APPLES AND ORANGES: Eve Tushnet

What is sexual orientation?

So much of it seems to be about the narratives we tell ourselves about what we experience. I know that sounds abstracted and postmodern and weird, but bear with me for a moment. Maggie's already pointed out the cultures and situations in which men have had sex with men without having anything remotely like what we would consider a gay identity ("Was Socrates gay?" has got to be one of the sillier questions one could ask).

For women, relationships and emotions that look and feel pretty similar have been interpreted in different ways in the past century or so--a 15-year-old girl with an intense, passionate crush on her best friend is a lot more likely, today, to interpret those feelings as "lesbian," whereas in 1910 she would just be experiencing a schoolgirl crush. (A decent place to start with this subject is Lillian Faderman's Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. She's got a pretty obvious agenda, but the book nonetheless challenges our tendency to shoehorn the past into our own ill-fitting categories.) So, not totally sure where this line of thought goes, but the tangle of culture and personal experience and desire is a lot harder to tease apart than our language of "gay, straight, or bisexual" leads us to think.

More on this later, I hope, since I'm working on a short story that deals with this very subject--the transmutation of desire into identity.

Soundtrack: Morrissey and Siouxsie, "Interlude."


posted by maggie at 12:03 AM | link

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