they will find such a thing is almost touching. It is also very telling: there are a lot of people out there who very badly want the doxa of sexual orientation, in which we all have an enormous social investment, to have a physical, demonstrable existence. But the fact remains that scientists often look for evidence of non-heterosexuality, what we consider the exception to the rule, while assuming that the heterosexual rule itself requires no evidence. Scientifically speaking, this isprecisely backwards. In science, it should technically not be possible to even begin considering whether there might be exceptions to a rule until you have proven that the rule exists.
The fact that researchers have repeatedly assumed a material scientific validity for heterosexuality without seeking verification is simultaneously problematic and completely unsurprising. That heterosexuality exists is doxa: âeveryone knowsâ that heterosexuality is real. But what is real from the standpoint of culture is not always or necessarily real from the standpoint of physical science, as the example of phlogiston eloquently attests. Phlogiston was the name given in 1703 to something that learned scientific men had long assumed had to exist for the world to function as it did: a colorless, odorless, tasteless, insubstantial substance that was capable of burning. Anything that could be burnt, it followed, contained phlogiston, and anything that contained phlogiston could have its phlogiston removed by burning off the phlogiston. It was not until the 1780s that experiments by the French chemist Anton Lavoisier proved that phlogiston did not and in fact could not exist.[ 1 ] Nevertheless, some very fine scientists, notably Joseph Priestley, the man who discovered oxygen, continued to cling to the phlogiston theory for the very good reason that it was familiar, consistent, and explained lots of things that scientists had observed in experiments.
It is possible that, from the perspective of the physical sciences, including biomedicine, âheterosexualityâ and âhomosexualityâ may be rather like phlogiston. No matter how formal the name sounds, heterosexuality was not, after all, developed as a scientific concept or according to anything like scientific principles. As we recall, the idea of something called the âheterosexualâ was developed by non-scientists, specifically for use in the non-scientific milieu of the law. From its very inception, âheterosexualâ was about people as social entities, participating in social and sexual interactions with one another, in the larger context of their society and their nations and national legal codes. There is nothing about the concept of heterosexuality that suggests, or has ever suggested, that it must of necessity be an objective physical quality with a measurable physical existence.
When âheterosexualâ caught on in the sciences, it was through psychiatry, the branch of medical science to which the social is of maximum importance. Early psychiatry in particular was essentiallynon-biological in its orientation. Its practitioners did study medicine, but as we know from the work of Freud and his contemporaries, the state of the psychiatric art of that day had to do with memories and repression, dreams and the unconscious. The sorts of sophisticated biomedical models we use today in talking about mental and behavioral medicineâneuroanatomy, biochemistry, neuropharmacologyâsimply did not yet exist. At the time when âheterosexualâ was in its infancy, the existence of hormones was just being deduced (the word âhormoneâ dates from 1905), and the earth-shattering news from the world of brain anatomy was the discovery of the location of the Brocaâs (1868) and Wernickeâs (1874) areas, two of the regions in the brain responsible for language. The application of even the crudest physical biomedical experimentation to the problem of
The fact that researchers have repeatedly assumed a material scientific validity for heterosexuality without seeking verification is simultaneously problematic and completely unsurprising. That heterosexuality exists is doxa: âeveryone knowsâ that heterosexuality is real. But what is real from the standpoint of culture is not always or necessarily real from the standpoint of physical science, as the example of phlogiston eloquently attests. Phlogiston was the name given in 1703 to something that learned scientific men had long assumed had to exist for the world to function as it did: a colorless, odorless, tasteless, insubstantial substance that was capable of burning. Anything that could be burnt, it followed, contained phlogiston, and anything that contained phlogiston could have its phlogiston removed by burning off the phlogiston. It was not until the 1780s that experiments by the French chemist Anton Lavoisier proved that phlogiston did not and in fact could not exist.[ 1 ] Nevertheless, some very fine scientists, notably Joseph Priestley, the man who discovered oxygen, continued to cling to the phlogiston theory for the very good reason that it was familiar, consistent, and explained lots of things that scientists had observed in experiments.
It is possible that, from the perspective of the physical sciences, including biomedicine, âheterosexualityâ and âhomosexualityâ may be rather like phlogiston. No matter how formal the name sounds, heterosexuality was not, after all, developed as a scientific concept or according to anything like scientific principles. As we recall, the idea of something called the âheterosexualâ was developed by non-scientists, specifically for use in the non-scientific milieu of the law. From its very inception, âheterosexualâ was about people as social entities, participating in social and sexual interactions with one another, in the larger context of their society and their nations and national legal codes. There is nothing about the concept of heterosexuality that suggests, or has ever suggested, that it must of necessity be an objective physical quality with a measurable physical existence.
When âheterosexualâ caught on in the sciences, it was through psychiatry, the branch of medical science to which the social is of maximum importance. Early psychiatry in particular was essentiallynon-biological in its orientation. Its practitioners did study medicine, but as we know from the work of Freud and his contemporaries, the state of the psychiatric art of that day had to do with memories and repression, dreams and the unconscious. The sorts of sophisticated biomedical models we use today in talking about mental and behavioral medicineâneuroanatomy, biochemistry, neuropharmacologyâsimply did not yet exist. At the time when âheterosexualâ was in its infancy, the existence of hormones was just being deduced (the word âhormoneâ dates from 1905), and the earth-shattering news from the world of brain anatomy was the discovery of the location of the Brocaâs (1868) and Wernickeâs (1874) areas, two of the regions in the brain responsible for language. The application of even the crudest physical biomedical experimentation to the problem of
Similar Books
