Culture, sexual lifeways, and developmental subjectivities: rethinking sexual taxonomies

Social Research, Summer, 1998 by Andrew J. Hostetler, Gilbert H. Herdt

Introduction

In the twenty years since the first English translation of Foucault's (1980[1978]) History of Sexuality, Volume 1, sexual categories have become conceptually and ideologically suspect. Building on Foucault's post-structural critique of sexual ideas and discourses, lesbian, gay, and feminist theorists have repeatedly contested the essential, intrinsic, or universal character of sexual identities. In subjecting the largely unexamined binaries of male/female and homo/hetero to analysis, theorists have gone beyond taxonomies of deviance to understand the cultural, historical, and textual sources of these idea systems (Altman, 1972, 1982; Weeks, 1977, 1981, 1985; Herdt, 1981, 1987, 1994; Vance, 1984, 1991; Newton, 1979; Newton and Walton, 1984; Halperin, 1990; Warner, 1993; Sedgwick, 1993a, 1993b, 1990; Butler, 1990, 1993; Halperin, 1995; Bersani, 1995; Patton, 1993; Berlant and Freeman, 1993; Halley, 1993). Cultural and historical investigations of two- and three-sex/gender systems (Herdt, ed., 1994), for instance, have substantially reframed the question of gender and sexual binarisms.

Taken together, this work has revealed some of the ways in which specific sexual identities are socially and discursively instantiated--on the body and in the mind--as alternately privileged or marginalized forms of personhood(1) in the contemporary Western world. This work has also produced a distinctive brand of inquiry, primarily textual, known as "queer theory." In addition to expanding the postmodern challenge to Western epistemological hegemony through its critique of geographic and temporal projections of our gender and sexual categories, queer theory has established sexual identity as a central axis of contemporary critical discourse about personhood and agency. Indeed, queer theorists have provided the most potent critiques of the theoretical coherence and practical utility of modern sexual taxonomies, though the claims of this position have not gone unchallenged within feminist and gay/lesbian academic quarters. Recent debates about queer theory have focused on moving beyond deconstructing identities, the necessity of their strategic deployment, and the importance of acknowledging the particularity of gay and lesbian lives. While recognizing the significance of these theoretical developments, we believe a gaping hole remains in postmodern discourses about sexual identities and classificatory systems: namely, the absence of a sufficiently complicated account of individual subjects and agents. More precisely, queer theory has tended to oppose individual agency to sexual taxonomy, typically on the grounds that taxonomy is normativizing and inevitably generative of an excluded other.

Through a careful reading of the assumptions and idealizations of queer theory--a reading informed by developmental psychology and cultural anthropology--this paper attempts to reconceptualize the relationship between sexual taxonomies, sexual subjectivities, and agency. While building on the insights of queer theory, we also wish to recoup sexual classificatory systems as necessary, even useful--if ever-shifting and contingent--frameworks for understanding the intentional realities and individual experiences of sexual minorities. After reviewing current debates among queer, feminist, and other poststrucrural theorists, we elaborate the concept of sexual lifeways (Herdt, 1997a) as an alternative to concepts such as "sexual identity." Sexual lifeways are culturally constituted developmental pathways, embedded within social and symbolic systems, that provide rich and meaningful contexts for the realization of full personhood in a society. These lifeways are conventionalized in the sense that they provide customary means and ends for individual development according to the locally situated theory of "human nature." Plummer (1994), for example, has explored the cultural narratives or "sexual stories" that guide normative and nonnormative sexual development in our own tradition. Similarly, the concept of "lifeway" enables an understanding both of the life possibilities opened up, as well as those foreclosed by a given sexual lifeway (for example, being "gay" or "lesbian" has thus far precluded canonical church marriage and parenthood). Thus, we can begin to chart the points of resistance as well as conformity in the space between deeply socialized desires--both normative and nonnormative--and the cultural scripts for their expression (Gagnon, 1990). We conclude with a brief example to illustrate these theoretical points.

Queer Theory: Grounding Assumptions and Continuing Debates

From its inception, queer theory has decentered concepts of subjectivity and identity. As is now well known, queer theory (a term attributed originally to Teresa de Lauretis [Wiegman, 1994]), is the immediate offspring of a gay and lesbian studies, wedded, so to speak, to gay and AIDS activism in the context of the late 1980s/early 1990s. Thus we might think of it as the grandchild of academic feminism and gay liberationist theory (see Annamarie Jagose, 1996). Although Foucault's History of Sexuality (1978) is often cited as the originary work in queer theory, earlier works by Hocquenghem (1993[1972]), Altman (1972, 1982), and Weeks (1977) are also considered significant. By the mid-1980s, its emergence was already signaled by constructivist social theory (see Plummer, 1981; Weeks, 1985; Herdt, 1981, 1987; Chauncey, 1982; D'Emilio, 1983; Newton, 1979; Rubin, 1981, 1993; Vance, 1984, 1991), a history sometimes forgotten by textual scholars (Patton, 1993; Altman, 1995). Particularly pivotal recent texts include Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) and Epistemology of the Closet (1990), and Judith Butler's Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). Sedgwick's Between Men has been widely credited with igniting the recent explosion of queer social and textual analyses, and her work has been highly influential in insinuating discussions of sexual identity into the center of critical discourse. And in Epistemology of the Closet she offers an opening salvo for the project of queer theory when she states: "An understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition" (p. 1).