Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics. Paula C Rust
but the issues were never resolved. We still disagree about who we are and what we stand for. The topic of bisexuality uncovers these dormant issues and brings our differences to the surface. The energy with which we debate bisexuality today is none other than the energy with which we struggled to define ourselves two decades ago.
2 “EXPERTS’” VOICES: LESBIANISM, BISEXUALITY, AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
We live in an age of science and technology. It is the era of computers, laser surgery, space travel, fax machines, and hydroponics. We look to science to answer our questions and solve our problems. We have learned that science is objective. According to my high school textbook, the scientific method involves asking a question, designing a study to answer the question, and then doing the study to find out the answer. Values, biases, and power do not enter the picture.
As a society, we are quickly finding out the hard way that this sterile image of science is false. Values shape the questions we ask and biases shape the way we ask them. The problems that are solved are often the problems of the most powerful in society, because the least powerful do not have the funding, training, or voice to put their problems on the agenda. Research on breast cancer has been dangerously underfunded in comparison to research on heart disease. Until 1993, the CDC definition of AIDS included opportunistic infections common among HIV infected men but not diseases common among HIV infected women, preventing women from receiving financial and medical opportunities available only to people with an AIDS diagnosis. We know almost nothing about lesbian health issues; we do not even know what the issues are.
Science does provide answers and solutions, but we cannot accept them at face value. We must study science with a critical eye, and select for ourselves that which is useful and that which is not. This is particularly true in an area as value-laden, controversial, and powerful as sexuality. This chapter will examine the contributions social scientists have made to our understanding of sexuality. In it, I will analyze the many different models of sexual orientation that are implicit or explicit in the sexological literature, and the ways in which these models have affected the questions that have been asked and the information we have gained about our sexuality. Readers who are familiar with the highlights of the history of sexology in the United States might want to skip to the subheading “New Models of Sexuality.”
WHAT IS A MODEL?
A model, or paradigm, is a way of representing something. Usually, in the social sciences, models are used to make something that is intangible—for example, the economy—a bit more tangible. Nobody can see the economy, but economists have computerized models of the economy that allow them to understand the real economy and predict what it will do in the future. It is impossible to create a perfect model, because the process of modeling is the process of giving shape to something that does not have a particular shape of its own.
All models contain assumptions, and all models highlight some features while downplaying or concealing others. When I teach, I illustrate this point by pulling a chair to the front of the room, tilting it forward, and asking a student to tell me what color the top of the seat is. The student can see the top of the seat, so she gives me the answer. Then I ask her what color the bottom of the seat is. She hesitates, and then either says she can’t tell or she guesses that it is the same color as the top of the seat. The fact is that, when viewing the chair from any given angle, she can see certain aspects of the chair but she cannot see others. If I were to turn the chair around, she would be able to see new aspects of the chair, but she would no longer be able to see the aspects she saw before. The chair looks different from each angle, and each angle displays some aspects while concealing others. Which view of the chair is the most accurate one? None. In order to fully know what the chair looks like, the student has to look at it from all different angles. Scientific models work the same way. We do not have to decide which model is the “best” or most “accurate.” We need to try out all the models, learn something from each one, and then put all that knowledge together to form a more complete picture of the thing we are trying to understand.
THE GREAT DEBATE—ESSENTIALISM VERSUS CONSTRUCTIONISM
One of the most fundamental debates among social scientists who study sexuality is the question of whether sexual orientation is essential or constructed. In social and political discourse, we have become so used to referring to people as lesbians, gays, or heterosexuals, that we no longer question whether or not there might be another way to understand our sexual diversity. Many historians argue, however, that the concept of types of people who are defined by their sexual desires or behaviors is recent. The word “homosexual” was coined in 1869 by Benkert. Prior to the late 1800s, there were people who had sex with members of their own sex and people who were attracted to and fell in love with members of their own sex, but historians tell us that these people were not placed in a category and viewed as a certain type of person because of these behaviors or feelings.1 They were simply engaging in some of the many forms of sexual behavior that are possible for humans, just as people today might have sex with brown-eyed or blue-eyed people, and might even have a preference for one eye color or the other, without being placed in categories and assumed to be particular types of people based on the eye colors of their sexual partners.
In other words, historical sexologists argue that the categories “lesbian/gay” and “heterosexual” are socially constructed. We have created these categories, and we place ourselves and each other in them on the basis of our behaviors and feelings. This does not mean that our desires are artificial or that we made them up; it means that we interpret our desires using the concepts and possibilities made available by our culture, and that we perceive our desires as indications of the types of people we are. It also does not mean that lesbian, gay, and heterosexual people do not exist. We certainly do exist, but we exist because we have come to understand ourselves this way. A house is no less real for the fact that it was built; we need shelter, and building a house is a fine way to give ourselves shelter. The longer we live in the house and the more comfortable we become in it, the more difficult it is to remember a time when the house did not exist.2
Essentialists, on the other hand, believe that sexual orientation or sexual desire is a characteristic that exists within a person. An “essence” is real in an absolute sense; it exists even in the absence of cultural interpretation. Essence is the thing that we would see if we could remove all our biases and cultural blinders. When we speak of “discovering” our sexualities, we are thinking in essentialist terms because we are assuming that there was something that existed within us even before we knew about it. When we say that we are lesbian/gay or heterosexual, we imply that we have a lesbian/gay or heterosexual essence, that is, that we are a particular type of person who has a particular type of sexual essence. In doing so, we create a bond between ourselves and other people who have the same essence because we put ourselves in a category together. At the same time, we emphasize our differences from people who have different essences by naming ourselves differently and putting them in another category.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEXOLOGY IN THE UNITED STATES
The Interplay of Politics and Science and the Downfall of the Dichotomous Conflict Model of Sexuality
The word “heterosexual” was coined after the word “homosexual,” and originally meant a person who was attracted to both sexes.3 In the 1890s, it came to mean a person who is attracted to people of the other sex (Katz 1983), and thereafter, scientists and the public recognized two types of sexual people who are essentially distinct from each other. Zinik (1985) called this dichotomous model of essential sexuality the “conflict model” of sexuality, because in it, heterosexuality and homosexuality are conceptualized as different and contradictory states of being. In other words, attraction toward people of the same sex and attraction toward people of the other sex are believed to be qualitatively different