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

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

And individuals who do adopt a heteronormative sexual lifeway may still experience discrepancies between the different components of this lifeway. For instance, in a study of gay- and lesbian-identified youth in Chicago (Herdt and Boxer, 1996), we found that a heterosexually identified adolescent who hopes to be a wife and mother might experience significant dissonance as a result of her sexual desire to love and have sex with another woman. If she comes from a more traditional community within the city, she might experience a painful dichotomy between her desire for an erotic object versus her desire for a social and sexual way of life (heterosexual wife and mother). The inclination to seek a context in which to explore and understand these tensions and meanings is strongly marked, as Michelle Fine (1988) has shown for urban adolescent girls of color. So, while the cultural ideal is for sexual lifeways to shape individual sexual experience seamlessly, this is rarely the case in practice. It is in the various matches and mismatches that sexual subjectivities are formed. And sexual agency emerges in finding a personally acceptable balance between different kinds of desires--sexual, emotional, relational, and life-desires (Herdt and Boxer, 1996), the latter three of which are often neglected by queer theorists. Thus, agency may or may not involve discarding (the more voluntary components of) one sexual lifeway in favor of a more congruent, satisfying, or fulfilling one.

Whereas every sexual lifeway carries with it a sexual identity, or an internal sense of sexual sameness or belonging to one group and a sense of difference from another group or groups, not all sexual identities are attached to unique and distinct sexual lifeways. Some identities, which evolve over the course of both individual lives and historical time, never develop into full lifeways, and either remain tied to discrete periods of the life course or disappear from the cultural landscape altogether. Either fate may still await "queer," the future of which remains unclear, although we will argue momentarily that it shows significant promise of becoming a distinctive sexual lifeway. And unlike sexual lifeways, sexual identities--portable snapshots and abstractions--can be assumed for strategic and/or practical purposes in one context, and discarded in another. Although sexual lifeways can also be fluid and internally inconsistent, they cannot be alternately worn and shed like articles of clothing. Rather, strategic uses of identity tap into and mobilize common-sense understandings of sexual lifeways for particular purposes. Thus, a queer-identified woman might assume the identity of lesbian when advocating for lesbian and gay civil rights--a political discourse that mobilizes an ethnic or minority identity that, while effective in this context, is otherwise alien to her sense of self.

Because they are culturally and historically contingent, transmitted through processes of socialization, and subject to change and transformation over the course of individual lives, the study of sexual lifeways requires ethnographic, historical, and develop mental analyses. Within a given historical society, such as the United States, there may be multiple sexual cultures. For example, gay sexual culture has historically been somewhat distinct from heterosexual (or general, "Western") sexual culture, but the emergence of increasingly public lesbian and gay sexual lifeways has led to significant overlap between gay and heterosexual cultures (Levine, Nardi, and Gagnon, 1997). It is also possible for cultures that are fundamentally different in other ways to have similar sexual cultures. Of particular note, dominant or hegemonic sexual lifeways have consistently included marriage and parenthood across cultures and throughout history, with few exceptions, although there have been many cultural variations within this broad pattern. For instance, among the Sambia of Papua-New Guinea, men cannot marry or become fathers until they have passed through six stages of ritual initiations that include years of ritualized boy-insemination, or what we would call "fellatio" (Herdt, 1981). The Sambia believe that, although marriage and fatherhood complete masculine personhood, development cannot proceed to this point without repeated inseminations. Thus, an account of Sambia sexual culture would be incomplete without a description of the homoerotic practices upon which the agency and full personhood of the male actor is contingent.