Date: Tue, 27 Jan 1998 20:10:54 -0500 From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu> Subject: Re: M-TH: Toward the Abolition of Heterosexuality? Carrol wrote: >I'm losing track of this thread, so I'm not speaking for/against any of >the posts on it right now, but one possible take on it is this: the >*labels* "heterosecuality" and "homosexuality" are relatively recent, and >that coinage of the labels corresponds to increasing social >self-consciousness about "manliness" and "womanliness." So >"heterosexuality" does not just mean a sexual practice, it means a >self-conscious choice to follow a certain practice. You probably wear >shoes, but I doubt that you ever think of yourself as a "shoe-wearer" in >contrast to "widget-wearers," thoughj one sees the possibility of that in >the common restaurant sign, "No shoes, not shirt, no service!" > >In this sense the elimination of "heterosexuality" AND "homosexuality" >would constitute the elimination of a non-desirable form of >self-consciousness, the elimination of an (at a minimum) unnecessary >social (and potentially or actually) political and legal classification. > >Does that help? Thanks. This basically sums up a lot of what I might have written in reply to Sheila. What I would add is that heterosexuality has been more than a certain set of practices that define the ideals of manliness and womanliness; it might be better referred to as institution that defines who is normal and abnormal. So if a person either consciously refuses to or just fails to perform all those practices that make up the unwritten codes of correct gender identification and sexual object choices, he or she will be called "abnormal," "unnatural," etc. For a woman to be unmarried after a certain age, for instance, meant her failure to conform to the socially sanctioned ideal of womanhood in the past (and may be even now, depending on localities). At the time of moral panics, such a woman might have been burned as a witch. Also, for many women in the past for whom economic dependence upon their husbands was the only or primary means of survival, choosing regular sexual partners that went outside of heterosexuality was extremely difficult. So heterosexuality as institution and women's lack of economic independence were mutually reinforcing. Now reproduction and heterosexuality.... Whether or not legal birth control and abortion are easily available makes a difference in the relationship between reproduction and heterosexuality as institution. With reproductive freedoms, heterosexuaity loses its institutional power somewhat because they weaken the historical identification of sex and reproduction, allowing us to consider sex to be primarily a matter of pleasure, thus making it easier for us to imagine all manners of consensual pleasures that used to be made to seem "abnormal" (such as homosexuality). Yoshie --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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