{"id":1205,"date":"2013-05-09T21:49:57","date_gmt":"2013-05-09T20:49:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/malebisexualqueer.wordpress.com\/?p=18"},"modified":"2013-05-09T21:49:57","modified_gmt":"2013-05-09T20:49:57","slug":"part-2-race-gender-sexuality-science-and-the-invention-of-bisexuality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/2013\/05\/part-2-race-gender-sexuality-science-and-the-invention-of-bisexuality\/","title":{"rendered":"Part 2: Race, Gender, Sexuality: Science and the Invention of (Bi)sexuality"},"content":{"rendered":"

Again, this chapter beings with Sedgewick and the crisis of masculine identity, i.e. how thought, society and sexuality have been defined by a \u2018now endemic crisis of homo\/heteroseuxual definition, indicatively male, dating from the end of the nineteenth century,\u2019 and as such, Sedgwick believes, \u2018an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of the modern homo\/heterosexual definition\u2019 (quoted on 23). This sounds particularly deconstructive, to my ears: the recognition of a dialectic structuring modern epistemology and thus requiring critical engagement.<\/p>\n

Angelides calls this the \u2018economy of (heterosexuality)\u2019 which emerged at the turn of the century in order to categorize and define the sexes and their desires. Angelides goes to show how the emergence of sexuality, alongside sex\/gender, came to be an additional, intertwined ontological category for individual identity. Believing bisexuality to have been erased from the historiography of sexuality, he figures bisexuality as \u2018central to the shifting epistemological structure of sexuality\u2019 and offers bisexuality as a \u2018corrective to the presentist tendencies within much recent queer studies\u2019 (25) which, I assume he believes, have deconstructed homo\/hetero without recourse to the influence of bisexuality.<\/p>\n

I have to say at this point that I didn\u2019t find this chapter easy, and the amount\/length of quotes apparent in what follows is an attempt to help me work through what is being said, rather than a full attempt to critically engage with it; although I will try to do that also.<\/p>\n

Beginning with the psychomedical tradition and looking at how sexuality became an ontological category defined by the sex\/gender of object choice, Angelides now turns to Luce Irigaray and phallogocentrism – the symbolic order of male epistemological representation, which structures the figure of \u2018woman\u2019 to be the lesser of two binary terms, and is thus dependent on \u2018man\u2019; which, as Elizabeth Grosz says, takes three forms: \u2018the negation or opposition of man, as similar or equivalent to man, or as the complement to man\u2019 (25). In these, \u2018all others are reduced to the economy of the same\u2019 (Irigarary). This line of thinking argues that Western epistemology is created and dominated by the male subject, making women \u2018unrepresentable in phallogocentric discourse\u2019 (26), so that woman can never be the subject, but only the object. She is \u2018other\u2019 in the same way that Edward Said \u2018oriental\u2019 is the other to the European selfhood.<\/p>\n

Angelides points to how Irigarary comes to the conclusion that gender itself is a phallogocentric concept, and thus in nineteenth century medical discourse sexual dimorphism, which came to signal sexual difference, was \u2018nonetheless a dimorphism of the one, the same, the masculine subject\u2019 (27). [Here, Angelides is careful to signal to us that his notion of \u2018masculine identity\u2019 is not recapitulating a universality he desires to deconstruct, but rather refers to \u2018a general epistemological organizing system\u2019 i.e. phallogocentrism, which through \u2018a series of hierarchical relations\u2019 produce a masculinity based upon social and discursive power at the expense of others (including other masculinities).]<\/p>\n

Within the discourses of science there is a particular desire to solidify and assert the specificities and differences of men\u2019s bodies at a time when \u2018white, middle-class, imperialistic and patriarchal social hierarchy\u2019 was under threat, due to \u2018the rise of industrial capitalism, the consolidation of the hegemonic middles classes…the expansion and formation of women\u2019s associations\u2019 (28). Gender roles were being challenged in ways previously unknown, such as education, the right to vote, ownership of property, custodial rights wider range of employment opportunities, etc. This was just one aspect of the anxiety found in the white male identity, structured around \u2018gender, race, nation and class\u2019 (29).\u00a0 Science then called upon \u2018Nature\u2019 as it\u2019s most trusted ally in attempt to maintain the status quo of the belief in \u2018innate biological differences between the sexes, races and often classes, [a] common objective of these theories [being] to defend and justify existing social hierarchies and social sex roles..[…]…scientific theories were constituted through a phallogocentric economy of the Same\u2019 (29). Here we see how not only gender, but race and class were key taxonomical figures of oppression.<\/p>\n

Angelides goes on to show how evolutionary scientific discourse propagated the primacy of white Western male identity, by affirming biological differences between the sexes and races. He begins with a 1871 text The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex<\/i>, where \u2018the fundamental thesis was that sexual selection as a central component of the evolution of all species resulted in a greater differentiation of the sexes proportional to the level of evolution\u2019, resulting in radical dimorphism and racial superiority, as sexual selection was seen to be the \u2018most powerful means of changing the races of man\u2019, hence a structuring principle of social darwinism which perpetuated the justification of \u2018the social position of women and blacks\u2019 (30). Within scientific discourse, women\u2019s demands for equality were met with the desire to direct this energy into the \u2018proper channels\u2019, i.e. reproduction and domesticity. This equated women with nature and men with culture and civilization.<\/p>\n

The blatant sexism and racism of \u2018objective science\u2019 is fairly stunning, and I\u2019m still shocked when I read things such as these comments by natural historian Carl Vogt: \u2018it is a remarkable circumstance, that the difference between the sexes, as regards cranial cavity, increases with the development of the race, so that the male European excels much more than the female, than the negro the negress\u2019 (quoted on 31). Further to this, Angelides documents how \u2018race and gender became mutually constituting structures\u2019 such that \u2018racial difference was largely constructed, as Sanger Gilman has demonstrated, \u201con the sexual difference of the black,\u201d generally, female body\u2019 (31).<\/p>\n

I think I\u2019m still a little surprised at the depth of intersection between sexist and racist epistemology. While being aware of it, I think this is the first time I\u2019m really taking it in; and I\u2019m feeling a little ashamed of my ignorance. I wasn\u2019t sure \u2018exactly\u2019 how this was going to relate to bisexuality, but it is through this lens of subjugation that the connection becomes elucidated. Detailing how the myth of black women\u2019s large genitals and their sexual appetite being likened to an ape\u2019s, we are shown how black women were understood to be less evolved from their primal heritage, and less differentiated from their male counterpart. \u00a0 \u00a0 By virtue of being \u2018closer\u2019 to the man in these two respects, the language and conception of the hermaphrodite appears. The epistemological category of bisexuality emerged with the discovery of hermaphroditic ascidians in 1866 (32), and thus \u2018the concept of bisexuality was fundamental to [the] racialized evolutionary framework of gender\u2019. Darwin posited that\u00a0 \u2018the sexual organs of even \u2018the higher vertebrata are, in their early condition, hermaphrodite\u2019, thus human development went through a period of hermaphroditism, or bisexuality (32). Again, quoting Darwin, we are told that \u2018some remote progenitor of the whole vertebrate kingdom appears to have been hermaphrodite or androgynous\u2019, leading to the conclusion, for these scientists, that women and blacks were just \u2018undeveloped men\u2019, closer to our bisexual ancestors. In this context however, Angelides isn\u2019t hugely clear in detailing the etymological or epistemological link between hermaphroditism and bisexuality, but mentions in a footnote that the terms were interchangeable, with a further quote to illustrating how scientists used the terms similarly. But this interchangeability\u00a0 allows him to propose that \u2018In this phallogocentric economy of (evolutionary) sameness, then, bisexuality provided the metonymic link between men, women, blacks and our hermaphroditic ancestors\u2019, and, more than this, that the \u2018universal starting point for all human development, and thus human differentiation, was embryological bisexuality\u2019 (33). Thus, following this logic in the domain of phallogocentrism, women and blacks were not fully human, but had \u2018arrested development\u2019, which linked them to their primordial bisexual\/hermaphrodite ancestors. Angelides writes<\/p>\n

\u2018Only the prototypical Western bourgeois male, however, had successfully completed this transition from (bisexual) nature<\/i> to (sexually differentiated culture, <\/i>divesting himself of his animal heritage. In fact, man, was synonymous with the totality of culture, or \u2018civilization\u2019 itself. Nature, on the other hand, was that unruly, animalistic (black), and feminine sphere to be dominated, subdued, and controlled, that over and against which \u2018civilized\u2019 Western society was instituted. There is clearly only one sex, one citizen, one (hu)man, in this framework: a male \u2018one\u2019 against which everything else is measured as an anomalous arrest or developmental failure. Bisexuality was therefore installed as both the figure of (hu)man sameness and the figure of (hu)man difference. It was employed as a rhetorical concept to explain and justify, in scientific terms, the social order in which women and blacks (and not to mention those of \u2018ambiguous\u2019 sex) were rendered not only subaltern, but subhuman (34).<\/p>\n

This may sound familiar in other contexts, in terms of racial and gender superiority, but the association of bisexuality as a \u2018central\u2019 term in the debate is new for me. But also one I\u2019m suspicious of placing in the centre. Angelides doesn\u2019t explicitly say he is doing this, but his argument is concerned with identifying how and where bisexuality has been erased from the historiography of sexuality\/sexology, and here it becomes a \u2018fundamental\u2019 term. I get a sense of claiming something ontological, as he shows Gerber to have done in Vice Versa<\/i>, which he explicitly states a distance from. Perhaps this is a byproduct of a close epistemological study, and not necessarily Angelides\u2019 agenda.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, the result of sexual dimorphism translated, obviously, into the social realm, most notably in gender roles: \u2018Men were thus sanctioned cultural producers, women the reproducers\u2019 and \u2018to deviate from this reproductive division of labour, therefore, was to work against the gendered and racialized bifurcation of \u2018nature\u2019, a move considered both counter(re)productive and evolutionarily retrograde\u2019 (34). However, this was inevitably happening, roles were being challenged, and with it the security of white male privilege. It is with this context in mind that Angelides encourages us to think about the emergence \u2018of a scientific category of the third sex, and thus, the sex\/gender distinction\u2019 (36).<\/p>\n

This third sex is the homosexual, which labelled effeminate men and masculine women as deviant, medically ill, and suffering from their sexual and gender inversion. This, Angelides points out, \u2018ensured a safe distance between the sexes…the invert served to protect and delimit the boundaries of bourgeois masculinity, not only \u201ctransforming sodomites into non-masculine men who could not engender the virility of \u2018normal\u2019 men,\u201d but also transforming female sex role transgressors into mannish lesbians\u2019 (37). Naturalized sex roles were thus challenged and the category of gender arose. Masculinity and femininity were born out of the need to assign and contain a \u2018normal\u2019 and \u2018naturally functioning\u2019 sexual instinct with the sex. Again, Angelides wants to propose that \u2018the shift in medical theory from sex to sexuality, from sexual inversion to sexual object choice, was made possible, at an epistemological level<\/i>, by bisexuality\u2019 (38).<\/p>\n

At the level of gender, the homosexual came to be seen as able to \u2018remain masculine in [their] non-sexual habits\u2019, where as lesbians continued to be thought of as gender inverts, probably because they \u2018challenged the socioeconomic power relations between the sexes\u2019 in a way that homosexuals did not, i.e. the division between the sexes(39). Again, ancestral bisexuality as \u2018arrested development\u2019 came to be used as an explanation of gender inversion and perversion of sexual instincts in the homosexual desire of men and women, highlighting for Angelides that<\/p>\n

The very process of speciation – of gender, race, and sexuality, takes place through the figure of bisexuality. <\/i>Thus, the more highly evolved the species, the more the individual is divested of a bisexual heritage. Each of these three structurally intertwined axes cannot (and ought not) be thought of apart from the others (41).<\/p>\n

The centrality of bisexuality against which the formation of gender and sexuality are produced is again advocated via sexology\u2019s appropriation of the \u2018biogenetic concept of bisexuality, [which] gave way to a biologically differentiated, dualistic, and individualized notion of sexuality\u2019 (43), where sex and gender now opened up onto hetero and homosexuality, such that Angelides argues that \u2018Bisexuality was…the pivotal epistemic tool employed for containing the crisis of masculine identity… [and in] this evolutionary schema, the path to (hu)manhood necessitates the stripping of race, and (bi)sex\u2019 (45).<\/p>\n

The picture being built here is that nineteenth century scientific discourse and sexology were founded on a evolutionary biology which recognised the straight white male subject as the pinnacle of humanity (or \u2018arrogance personified\u2019 we might want to call it). Anything which strayed from this combination of factors didn\u2019t meet the standard, and thus had not been successful in the \u2018repudiation of bisexuality\u2019 (46).<\/p>\n

\u2018Bisexuality\u2019, Angelides states was figured as \u2018the elusive Other in the evolutionary process of (hu)man speciation\u2019. Types of psychological bisexuality had been recognised by scientists of the time, but it was usually subsumed into homosexuality and thus critically engaged with very little. He sees this as a resistance to construct a \u2018bisexual species\u2019 as this type of sexuality was \u2018found to introduce uncertainty and doubt\u2019 (47). I can certainly relate to this! But, the inability to fix and bring it into the ontological still seems important at this juncture, and a reflection in science of the inability to present or define bisexuality. Angelides states that bisexuality \u2018threatened to absorb both [the] differentiating human registers (sex\/gender and sexuality) and dissolve the boundaries of human identity\u2019 (47). This would appear close to the utopia and deconstructive qualities that bisexual activists proclaim, which Angelides was reserved to fully embrace in the first chapter.<\/p>\n

Again, deconstruction comes to mind when he writes in the conclusion to the chapter (yes, we\u2019re coming into land now!) that \u2018The coherence, or self-sameness, of the entity of the (hu)man was thereby structurally predicated on a repudiation of a difference internal to itself: that is, bisexuality\u2019 (48). I wonder in some ways if bisexuality is being, or could be, figured as one of Derrida\u2019s third terms, like supplement, or hymen etc?\u00a0 This difference internal to itself would then be undefinable, wholly other, and unrepresentable. But I\u2019m not sure this is the type of \u2018third\u2019 term that he is introducing into the hetero\/homosexual relationship yet. What we do know, is that bisexuality was both \u2018avowed as an originary human state and yet disavowed, as a distinct sexual identity\u2019 (48) by nineteenth century scientific discourse. This language seems appropriate for the ending of the chapter before he moves on to how bisexuality was then translated from evolutionary biology and\u00a0 psychomedical science into Freudian psychoanalysis.<\/p>\n

A Note: This has felt very dense and challenging in comparison to the introductory chapter. Therefore, I\u2019d like to come back the notions of sex\/gender and sexuality, and how bisexuality figures in their emergence and changing modes, when I\u2019ve had time for them to make some more connections in my unconscious.<\/p>\n

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