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

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

We do not mean to say merely that identity is a process; we also mean to suggest that the phenomena typically glossed as "sexual identity" includes a narrative of origins (an ontology), a fantasy of an ultimate purpose and future fulfillment (a teleology),(3) and a theory of and/or plan for moral action in the world (deontology). We take issue with queer theory's tendency to dismiss the ontological and teleological components as merely essentialist (see for example Patton, 1993), and we contend that all three of these dimensions are important to the formation and sustenance of meaningful human life patterns--a claim long supported by the cross-cultural record (Malinowski, 1929; Benedict, 1934; Mead, 1935; Herdt, 1981, 1994; Nanda, 1990; Shweder, 1984; Vance, 1991). For the present, we conceptualize these notions and their contexts through the idea of sexual lifeways, which has the merit of avoiding the triumvirate of "isms" listed above.

Sexual lifeways are the culturally specific erotic ideas and emotions, sexual/gender categories and roles, and theories of being and becoming a full social person that together constitute life-course development within a particular sexual culture (Herdt, 1997a, p. 20). Sexual cultures, in turn, are the specific discursive and material fields in which systems of power relationships are used to control sexual behavior or conduct, and through which sexual lifeways are instituted, enculturated, enacted, and reproduced. Sexual cultures, as historical formations, are distinct from bordering cultures and from the imports of colonization. However, in a time of increasing migration and change in the world system, larger processes of globalization had contributed to the current flux of sexual cultures (Herdt, ed., 1997b). Sexual cultures and lifeways provide formulas for gender performances and for the control of gender roles in sexual relations. Sexual lifeways thus overlap significantly with gendered lifeways: what is at stake is the control of sexual behavior, which has important implications for the enactment of gender.

Sexual lifeways provide a cultural template or script that inflects individual subjectivity, shaping an amorphous array of thoughts, feelings, needs, and desires into specific attractions, fantasies, behaviors, understandings of the self, roles, rights, duties, ontologies, deontologies, and teleologies. This is not to suggest that specific sexual desires, such as for same-sex or cross-sex persons, are something the individual is simply socialized into as part of a larger gender package. Some of the components of sexual lifeways are more accurately described as "learned" and are therefore more voluntary than others. The concept is not intended to be exhaustive of all processes of sexual development; there are potential slippages between sexual lifeways and other psychosocial processes that produce sexual subjects, and these slippages can produce discordances and mismatches between the different components of any given sexual lifeway. For example, most individuals in the contemporary West continue to be socialized in the direction of erotic and emotional attachments to members of the opposite sex, with the expectation that they will heterosexually marry, rear a family, and, eventually, become a grandparent. But despite the existence of one officially sanctioned sexual lifeway, there are a myriad of possible developmental outcomes, including the adoption of a gay or lesbian identity and social role--a sexual lifeway that becomes a viable alternative in adolescence, at the earliest.