The following is the second of a three-part series. The first can be found here.
Social constructionist theory developed as an answer to essentialist theories of sexuality and sought to demonstrate the variety and complexity of approaches to sex, reproduction, love gender, and marriage have been throughout human history. Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality series and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble are two significant and rather famous texts in this tradition.
Foucault’s History of Sexuality pt. 1 involved an extensive analysis of the scientific and medical discourses around in the19th and 20th centuries, arguing that they should be interpreted as discourses of power rather than accepted at face value in their claims to scientific objectivity. These discourses around sexuality weremeant to influence the behavior of persons and populations. Foucault understood them as a secularized transformation of previous religious and clerical discourses of power around sex.
Whereas in previous centuries one might have confessed their sexual desires and behaviors to a priest, moderns simply reorient their confessional practices to doctors, psychiatrists, or therapists. Foucault argues, “The essential point is that sex was not only a matter of sensation and pleasure, of law and taboo, but also of truth and falsehood, that the truth of sex became something fundamental, useful, or dangerous, precious or formidable: in short, that sex was constituted as a problem of truth.”[1] The History of Sexuality series is an attempt to trace the historical relation of sexuality and truth in Eurochristian discourses dating back to Antiquity. One effect of such a history is to demonstrate how multiform, contingent, and flexible such claims around the relationship between truth and sex, or the truth about sex can be.
Judith Butler develops and radicalizes this social constructionist position in Gender Trouble by calling into question the distinction between sex and gender, which itself has only arisen in recent decades. The conventional terms of the distinction are as follows: while sex is considered to be a biological or natural reality which precedes cultural assumptions, gender is understood a socially-constructed system of cultural assumptions and practices which develop in response to this biological reality. Butler contests this traditional understanding, arguing that “gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘pre-discursive’, prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.”[2]
Butler’s is ultimately an argument against any claim to nature unmediated by culture, against any assertion of truth which finds its legitimation in a pre-cultural or pre-discursive reality. For social constructionist, culture and discourse are always prior to any claim of truth, there is no truth to be found outside of discursive practices. Boswell’s historical approach is then in many ways influenced by the insights of social constructionists. He employs careful attention to the historical and linguistic incongruities on language of love, sexuality, and affect across the ages to destabilize essentialist narratives about the incompatibility between Christianity and homosexuality.
He uses Christian history to destabilize what is considered by many to be irrefutable Christian dogma and seeks to reclaim evidence of tolerance and affirmation of same-sex relationships in the ancient world. Simultaneously he seeks to reclaim evidence of homosexual relationships in European history. Finally, Boswell provides compelling evidence that such relationships have been intentionally obscured by historians and anthropologists in recent centuries.[3]
With this background, the accusations from queer theorists that Boswell was engaging in a form of essentialism might come as a surprise. The social constructivist critique of Boswell takes place at a much more technical level, it is ultimately a contestation at the level of theory of language, which takes issue with the use of general definitions which frame Boswell’s historical inquiry. Boswell posits that general concepts like homosexuality or marriage can be usefully employed across cultural and historical contexts. For Boswell, to be gay is to be a person “conscious of erotic inclination toward their own gender as a distinguishing characteristic” [4], and he claims that such persons have existed in varying degrees as a something approaching an empirical universal across human civilizations—that is, he claims that something akin to this preference can be found in nearly all cultures throughout history.
His provisional definition of marriage takes a similar approach by establishing a Familienähnlichkeit [5](family resemblance) between various historical, cultural, and legal conceptions of marriage, arguing that most share the features of “a lifelong, committed bond between two partners” involving a merger of legal status or property. He argues that these are more stable attributes of marriage than the common modern expectation that the partners be in some way “in love”. It is in this way, by establishing this manner of family resemblance, that Boswell argues that adelphopoiesis can be understood as a kind of marriage.
The radical social constructionist argument against Boswell can be put rather simply and provocatively: if homosexuality as a concept didn’t exist before the 19th century, then it must follow that homosexuals also did not exist before the invention of the term. So understood, it is an invalid anachronism to posit that gay people existed before the coining of the word “gay”. The category would not have made sense to persons in the medieval or ancient world, and some posit that the very idea of sexual orientation or sexual preference is a modern invention and that these are ideas with no currency prior to the 19th century.
A very strict social constructionist position would hold that there are no sexual or social categories which exist outside of the precise vocabulary used to describe them in a given culture or language. In this view, Boswell’s attempts to control for anachronism in discussions of human sexuality are insufficient; the chasm of culture, language and context is insurmountable and gay or Queer history is, as such, impossible to undertake in a historiographically responsible manner.
Boswell and the Critique of “Neo-Nominalism”
Boswell himself addresses these methodological issues in his 1989 essay Revolutions, Universals, and Sexual Categories, in which he compares the substance of essentialist/social constructionist debates to the universalist/nominalist debates of the High Middle Ages.[6] Ultimately both are debates about the structure and function of language. For the universalist or essentialist, human categories assign names to already existing structures of reality.
For the nominalist or the constructivist, categories are only names agreed upon by humans and “the ‘order’ [that]people see is rather their creation than their perception.”[7] Mediations between these positions have been at play in most of the history of Western philosophy. Kantian critical philosophy for example seeks to synthesize empiricist and idealist epistemological positions in a system in which both human construction of categories and human perception of transcendentals shape their complex interactions in the world. Kant’s critical mediation of empiricism and idealism addresses the same epistemological issues inherent in the nominalist/universalist debates that preceded it as well as to the social constructionist/essentialist debates which followed.
The problems of strictly essentialist approaches to human sexuality have already been demonstrated—even a cursory historical study will make clear that attitudes, mores, and categories of gender and sexuality vary and fluctuate across time and communities. Regardless of the dogmatic claims of many Christians, there is no historical or theological consensus within Christianity on the “right” way to be sexual or the “right” way to inhabit a gender. On the other hand, a social constructionist position, like that of Butler’s on gender and sex, holds that there is no such thing as a pre-discursive sexual reality. In some sense, this is true.
All persons are always already immersed in language and culture, there is no human reality fully untouched by these structures. However, an extreme nominalist position leads to difficulties in explaining who the agent is in the generation of a new concept and who is acted upon. Many social constructionist positions suffer from a significant contradiction: if persons are passive recipients of socially mandated categories, something like homosexuality or heterosexuality are not questions of biology or agency or preference but of suggestion. But who does the suggesting? How are already existing sexual or relational categories generated?
If an extreme essentialist position leads to unfounded dogmatism in matters of human sexuality, an extreme social constructionist position leads to an intractable skepticism, in which no ‘object’ of thought (or of desire) might ever be admitted. The question of interdiction is the structuring principle to essentialist approaches to sexuality: What is permissible? What is forbidden? What is the telos of sexuality and how do I conform myself to it? In this approach, another set of highly relevant questions regarding sexuality and eroticism are conspicuously avoided: What do I desire? And why? Those who would forbid or stigmatize Queer sexuality through a theological essentialism reduce all questions of human sexuality to the relation to a scriptural interdiction: homosexuality is forbidden because it is written in the Holy Text.
The enduring hermeneutic problem, is of course, that the Hebrew Bible and New Testament are by and large not the kinds of texts that lend themselves to easy or unambiguous judgements on permissible and forbidden actions. Even the Torah, which contains the most straightforward ordinances on ritual and moral behavior, has been subject to many centuries of debate about its proper practicability. Add to that the ambiguities of culture, context, translation, and it becomes clear: there is no unambiguous textual ordinance to which one can simply submit oneself and thereby avoid the questions: What do I desire? And why?
Though utilizing different epistemes, biological and psychological essentialisms operate under the same framework: What is permissible (or recommended)? What is forbidden (or not recommended)? What is the telos of sexuality and how do I conform myself to it? Such sexual essentialisms are, at the end, a naturalization of normative imperatives that pretend to be observations, the should posing as the is. Boswell himself employs the strategies of the social constructionist, in Christianity, Homosexuality, and Social Tolerance and Same Sex Unions : he destabilizes theological essentialisms around sexuality by exposing their origins and providing credible historical counter-examples.
Such counterexamples reveal the contingency of essentialist-normative approaches to sexuality, which pretend to be indisputably universal. Boswell was amongst the earliest historians who succeeded in calling the bluff that the Christian scriptures unambiguously forbid all forms of non-heterosexual, non-reproductive sexual activity, and in doing this he followed the example of Michel Foucault. However, this strategy alone can only go so far. To simply deny the terms of the interdiction does not go far enough, it remains at the discursive-negotiative level in which lines around what is forbidden and what is permitted are arbitrarily drawn and redrawn, potentially ad infinitum. Boswell himself described the most extreme forms of social constructionism as a form of “neo-nominalism”, they preclude any possibility of naming desire. What lacks in these approaches is a coherent approach to the fundamental issues of Word, Concept, Body, and Desire.
Semiotic Problems/Somatic Problems
In his introduction to The History of Sexuality pt. 2, Michel Foucault provides an illuminating reflection on the motivations for the project:
As for what motivated me, it is quite simple… It was curiosity—the only kind of curiosity, in any case, that is worth acting upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself. After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower’s straying afield of himself? There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.[8]
For all the novelty and potential of such a strategy it is necessary to point out that the body is this approach, also somehow absent. The archaeological method shared by Boswell and Foucault might be understood as a kind of askesis – through the careful examination of absent bodies of the past, one seeks to stray afield from oneself, to escape or transcend restrictive beliefs about sexuality, to see the world through the eyes of an absent Other, and as Foucault expresses, through this experience or undertaking, to change. The manner of change to be effected remains unseen and unknown at the initial moment of inquiry.
Foucault is not seeking sexual liberation exactly. Rather, through his research, he is seeking an epistemic liberation on the issue of sexuality. It would go perhaps too far to accuse him of merely intellectual exercise. One can also detect an existential element in this quote– the questions he is posing around desire, pleasure, and sex are brought to bear on the entire person and not just the “mind”. But the desire for knowledge Foucault expresses here is a remarkably disembodied knowledge. Which is paradoxical, as the topic is itself sexuality.
The third volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality series, entitled The Care of the Self, closely scrutinizes the ways in which Antique men cared for themselves, related to themselves, and constructed a coherent subjectivity.[9] This is ostensibly undertaken as a part of a critique of transcendental subjectivity, but one cannot help but note the echoes of the ‘self-help’ genre in both locution and topical orientation.
While he tends to emphasize the contingent and non-elective factors which indelibly influenced the construction subjectivity in the western tradition, even this intervention, Foucault’s inquiry into the “care of the self”, cannot fully exclude the reality one’s reflexive and elective participation in the construction of subjectivity. Foucault and Boswell’s interventions involve a method of rethinking sexuality by way of historical proxy. This approach may eventually affect the body, but it does not take as its starting point the body of the questioner, the body that is present.
It is culturally unseemly to admit that personal fears and desires play any role in discussions of LGBTQ issues. Appeals to law, appeals to dogma, and appeals to tradition are rhetorical tools which enable one to take a position on admissible desires, while simultaneously avoiding any indication that the speaker is herself a subject of desire. A minimum veneer of disinterested objectivity serves as an unspoken term of admission to most forms of public debate. The paradox lies therein, that the failure to address the question of desire ultimately renders all discussions of gender and sexuality superfluous. When so conducted, debates around Queer and LGBTQIA+ issues are devoid of any real content, significance, or relevance to the lived experience of the interlocutors.
Without acknowledgement of desire, these are only differential disembodied positions, or identity politics. Frequently, discourse on Queer issues has little at all to do with the topic of sexuality, the rights of sexual minorities, erotic expression, or the pressing questions of reproduction and intergenerational politics. Stripped of any real content, these become culture war discourses centrally (and futilely) concerned with expressing a sentiment or position which distinguishes one as opposed to their opponent. Such discussions are redundant, devoid of real referent, and wholly unproductive on the socio-political register.
Through their historical interventions, Foucault and Boswell provide a truly innovative contribution first to Queer and Gender studies and derivatively to the political struggle for LGBTQ visibility and rights. These inquiries remain, however, on the culturally approved registers of disinterested historical inquiry. While their use of historical proxy is successful in destabilizing essentialist certainties, such interventions do not constitute a successful interrogation of desire, they only create better conditions for such a task. Boswell’s historical inquiries are an exemplary intervention which call the bluff of the essentialist discourses around sexuality which dominate both the secular and religious scenes, while avoiding the neo-nominalist and self-referential excesses of some social constructionist discourses.
Boswell’s archaeological method, inspired by Michel Foucault, falls short of an embodied discourse, that is, a discourse that implicates and interrogates the bodies and desires of the interlocutors. A disembodied discourse will always fall short of formulating a coherent sexual ethics. Indeed, the failures of theological, ethical, and social conversations on human sexuality, their disintegration into culture war polemics which eventually lose sight of their referent, might be attributed to their inability to locate the body, to in-carnate, so to speak. The only path out of such culture-war dead-ends is the establishment of an embodied discourse, which a re-locates the embodied, desiring, speaking subject and calls the bluff on the tactic of avoidance present in the extremes of essentialist and social constructionist approaches. Both the absolute submission to interdiction and an absolutely laisse-faire attitude to sexuality share the great advantage of never requiring one to pose the question: What do I desire, and why?
Foucault gets at something very important in stating that, in the nineteenth century, “sex was [re]constituted as a problem of truth.”[10] If there is a truth to be found in sex, the greatest problem with the modernist essentialist approaches lies in a misapprehension of the structure and function of truth. The truth of sex cannot dispense with the realities of the body. In his 1996 Fire and Roses, Carl Raschke proposes transcendental somatics as an approach with the potential to transform the parameters of what embodied or incarnate discourse might entail. Boswell and Foucault’s clever inquiries into the practices of absent, historical bodies provide an initial destabilization of the reductive absolutisms which govern essentialist approaches to sexuality. Raschke’s transcendental somatics then, provides conceptual tools to ensure against the spiral into self-referential triviality which so plagues social constructionist discourses on sexuality.
Transcendental Somatics as the Framework of Embodied Discourse
The call for a rejection of the mind/body dichotomy frequently forms the basis for discourses around embodiment or somatics. In order to correct the disembodied excesses and ills of the Western tradition of Cartesian subjectivity, we are urged to take the human body as a focal point, to center the body, and talk about the body. Transcendental somatics nuances such approaches by way of a crucial but subtle assertion; Raschke understands the mind/dichotomy as the double sentence of Western (or Eurochristian) culture. [11] The double sentence, more commonly known as the Freudian slip, is the apparently misplaced speech act; that which appears to be either an embarrassing or irrelevant error is a complex, but crucial subjective process of simultaneous compromise and self-assertion.
The Freudian slip is the subject’s attempt to simultaneously contend with and submit to social expectations. At the conscious level it is an acquiescence to interdiction but at the unconscious level it is the insistent assertion of desire.[12] In regards to contemporary debates around LGBTQ issues, we can take this to mean: when we speak of sex, we don’t mean sex. When we don’t speak of sex, we almost certainly mean sex. Sexual education or public health discourses, for example, directly address sexuality and sexual acts while employing a clinical and regulatory distance. These factual discourses discuss sexual acts in the most explicit manner, while maintaining an almost prudish reticence regarding sexual desire, that is, the complex and idiosyncratic motivations and contexts which lead people to engage in sexual acts.
On the other hand, many discourses which seem to be a level of abstraction beyond mere sex talk are frequently brimming with erotic subtext. Countless discourses purportedly about something else are shot through with desire and questions relevant to desires of the body, the coupling or connectivity of bodies. This is indeed the principle which undergirds the entire advertising industry, it lurks in concepts like commodity fetishism, and it unavoidably colors political discourse.
Such persistent double sentences cannot be explained by the concept of repression alone. In a crucial sense, they are matters of transcendence. In his transcendental idealism, Kant endeavored to establish the necessary parameters of reason which could function independently of the accidents of empirical experience. The great headache of the history of Kantian interpretation arises from exaggerated misapprehensions about the nature and purpose of such an independent reason. This independence should not imply that Kantian critical reason is an “island unto itself”, utterly isolated from the realm of empirical experience, nor should it imply that the world of empirical objects is in some way, irrational, or an inadequate object of rational faculties.
Rather, the Kantian critical project seeks to establish a reason which can operate autonomously of the accidents of circumstance, experience, or appearance; it establishes an independent basis of reason, but it would be a mistake to seek to separate reason and experience into two utterly remote fields. As Raschke puts it, “The great, yet inchoate discovery is postmodernist theory as a whole is that any ‘transcendental analytic’ in the Kantian sense and a transcendental somatics are one in the same. Both, in fact, constitute the groundwork for a totally new ‘empirical’ approach to knowledge.”
The Enlightenment philosophical tradition too often fails to recognize the Knower as also always and already Agent.The Knower or Reasoning subject is constructed as passive observer of the world around him and not as always and already subject to, products of, and agents in the empirical world which he seeks to Know, a world which consists of both substance and accident. This leads to a well-documented solipsistic tendency in the western construction of subjectivity. Such a distortion has significant consequences for the aforementioned debates around human sexuality.
If the mind/body split as the double sentence of Western culture, as Raschke argues, or double sentence, the Freudian slip, is not a sickness to be diagnosed and cured. It is simply a symptom of our subjective constitution. The double sentence is a product of subjective processes, analogous to the way that burping, blinking, or falling asleep are symptoms of our physical constitutions, they are products of physical processes. This double sentence, the mind/body split, is a symptom of the play of potentiality and actuality to which each person is indelibly subject.
This double sentence is the interstice of mind/body and potential/act; this interstice, indeed, constitutes desire itself. While the reflexive differential subjectivity of Western philosophical subjectivity (a tradition initiated by Descartes) utterly misses the body, a transcendental somatics replaces the cogito ergo sum with the somatic a priori. This involves the recognition that the fundamental condition of embodiment is to be subject to desire and finitude.
Crucially, transcendental somatics is not naval-gazing. This is to say that it is no reductive materialism of the body which takes anatomy as its exclusive point of focus. In his 1990 work The Absent Body, medical doctor and philosopher Drew Leder provides an account for the curious phenomena of “body-forgetfulness”. In everyday life we frequently forget that we are bodies. Rather than diagnosing this as dysfunction or sickness, Leder accounts for this forgetfullness, arguing that the body recedes from view precisely because the body is always oriented to that which is outside of itself.
The body is understood as an organ which transcends itself, which is utterly oriented for connectivity with its environment.[13] That is not to say that the human person cannot take her body as object. This is certainly possible—and frequently necessary—but it is not our default orientation. The body is oriented outward, it is given over unto its environment and this given-over-ness is indicated by its very anatomical structure and function. The body is finite. The body transcends itself. Transcendental somatic recognizes the body as oriented toward transcendence and it is in this way that Raschke can state, “sexuality signifies the interconnectivity of bodies.” [14]
Sexuality signifies the interconnectivity of bodies. The body, the person, is also a signifying entity. In Fire & Roses, Raschke makes brief but important reference to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s primordial perceptual milieu, which constitutes a field distinct from the field of linguistic signification. [15] The world of signs and signifiers draws loose connections between distinct perceptual milieu, or lifeworlds, which would remain remote from one another without this linguistic intervention. Systems of signification (i.e. language and speech) connect by way of displacement. Signification is a complex and generative process; it cannot be reduced to a simple one-to-one correspondence to the signified lifeworld. Language and speech are categories of transcendence because they alter and transform the perceptual milieus from which they initially arise.
Systems of signification describe, transcribe, and translate lifeworlds, and in this process these lifeworlds are inevitably also transformed. To speak at all is to express a desire and connect to a listener. The speech act instigates some manner change –an alteration or intervention into a situation– and it implicates a listener into this intervention. This fundamental desire holds for even the more abstract speech acts; speech remains speech inasmuch as it seeks out listeners, recipients, or interlocutors. Speech is always related to a desire, a willing. If, as Raschke argues, sexuality signifies the interconnectivity of bodies, speech signifies an indispensable mode by which persons connect with one another.
These persons who seek to connect by way of signification are always already embodied. It is in this way that we can say that discourse itself is erotics, at least in an extended sense. Reference to desire and reference to the body, and particularly the desire of, for, and between bodies, is that which makes something erotic. Speech cannot but participate in both.
Kieryn Wurts is a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Bonn, Germany.
[1] Foucault Michel, Robert Hurley (transl.), The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, New York, 1978, pg. 56.
[2] Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York and London, 1991, pg. 11.
[3] More attention is dedicated to this issue in the closing section (Why) is a gay history necessary?
[4] Boswell later changes his position by omitting the conscious aspect of same-sex attraction as a necessary component of gay sexuality. Rather than needing to be conscious of their erotic inclinations, the unconscious or semi-conscious presence of erotic inclinations towards one’s own gender also fits into his understanding of gayness. See Boswell, John, Christianity, Homosexuality, Social Tolerance Gay people in Western Europe from the beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, Chicago & New York, 1980pp. 44. See also John Boswell, “Revolutions, Universals, Sexual Categories,” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman et. al., New York, 1989, pg.26.
[5] See Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophische Untersuchungen, Frankfurt am Main, 1971, pg. 48-53.
[6] William of Ockham and Peter Abelard are two of the most well-known nominalist philosophers from this period.
[7]Boswell, John, “Revolutions, Universals, Sexual Categories” in Duberman, Martin (Ed.), Vicinius, Martha (Ed.), and Chauncey Jr., George (Ed.), Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, New York, 1989, pg. 2. Emphasis my own.
[8]Michel Foucault, Robert Hurley (transl.), The History of Sexuality Volume II: The Use of Pleasure, New York, 1985, pg 8.
[9] Michel Foucault, Robert Hurley (transl.), The History of Sexuality Volume III: The Care of the Self, New York, 1988.
[10] Foucault Michel, Robert Hurley (transl.), The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, New York, 1978, pg. 56.
[11] See Carl Raschke, Fire and Roses. Postmodernity and the thought of the body, New York, 1996, p. 33-4.
[12] See Sigmund Freud’s “Lectures on the Psychology” of Errors in: Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall (trans.), Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, digireads, 2019.
[13] See Drew Leder,The Absent Body, Chicago & London: 1990.
[14] See Carl Raschke, Fire and Roses. Postmodernity and the thought of the body, New York, 1996, p. 43.
[15] Merleau-Ponty’s primordial perceptual milieu owes, of course, much to Edmund Husserl’s concept of Lebenswelt.
