queer culture arise from a core of queer desire and are not wholly configured by the regulation of that desire” (11). In other words, queer culture, as he calls it, is as much a product of what it means and feels like to be gay as it is a product of laws and regulations governing sexuality, and homosexuality specifically. He goes on to say that “there is a core of queer desire that is transcultural, transnational, and transhistorical…innate, congenital, constitutional…” (12). But in the very same paragraph, he goes on to say that we should not mix “the constancy of the desire with the variability of its expression” (12). Or: Thou shalt not confuse having sex with having a sexual self. All gay people – and all straight people, too, for that matter – have basically the same sexual desires: to have sex, be it with someone of the same gender or the opposite. But how they express that desire – in their clothes, and the way they act, talk, and walk – will change. But it won’t change TOO much, according to Norton: Identity “is then consolidated along lines suggested by the collective identity…” (12).
This seems fairly logical. That girl in the first example had to learn from someone that females who want to look sexually desirable are expected to paint their faces. But when Norton goes on to talk of the gay lisp and gait, he loses me. Maybe it’s just too much political correctness, but I don’t like the way he makes it sound like the “queer gaze” (13) and other attributes have been accepted to be the norm beyond the shadow of a doubt.
The question it does raise, for me at least, is if the gay lisp/gait/gaze do exist, are they learned behaviors, or is it something Norton thinks gay men will adopt even if they lived as the only homosexual in Heterosexual City, USA? Norton seems to believe that they “learn their particular manner of speaking from one another…” (13).
On a side note, in Norton’s essay there is precious little mention of female homosexuality aside from a short mention of using the terms lesbian, dyke, and tomboy. I think this relevant since Norton does not believe Foucault’s idea that we discoursed and that’s how we learned. He argues that if people were always oblivious and naïve to homosexuality, then it should never exist. But I think people did discourse about it. At least in Western cultures, homosexuality is part of the Bible, isn’t it? I’m sure many people whispered of it, if not railed against it openly, in the past. But as far as I know, the Bible doesn’t mention women sleeping with women. It wasn’t discoursed about in the past – and now in the present, Norton does not mention it.
February 21st, 2010 at 1:49 pm
Hi Dassa, you and Joe and Kaitlyn have all dealt well with some of the points of debate between Weeks and Norton, so be sure to read their posts too as you continue to think about these issues. You raise a key point in observing that Norton says little about women and doesn’t mention the terms lesbian, dyke or tomboy–though one could make his case using those terms and a similar set of insistences by following his logic and providing a different set of examples.
I don’t quite follow the argument of your last paragraph in terms of what you say Norton says about discourse. But you do raise an important point about the absence of specific mention of women having sex with each other–in the Bible and elsewhere. As you say, the Old Testament specifically proscribes sex between men but does not do so in regard to women. A similar absence of restriction appears in late 19th and 20th century legislation which specifies laws against men engaging in sex with each other and also against male homosexual bars. Some historians have noted that this may be in part to gender assumptions about women and sexuality in general, with the assumption that women are less sexual in the first place. Your point about discourse existing is astute–so we need to think in terms of characterizing the various discourses–religious or scientific or legal, etc.