Mediated Sexualities and Gay Constituency: Queer Standpoint Thinking in a Post-Structuralist Heterocentric Society.

Richard Birch
Monday April 18, 2005
This work Copyright (C) 2005 Richard Birch

Personal Introductory Note:
I have posted this version of the essay before submitting it for evaulation. I truly enjoyed writing this experimental analysis on my research and felt the need to post it anyways, regardless of the academic outcome. This essay was certainly the most challenging one this year, and certainly produced the most anguish as my professor knows. No matter how it turns out, I am happy with the work so far. Special thank you to Alison Walton for the editing.

Queer standpoint permits one to engage in a method of inquiry designed to uncover oppression, subordination, and heterocentric social stratification. To find interest in the structure of male heterocentric stratification in a postmodern society, one must uncover knowledge in its relation to the creation and maintenance of power. Sexuality is constantly political. Sexual politics manifests itself in the very corporate, governmental, and educational systems that have been imposed in society. As women have for generations been the subject of elaborate discourse on gender differentiation and issues of equality, so now are communities that include the gay, lesbian, and other queered groups. Sexuality is a culturally determined human identity. However, when engaged in standpoint subjectivity of the queer citizen, the socio-economic pyramidal construct of oppression is clear.

The construction of sexuality as a culturally produced institution is a mediated one. As French post-structuralist philosopher Michel Foucault points out, power is a system of complex relationships in stratification “rather than as a property inherent in a particular individual or class” (Spargo, 1999, p.16). Then, if power is reliant on relationships, how does knowledge of sexuality circulate in a culture to create power? Is there any basis for considering that in this structured pyramidal system of oppression, the non-heterosexual population can assert its own discourse of knowledge in a heterocentric stratified society? In order for any sexuality to affect systems of sexual-social stratification, it must successfully be constructed by knowledge. Through standpoint subjective discourse the appropriation of sexual identity for the queer community can be achieved.

Heterosexual/Homosexual Cultural Production
Foucault asked that if homosexuality is culturally produced, then what is heterosexuality? Why is Western society governed by heteronormativity? Foucault argues that sexuality is “a cultural product that cannot be regarded as a simple extension of a biological process” (Spargo, 1999). He insisted that homosexuality developed from a late nineteenth-century milieu as a socially constructed classification of knowledge, rather than an innate identity. It is not accurate to say that same-sex socialization did not occur prior to this period, nor did condemnation of sodomy by clerical and legal institutions. However, regulating sexual practices was thought to be necessary prior to and during the late nineteenth-century. This was characterized by the introduction of what Foucault labelled “species,” an anomalous category of human defined by sexual perversity (Spargo, 1999). Thus, in the late nineteenth-century and thereafter, a man engaging in sexual relations with another man would be encouraged to identify as homosexual (Bronski, 1998) (See Appendix 1).

This form of identification relates heavily to Marxist theories of stratification. Alienating homosexuals from heteronormative social realities resulted in class distinction. To Marx, class was determined by one’s “relationship to the means of production” (Brym, Lie, Nelson, Guppy & McCormick, 2003). For the members of the bourgeoisie, the homosexual became a specific type of proletariat to oppress. Oppression of the homosexual as deviant had more to do with suppressing non-procreative and non-productive activity and knowledge. It was during this industrial period that the classification homosexual became a focus for medical, scientific, and bureaucratic institutions in order to implement a regulation of social stratification. A “technology of sex” designed to preserve and cultivate a productive and procreative surplus workforce would meet the needs of a developing capitalist system (Spargo, 1999). The proletariat family, the apex of the procreative future workforce, was thus institutionalized. Control over same-sex desires and activities was suddenly something much more than a problem for the church and state. Controlling cultural knowledge of differentiated sexual orientation was necessary for procreative/productive social order. Further, this division between the two orientations allowed heterosexuals to enjoy their existence as a status group, not just as one of prestige, but also of principle.

According to Max Weber, any group ascribed status as a social majority or cultural superior is the result of the marginalization of lower social minorities by parties that are “organizations that seek to impose their will on others” (Brym, Lie, Nelson, Guppy & McCormick, 2003). Under the capitalist productive order, “classes and parties … become the main basis for stratification” (Brym, Lie, Nelson, Guppy & McCormick, 2003). In order to ensure the existence of a surplus labour force – which can be further economically stratified and exploited as a resource – this form of stratification, based on the notion that all human resources must endeavour to regenerate and continuously repopulate, became social knowledge.

Mediated Reverse Discourse
The classification homosexual, now a pathologized apposite for arrest and treatment, was a distinct as an aberration from heteronormativity. Thus was created the model for subordination and oppression of homosexual identification, subject to negative sanctions and social marginalization. An integral component to Foucault’s post-structuralist Queer Theory (an historical comparative discourse on the mediation of knowledge of differentiated sexual orientation) is his argument on reverse discourse. Foucault charged, “there is no question that the appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature…made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of perversity; but it also made possible the formation of a reverse discourse” (Foucault, 1978).

Through mediated sexual reverse discourse, could non-hetero appropriation possibly find further ability to negate this oppressive order in the sexual montage of society? Foucault suggests that optimizing the effects of reverse discursive measures leads to power. Through the duplication of pleasures, power is created through the creation of such knowledge of pleasure in opposition to the knowledge of restrictions (Foucault, 1978). As Tamsin Spargo points out, to view power as anything other than a negative force that does not typically act on society is extremely unusual and unconventionally difficult. Foucault asks the social scientist to contemplate power as something other than its relation with dominance and oppression. This is where one can critically question Foucault’s ideas of power. Can power relations as they exist within social order simply be inverted? If one succeeds in flipping over the power relations that stitch the social productive order’s cohesive bonds, how can the social scientist measure the resistance to the reversal by other social institutions? All power relations require a network of institutions to harbour and link ideologies to one another in order for there to be complete control over populations and behaviours. To influence such a network, one must grasp the concept of subjectivity.

Reverse Discourse of Subjective Knowledge
Dorothy Smith’s (1990) conceptual grasp of subjectivity clearly defines its use as a method. “The only way of knowing a socially constructed world is knowing it from within. We can never stand outside it” (p. 22). The queer observer can only know its existence in a heterocentric society through a subjective gaze. C. Wright Mills further accentuates Smith’s theory of standpoint subjectivity: “The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals” (Mills, 2000). For the queer social scientist to comprehend the level of oppression he or she experiences in today’s global environment, each must see where personal history as an oppressed social species converges with the milieu of post-structuralist economic social stratification. Where does the queer social scientist fit into the productive order? Does he or she have a placement in such a structure? From what knowledge is the basis for power and pyramidal oppression constructed in a heterocentric society? How can homocentricism, if it can be termed in heterocentric spheres, be socially cultivated where knowledge liberation and power converge?

Reverse discourse is not new. For Queer Theory, it is about inverting stratified hetero-homo binary classism into a model of resistance. When Foucault wrote his comparative theories of sexual discourse, a new outset of gay and lesbian politics took shape, and has been refined into an equal but different classification of sexual minority. Political notions of pleasure and identification become more complex in lieu of sexual classism. Through reverse discourse, “the gay rights movement [has become] professionalized” (Bronski, 1998). Such resistance to traditional subordination has “…shifted from community-based groups to legal battles fought by lawyers – a radical shift from gay liberation’s grassroots, consciousness-raising strategies” of the Stonewall riots of the mid twentieth-century (Bronski, 1998). But is the utilization of gay professionalism in the courts adequate to implement reverse discourse of homosexual knowledge macro-socially? It is questionable that the true struggle for knowledge reversal and its effect on traditional formats of economic social stratification by non-hetero groups can be achieved solely by affecting one specific institution of the state. For where in an economic productive order, and thus procreative symbolic order, can true discursive effectiveness of gay culture successfully find appropriation in such a crucial environment for social change?

Gay Consumerism/Constituency
Homocentric knowledge, a reversal and manipulation of power binaries in heterocentric stratification, legitimized when the exploitation of consumer pleasure produces appropriation. The “rise of the gay consumer [is] the emergence of a less-closeted gay sensibility in mainstream culture” (Bronski, 1998). This convergence of gay and mainstream ideologies has been, in the Weberian sense, the result of queered commercialism acquiring social status. Arguably, though slowly achievable, the promotion of non-hetero economic power leads to fuller political power and citizenship. From Queer Theory, the notion of reverse discourse allows an evolution of the ‘mainstream gay lifestyle’ since the liberation movement of the early 1970s first contemplated it. It allows a socialization to occur between the homosexual and the heterosexual, a socialization implemented through gay consumerist exploitation. This evolution fuels power through the knowledge of the gay consumer, and forces a directive to assess its potential in lieu of the historical context of heterocentric binary stratification. Both the promotion and utilization of the gay affluent consumer mediates homosexuality in the heterocentric public. Through such a mediated process, the most influential revolution from gay consumer to gay constituent may be possible. What better method for homocentric appropriation than through a consumerist revolution, one that can be easily adopted by a heterocentric capitalist productive, and procreative order?

Yet, this is not occurring without resistance. Marxist theory on classist stratification states that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production …generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it” (Marx, 1970,2001). Those who control the means of commercial and intellectual production also maintain the ability to exploit changes to ideologies regarding of power relations and knowledge. In a reverse discursive method of solving heterocentric social problems, those who exist in the non-hetero strata of society may also benefit from this binary of control. Challenging heterocentric stratification may be achieved through the concept of a mediated sexuality. Mediated sexuality aids in challenging the historical, and “one of the unique aspects of oppression towards homosexuality [which] is its lack of visibility. Unless one states that he or she is gay or lesbian or bisexual, there is usually nothing to indicate that this is so” (Mullaly, 2002). If the invisibility of a sub-class is maintained, justification for the discouragement of homosexual knowledge is socially cultivated. “Because of cultural tradition and strategic advantage in fund raising and media, traditionalists have succeeded in advancing reasons for discouraging homosexuality to which gay/lesbian advocacy is largely a response” (Smith & Windes, 2000). Reverse discourse sets up a basis for inverting this paradigm of heteronormative knowledge.

Through standpoint subjective discourse the appropriation of sexual identity for the queer community can be achieved. Classist stratification requires hierarchal pyramidal models on which to operate. Upper stratas exist in relation to lower stratas because of socially constructed ideologies of power. Ideologies are formed through the knowledge asserted by social institutions. A heterocentric pyramid of oppression is based on knowledge of binaries of sexuality and the interests of ruling echelons. Queer Theory provides the insight for upward mobility of lower stratas. Reverse discourse as pertaining to Foucault allows the subjective social scientist to view the phenomenon of heterocentric social stratification as a system for elevating homosexual sub-classes. Non-heterosexual appropriation is possible in this method. Mediated sexuality is essential in a method of asserting knowledge through media, and thus asserting its interconnectivity to social institutions inherent to mainstream popular knowledge and ideologies.

Appendix:
1. The term ‘homosexual’ was first used as a way of labeling non-heterosexuality in 1868 by Károly Mária Kertbeny an Austro-Hungarian journalist. On May 6, 1868, in a letter to German sexologist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Kertbeny used the word Homosexualisten ("homosexuals"), formulated from the Greek word ‘homos’ ("the same") and the Latin root ‘sexualis’ (glbtq.com). In 1869 he again used the word in an open letter that protested the recriminalization of homosexuality into the new German penal code in a post-unified North German Confederation (Bronski, 1998).

References:
Bronski, M. (1998). The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press.
Brym, R. J., Lie, J., Nelson, A., Guppy, N., & McCormick, C. (2003). Sociology: Your Compass For A New World. Scarborough, ON: Nelson.
Endres, N. (March 1, 2004). Kertbeny, Károly Mária (1824-1882). Chicago, IL: glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture. Retrieved January 27, 2005 from www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/kertbeny_km.html
Foucault, M. (1978). The History of Sexuality: An Introduction: Volume One. (R. Hurley, Trans.) Toronto, ON: Random House.
Marx, K. (trans. Originally published 1970). Ideology and Class. In D. B. Grusky (Ed.), Social Stratification: Class, Race, and Gender in Sociological Perspective, 2nd edition. (pp.101-102). Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Mills, C. W. (2000). The Sociological Imagination. New York, NY: Oxford University Press (Original work published 1959)
Mullaly, B. (2002). Challenging Oppression: A Critical Social Work Approach. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press.
Smith, D.E. (1990). The conceptual practices of power: a feminist sociology of knowledge. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press.
Smith, R.R. & Windes, R.R. (2000). Progay/Antigay: The Rhetorical War Over Sexuality. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.
Spargo, T. (1999). Foucault and Queer Theory. Cambridge, UK: Icon Books Ltd.