The analogy to color-categorization and naming is intriguing but there's a clear difference in that the visible wavelength spectrum is universal (saving the various forms of color-blindness). But once you get past the biological grounding for certain basic aspects of color categories, then various cultural forces are clearly at work in the number and nature of distinctions made.
I'm less certain of my opinion on the essentialist/constructionalist aspects of sexuality. Hmm. Well, now that I come to consider the two concepts (color perception and sexuality) I suspect my opinion is something along the lines of what you're suggesting. That there is an underlying "setting" for the nature and range of who we feel desire for that can be strongly influenced by culture in how we interpret and express it. One of the difficulties in disentangling homosexual versus transgender motifs in history is the problem of what models people are offered by their culture for understanding their own desires (or understanding how other people are acting on desires). And the historic record is rarely nuanced.
There are some interesting parallels in cultural experiences of emotions. I recall a paper that studied the performance of "depression" in a culture that had no specific experiential category corresponding to that label. Feelings that westerners would label "depression" would be described by the experiencers in the language of illness or pain (or some other things I don't recall offhand) but not in any systematic or reproducible way. (With the caveat that I don't recall when this study was done or how much inter-cultural awareness the researcher had to check their own assumptions and defaults.)
Too many modern historians have looked at queer history and applied the prejudices of both the historic era and our own to their interpretations in taking genital activity to be the definitive dividing line. Thus there has been a position that "romantic friendships" between women can be clearly distinguished as platonic or lesbian based solely on evidence of genital sexual activity (and often with a clear air of "it's slanderous to label a historic figure as lesbian without clear and incontrovertable proof of sexual activity"). The heteronormativity, it burns. I'll be touching on this when I do a comparison of various historians' interpretations of the same-sex love lyrics by Bieris de Romans. It's astounding the contortions some writers have gone through to explain away the basic fact that it is a romantic/erotic song framed as being written by a woman and addressed to a woman.
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Date: 2014-06-27 03:50 pm (UTC)I'm less certain of my opinion on the essentialist/constructionalist aspects of sexuality. Hmm. Well, now that I come to consider the two concepts (color perception and sexuality) I suspect my opinion is something along the lines of what you're suggesting. That there is an underlying "setting" for the nature and range of who we feel desire for that can be strongly influenced by culture in how we interpret and express it. One of the difficulties in disentangling homosexual versus transgender motifs in history is the problem of what models people are offered by their culture for understanding their own desires (or understanding how other people are acting on desires). And the historic record is rarely nuanced.
There are some interesting parallels in cultural experiences of emotions. I recall a paper that studied the performance of "depression" in a culture that had no specific experiential category corresponding to that label. Feelings that westerners would label "depression" would be described by the experiencers in the language of illness or pain (or some other things I don't recall offhand) but not in any systematic or reproducible way. (With the caveat that I don't recall when this study was done or how much inter-cultural awareness the researcher had to check their own assumptions and defaults.)
Too many modern historians have looked at queer history and applied the prejudices of both the historic era and our own to their interpretations in taking genital activity to be the definitive dividing line. Thus there has been a position that "romantic friendships" between women can be clearly distinguished as platonic or lesbian based solely on evidence of genital sexual activity (and often with a clear air of "it's slanderous to label a historic figure as lesbian without clear and incontrovertable proof of sexual activity"). The heteronormativity, it burns. I'll be touching on this when I do a comparison of various historians' interpretations of the same-sex love lyrics by Bieris de Romans. It's astounding the contortions some writers have gone through to explain away the basic fact that it is a romantic/erotic song framed as being written by a woman and addressed to a woman.