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

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

Our intention here is not to depoliticize agency or reify a dubious distinction between the private/individual and public/political realms. Nor are we positing an essential, developmentally fixed agency. We start, rather, from the assumption that processes of enculturation, while never totalizing, are sufficiently profound as to obviate the kind of voluntaristic self-determination suggested by much of the work we have thus far reviewed. While we strongly believe that social science should not pursue specific political aims at the price of denigrating particular forms of social life, we are not attempting to breath life into the old logical-positivist dogma that social research can ever be fully "objective," in service to an "out-there," unmediated reality. However, at the same time that we are troubled by partisan representations of political agency, we recognize that the legitimacy of the claims staked by particular agents depends on noninfringement upon the legitimate claims of others--a point queer partisans understand far better than many of their conservative opponents. In sum, we agree that "the personal is political," but we also believe that the personal is more than political, and that the political is also personal. The latter two assumptions guide our present project.

Given this perspective, how, if at all, can we productively make use of sexual taxonomies? As we have already argued, the queer pretense--or at least the aspiration--to displace taxonomy, while provocative and intriguing, is most likely not sustainable. Although "queer" may ultimately reshape the boundaries of gender and sexual identities, it is unlikely to do away with these boundaries anytime soon--indeed, its success as a critical intervention does not and should not depend on this eventuality. What does seem clear at the moment is that "queer" does operate as gender/sexual category in dialectical relation with--and sometimes in reaction to--other existing categories, and that it demonstrates its own normativizing and prescriptive tendencies and insider/outsider politics. This is not news to many of the most ardent defenders of "queer" who still hope to see its radical potential realized. Whether or not future events bear out this hope is not relevant to our present purpose. Rather, we see in "queer" a potentially viable, if still emergent, sexual lifeway--one of several in the contemporary West (most notably the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Australia), and one in a century-long line of sexual lifeways available to individuals with homoerotic desires.

Sexual Cultures and Sexual Lifeways

To make a psychological/developmental perspective relevant to contemporary social theory and research, it must not simply recycle universalist, essentialist, and reductionist assumptions. And if such a perspective is to make productive use of taxonomies, these taxonomies must be culturally and historically grounded (Herdt and Stoller, 1990; Herdt, 1991). As we have already alluded, we find existing concepts--such as "sexual preference," "sexual orientation," and even "sexual identity"--to be inadequate in describing the forms of social life and subjectivity that have been attached to particular sexual desires. In addition to being too individualistic and internal, obscuring the social and cultural levels from view (Herdt, 1997a), these concepts reduce to one or, at most, two dimensions (that is, sexual object choice, and the subjective identifications that follow from it) what is in fact a multidimensional, multifaceted phenomenon (though, of course, all concepts homogenize diversity to some degree). Obviously, it is inadequate to reduce all of these meanings to an entity such as "identity," which does not inflect developmental and cultural change, but rather instantiates permanence in a way that is foreign to most people's lives (Herdt, 1990). The failure of queer theory to move beyond "identity," even as it has deconstructed it, is no doubt partially responsible for its cynical reading of sexual taxonomies.