ABSTRACT
In 1968, a year before Stonewall and the emergence of gay resistance, the sociologist Mary McIntosh published a remarkable article entitled “e Homosexual Role” embracing a position that would now be called antiessentialist.1 Noting the diculties that science had encountered in its eorts to promote the conception of homosexuality as a medical condition, she proposed that
An antiessentialist approach to homosexuality was further developed in gay studies as a result of a similar thrust in the feminist criticism of gender. It received a powerful endorsement from Michel Foucault, whose position has recently been outlined by David Halperin as follows:
ere is of course one major problem with this approach. In an age in which public discourse surrounding homosexuality has become increasingly dominated by right-wing rhetoric, institutionalized philistinism, and AIDS panic, it seems to be a way of encouraging oppression by oering a view of gay identity, and furthermore desire, as merely a cultural production-with the implication that this production can simply be unproduced, erased, silenced. Not surprisingly there have been several attempts to nd substitute terms. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, pointing to the radical condensation of sexual categories in our century to the two species homosexual and heterosexual (and more importantly to the resulting incoherence surrounding those terms), oers the terms “minoritizing” versus “universalizing” as alternatives to essentialist/constructivist because they respond to the question, “In whose lives is homo/heterosexual denition an issue of continuing centrality and diculty?”4 In a recent book Diana Fuss attempts the rehabilitation of essentialism by insisting that “interrogating essence wherever we may nd it does not necessarily entail simultaneously dismissing it.”5 But essentialism has peculiar new dangers for gay people in a world in which the fantasy of genetic engineering threatens to become a reality: as Sedgwick points out, no medical technologist is talking positively about the proper biological conditions for gay generation.6 And what antiessentialism has done for the gay movement is at least positively to open up broader vistas of understanding. For part of the very substance of accepting a gay identity in Western culture in our time is by implication the cultivation of that sense of dierence, of not subscribing to the straight world’s tendency to project itself onto everything it encounters and to assimilate everything to its own idea of itself, but instead valuing, exploring, and trying to understand dierent things, people, and ideas, in terms that are closer to the way in which they perceive themselves. It is, in other words, worth the risk.
