Categories and Sexuality - Review

Journal of Sex Research, May, 2000 by Charlene L. Muehlenhard

Over the past several months, I have been intrigued by news stories and discussions that were on diverse topics but that all had in common the same underlying theme: categories--how to delineate them, how to think about them.

Consider an example related to race: California's Proposition 209, the law prohibiting state agencies from using gender or race in decisions related to education, hiring, or awarding contracts (Schmidt, 1997). In effect, it bans affirmative action. I had grown up with the idea that political conservatives evaluated and treated people differently according to their race, whereas political liberals treated people equally regardless of their race. But now, in arguments over affirmative action, political liberals (e.g., Democrats, the American Civil Liberties Union) are arguing that we should take race into account in decisions on admitting students to universities, hiring, and awarding government contracts. Conversely, political conservatives (e.g., Republicans) are arguing that we should treat people equally regardless of their race, which would take the form of abolishing affirmative action programs. In a sense, this argument is about categories--in this case, racial categories. At issue is how to treat people in different categories or, more basically, whether to emphasize or deemphasize categories.

Consider an example related to sexual orientation: I was at a Saturday morning meeting of a group called the Freedom Coalition, a Lawrence, Kansas, group that works for civil rights for people of all sexual orientations. After the meeting, several of us were discussing the categories lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer, and the increasing visibility of self-labeled bisexuals in the queer-rights movement.

Some people regarded bisexuals as less threatening to the status quo than lesbians or gays. They said that the category bisexuals includes women who are attracted to men and men who are attracted to women, which makes them less threatening to the general public than lesbians, for example, because lesbians are not attracted to men and in that way are more threatening to men. So, they saw bisexuality as relatively nonthreatening to the status quo.

But this discussion also reminded me of a book I was reading, Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out, edited by Loraine Hutchins and Lani Kaahumanu (1991). Hutchins and Kaahumanu wrote of the revolutionary, disruptive possibilities of bisexuality:

   Heterosexuality needs homosexuality, to be reassured that it is different.
   It also needs the illusion of dichotomy between the orientations to
   maintain the idea of a fence, a fence that has a right (normal, good) and a
   wrong (abnormal, evil) side to be on, or fall from. To the extent that we
   collaborate in seeing homosexuality as an opposite polarity (not part of a
   diverse range of human sexuality), we perpetuate this unhealthy,
   unrealistic, hierarchical dichotomy. (p. xxii)

So, is the category bisexuality less or more threatening to the status quo than is homosexuality? However one answers this question, categories are again at issue.

Consider an example, constantly in the news, related to gender: When thinking about categories, I recalled when politicians took up the issue of the number of sexes, of all things. Biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling (1993) wrote an article, "The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough," in which she conceptualized the categories of two totally distinct sexes as social or medical constructions. She described people born with both an ovary and a testis, whom she labeled as true hermaphrodites or herms. She also described people with ovaries and some aspects of male genitalia but no testes, whom she called female pseudohermaphrodites or ferms, and people with testes and some aspects of female genitalia but no ovaries, whom she called male pseudohermaphrodites or merms. So, with females, males, herms, ferms, and merms, Fausto-Sterling (1993) conceptualized five sexes. That idea seemed upsetting to right-wing politicians, who distorted Fausto-Sterling's (1993) position and took it up as a campaign issue. The Advocate quoted presidential candidate Pat Buchanan as saying, "They say there aren't two sexes, there are five genders.... I tell you this: God created man and woman--I don't care what Bella Abzug says" (Agenda, 1995, p. 11; see Fausto-Sterling, 2000, for more information). So we have another controversy about categories.

In this talk, I want to raise some issues and questions regarding categories, especially as they relate to sexuality. I'll discuss our tendency to reify categories after we create them and our tendency to exaggerate the differences between the categories that we create. I'll then discuss how confounds can make differences between categories difficult to interpret--a fact easily forgotten. Finally, I'll discuss problems associated with focusing on the differences between categories, as well as problems associated with ignoring the differences between categories.