[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Indeed, it is difficult for me toimagine that the author of these fantasies has ever felt desire or even thathe has ever known anyone who has.magical science, wishful thinkingWhatever the dubious logical, empirical, or scientific grounds for the claimsnow in play, it is conceivable that new technologies of the self are being 278 / Permutations on the Nature of Desireinvented, that new subjectivities are being fostered, that new conceptionsof agency are being deployed now, as in the nineteenth century.22 In cer-tain scientific circles, and in the mass media outlets that ventilate their views,sexuality is increasingly conceived as the active expression of personifiedgenes in a depopulated and passive environment.Desire, in these paradigms,appears well demarcated, self-enclosed, solid, and particulate, an object or athing detached from the person who feels it and the meanings that supportit.A curious symptom afflicts desire, imagined this way: the more voli-tion, activity, and creativity are attributed to genes, hormones, and brainstructures, the less they are seen as inhering in people s activity, in their re-lations with others, in their bond with the world.A perverse political symp-tom follows, too.As long as one seeks categorical confirmation of an essentialidentity in the self-evident light of nature, our own desires, acts, and waysof being appear to us as alien and inert things, as finished products, alreadyhere before we arrived.This strange and estranging conception of desire hasimplications far beyond the question of carnal relations, per se, for in thesefantastic representations of nature and of humankind s place in it, the playof history and the sway of culture have likewise been drastically reduced.Not that unstable theater where intentional actions collide with unintendedconsequences, cultural history is now conceived as the slowest and mostlong-term effect of chemical changes.This kind of magical thinking at least makes sense for cultural revan-chists: Faced with change and disorder, they construct a hypothetical worldof order and stability.They represent desire, uncontrollable and volatile de-sire, as a gene so as to classify, to know, and in some sense to control it.Butgenetic fetishism and nostalgia for nature are dangerous indeed for thosecreatures whose existence lies at the margins of the naturalistic imaginary.It would be premature to claim to know in advance all the effects of to-day s minoritizing discourse, the magical science it embraces, and the ge-netic fetishism it purveys or even to guess whether such representationswill take against the flux of other, very different, contending representa-tions.What will be the thoughts and introspections of future adolescents,as they connect wayward desires with images of genetic blueprints? Per-haps vague feelings and occasional attractions like those reported bythe Newsweek twin are already convincing legions that they are gay bynature. Or perhaps a generation of youth will engage in sexual experi-mentation of every imaginable sort, in every conceivable combination, re-assured by the belief that none of it will have any implications for themunless they carry that gene. ( LUG, or Lesbian until Graduation, hasalready become a badge of identification on college campuses.) And of Familiar Patterns, Dangerous Liaisons / 279course, if they do carry that gene, they might as well enjoy it.Or perhapsyouth, being skeptical, already takes the gay gene with a grain of saltunderstands it for its camp value from the start.23Or perhaps we stand on the threshold of a strange but eerily familiar land-scape where new vistas of magical technologies await us a brave new worldwhere expecting mothers will visit high-tech witch doctors to divine theshape of the future, where mutant outcasts confront all the superstitionsof a latter-day scientific racism, where instead of kneeling at the prayerbench, clutching a rosary, or confessing to a psychiatrist, the tormentedfaithful will take straight pills, which, the doctor confides, will only workif you really, really want them to, and, no doubt, where sexual reprobatestake black-market elixirs in pursuit of scientifically enhanced pervertedpleasures.24variation and deviationFor the time being, however, those who would claim their human rightsbased on the idea that people are made homosexual by nature play a dan-gerous game indeed.LeVay, Hamer, and other innatists fully assent to theprevailing biomythology, with its belief that heterosexuality of the modernera is the biological default mode for human beings but they then as-sert that homosexuality is a benevolent variation on, rather than an un-healthy deviation from, this essentially heterosexual nature. 25 In mak-ing this move, today s innatists are attempting, one more time, to both playoff and reverse the thrust of a heterocentric sexual science.This is an oldmove with an established legacy, but it is also a dangerous move, like a dancewith death.Once it is alleged that men are by nature this way and womenare naturally that way, nothing very clear distinguishes a good variation from a bad deviation. The new innatists have made no new discoveries,nor have they developed any new insights or theories.They are simply mak-ing a claim and hoping that others will agree with it.In fact, it is difficult to believe that that bastion of social conservatism,the medical establishment, will simply go along with the idea that homo-sexuality is benign that it will come to view homosexuality the way mod-ern medicine tends to view left-handedness, as a more or less benevolentvariation on human neural wiring, rather than, say, the way it understandscolor blindness (a defect) or even lupus (a genetic disease).When homo-sexuality is considered as having a genetic basis, as in the Times reportagequoted earlier in this chapter, it invariably appears alongside illnesses with 280 / Permutations on the Nature of Desirea behavioral component, like schizophrenia, manic depression, alcoholismand hypertension. 26 As such associations suggest, no amount of sober talkabout medical ethics will prevent the remedicalization of homosexualityas long as it is viewed as a genetic or hormonal condition at variance withthe normal workings of male and female genes, hormones, and neurobi-ology in the default mode a perspective that logically would seem to placehomosexuality squarely within the medical purview.At best, then, the new innatist claims carve out a protected niche for ho-mosexual exceptionalism.At worst, they reify the prevailing logic of het-erosexual metaphysics and thus actively contribute to the reproduction ofan exclusionary homophobic and sexist environment.For gays can onlybe gay by nature in a nature that already discloses men and womenwhose deepest instincts and desires are also different by nature
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]