Bloggasm

Within any kind of moralist debate, the need to categorize and define becomes almost necessary in order to form an argument. What results is a devolution into a game of semantics, where one party simply tries to debase the generalized terms of the other, and in the end they are no longer arguing about the issue at hand, but at ways to merely define the issue. Arguments that deal with gay or lesbian issues often fall into this trap, because the pro-gay side will no-doubt produce analogies or scenarios in which straight people engage in the same action. For instance, if a homophobe were to make the claim that gay sex is unnatural since sex is aimed at procreation, then the other side would say that anything other than vaginal sex should be deemed inappropriate between straight couples, since procreation is impossible without it. This would discount any kind of foreplay, and though I’m sure that some straight people out there wouldn’t mind this, I think most would. At the heart of this semantics debate is the one between essentialists and constructionists. The essentialists, by their very nature, attempt to locate the essence of every entity, and would try to hone in on specific traits that make and categorize that entity into a group. This does not mean that this person couldn’t have traits uncharacteristic to the group, only that these characteristics are irrelevant to it, just things that define an individual person. What is stressed is the fact that these traits or characteristics are often considered permanent, consistently found to be true in every scenario. So in terms of gay and lesbian lifestyle, there is a key essence to what it means to be a homosexual. Social constructionism, on the other hand, doesn’t necessarily completely contradict the essentialist philosophy, but rather tries to explain it. The theory was first created by Thomas Luckmann and Peter L. Berger in their book The Social Construction of Reality, and tries to argue that people work and function in what is often termed a perceived reality. Rather than things being permanent, like essentialists claim they are, these perceived realities are an ongoing process that is based on people’s interpretations of the world around them. It rejects the notion of everyday common sense, claiming that common sense is just another interpretation of reality. What makes the essentialist vs constructionist debate even more interesting is when it isn’t just applied to morals, but the law as well. Perhaps one of the most well-documented 21st-century supreme court cases of this is Lawrence vs. Texas. In it, two gay males were caught in the act of gay sex when police officers entered their home (for entirely different reasons) and arrested them for anti-sodomy laws that were still in use in the state of Texas. The case eventually made it to the supreme court, and the end result was a 6-3 ruling in favor of Lawrence, thereby stomping down the anti-sodomy laws across the land, making this a landmark case for the Gay Right Movement. I’ll outline the essentialist and constructionist debates in both the dissenting and majority opinions for this particular case.

Eve Sedgwick, in her book Epistemology of the Closet, pinpoints the definitional claims towards homosexuality and their historical significance, starting with the nineteenth century, when there was “a shift in European thought from viewing same-sex sexuality as a matter of prohibited and isolated genital acts…to viewing it as a function of stable definitions of identity” (83). Put simply, before a certain point in time, the concept of homosexuality was confined only to one person engaging in any kind of sexual act with another person of the same sex, something that was usually thought to be isolated incidents with certain people’s lives, not a recurring practice. After a certain number of public cases regarding homosexuality (Oscar Wilde being the most prime example), then the focus shifted away from individual sexual acts and started to view the homosexual as a Person, one with specific characteristics that are consistent. This is the concept of identity that is important in the essentialist philosophy. By trying to create a minority categorization of a homosexual, people were engaging in essentialism. A social constructionist on the other hand, would look at this trend and say that the public was merely responding to these popular cases of homosexuality and offering their own interpretations based on their own realities. How else, then, would there have been a shift in thought? If the essentialist debate were correct, wouldn’t the concept of homosexuality remain relatively similar, discounting the shift that Sedgwick points out?

When arguing the consenting and dissenting positions for Lawrence vs Texas, the justices very often refer to the case of Bowers v. Hardwick, a previous similar case in which the gay rights side lost, allowing anti-sodomy laws to take place. When pointing out the flaws of the previous case, the majority opinion in Lawrence v. Texas often highlights the fact that many anti-sodomy laws are aimed primarily at homosexuals rather than the sodomy sexual acts themselves. In the opening paragraphs, it says:

It should be noted, however, that there is no longstanding history in this country of laws directed at homosexual conduct as a distinct matter. Early American sodomy laws were not directed at homosexuals as such but instead sought to prohibit nonprocreative sexual activity more generally, whether between men and women or men and men. (Lawrence v. Texas).

Here, they are pointing out the “shift in European thought” that Sedgwick outlined for us. When American lawmakers saw that their laws were too generalized and criminalized acts from the heterosexual populations, they aimed to redefine those laws in order to target a much smaller population: homosexuals. So, in essence, the change in law became anti-homosexual in nature, rather than simply anti-sodomy, which added a much more discriminatory factor to the law. It is essentialist motions like these that creates what Sedgwick has called a “distinct, minority population, however produced or labeled,” one that is so powerful that the categorization of the homosexual “has robustly failed to disintegrate under the pressure of decade after decade, battery after battery of deconstructive exposure–evidently not in the first place because of its meaningfulness to those whom it defines but because of its indispensableness to those who define themselves against it” (83). In order to define something in today’s society, the constructionists would argue (as Sedgwick also does above) that a wall has to put up against it, so it is the very discrimination against homosexuals that helps define the homosexual identity and how it is perceived within our interpreted realities. The irony here is that in order for your to understand your own identity, you must be defined by someone outside the group that you’re being categorized into, as Sedgwick claims when she tells us that the “definitional barriers between ‘the homosexual’ (minority) and “the heterosexual” (majority) are fortified, in this century, by nonhomosexuals, and especially by men against men” (84). This makes sense when one considers the fact that in order for people like Oscar Wilde to have been prosecuted, judges must first give them a reason for being punished, which logically leads to certain characteristics being put in the spotlight to define what a homosexual was.

The Bowers court tried to discredit this essentialist/constructionist debate when it said that “Proscriptions against that conduct have ancient roots” (Bowers v. Hardwick). Of course nobody can read the minds of the justices who wrote those majority opinions, but it is logical to assume that if they could use the essentialist argument of a permanent homosexual identity, then the case could be brought against the homosexual based on legal precedent. In other words, the US has always had laws against homosexuals, so therefore it should continue to do so. Unfortunately for Bowers, though, Kennedy writes that “in academic writings…there are fundamental criticism of the historical premises relied upon by the majority and concurring opinions in Bowers” (Lawrence v. Texas). In his summarization of this lack of historical discrimination:

Beginning in colonial times there were prohibitions of sodomy derived from the English criminal laws passed in the first instance by the Reformation Parliament of 1522. The English prohibition was understood to include relations between men and women as well as relations between men and men…Nineteenth-century commentators similarly read American sodomy, buggery, and crime-against-nature statutes as criminalizing certain relations between men and women and between men and men. (Lawrence v. Texas)

Here, the essentialist debate put forth by the Bowers court is quick deconstructed as Kennedy puts forth his constructionist debate. Kennedy recognizes through social constructionism that the laws against homosexuality are based on the backdrop of temporal and cultural factors. Constructionists view humans to be incredibly flexible creatures, ones which are easily influenced through world events and the times from which they live. In a completely different time period, essentialists would try to judge homosexuality in whatever way they view it and argue that it has always been that way, something that is easily debunked. It isn’t hard to make references to ancient Greece and other cultures, when the concept of homosexuality had a very different societal viewpoint, thereby changing the very concepts of the debate based on the culture at the time.

Sedgwick even goes on to argue that the essentialist desire to break down and define each group is so incredibly powerful, that people thought to be liberal, social constructionists work hard to break down gay groups into even smaller, more specifically defined groups:

It remained for work emerging from the later feminist and gay movements to begin to clarify why the male paranoid project had become so urgent in the maintenance of gender subordination; and it remained for a stunningly efficacious coup of feminist redefinition to transform lesbianism, in a predominant view, from a matter of female virilization to one of woman-identification. (84).

Stunning, indeed. Our need for cultural definitions has extended so far that not even gay males and gay females share any part of the same identity. Speaking from personal experience, I had noticed a more mainstream acceptance of female-to-female relations rather than male-to-male relations, though admittedly this mostly applies to the sexual acts themselves, and mostly for women who are bisexual. Put rather crudely, people’s reasons behind this is the notion that female-to-female sexual relations are considered acceptable (even sexually erotic in most cases), while male-to-male relations are “icky” and “unnatural.”

Of course Scalia, in the usual grappling illogical consistencies of conservatism, tries to uphold the essentialist debate of homosexuality, because only through legal precedent can he argue that these laws are legal. Obviously, he has no valid reason for homosexuality being outlawed, so to put forth bigotry, one must show that bigotry has been allowed in several cases and laws in the past, despite the fact that he claims that he doesn’t have a “rigid adherence to stare decisis in constitutional cases” (Lawrence v Texas). This is somewhat hard to believe, however, when he opens his argument with “I begin with the Court’s surprising readiness to reconsider a decision rendered a mere 17 years ago in Bowers v Hardwick” (Lawrence v Texas). He is so grounded inside the essentialist debate that he is completely unable to understand how society, in the span of seventeen years, can change enough so that their view on homosexuality and sodomy acts is completely different. Perhaps this is why Republicans label themselves as a more “traditional” party. It’s not that they aren’t able to recognize change, it’s that they want to resist the very notion of change as well, even though it’s hypocritical to do so. Even the most conservative politicians today wouldn’t adhere to the social laws of their Puritan ancestors, showing that even the essentialists themselves are subject to the constructionist definitions of cultural change, and this is why the liberal debate will always be there to push up against the gates of stagnation.

And in the case of Lawrence v. Texas, the social constructionists were able to win. By proving that anti-sodomy laws were not grounded in the social identity of homosexuals, an identity that wasn’t even created until the late 19th century, they were able to get past the weak debate of legal precedent and strike down the very laws that created the social identity of homosexuals themselves. Which leaves the question: Would homosexuals as we know them today exist if it weren’t for the conservative essentialists who try to discriminate against them? This notion is an interesting one, but in the end, a social constructionist would be forced to answer with a single word: No.

–Simon Owens
Simon.bloggasm@gmail.com