From: amz@iguana.cis.ohio-state.edu (Arnold M Zwicky)
Subject: your sexuality as an organism
Followup-To: soc.motss
Summary: unfolding in a context
Organization: osu, stanford, lsa, outil,...
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1992 18:56:52 GMT
Xsfrom: amz@cis.ohio-state.edu (Arnold M Zwicky)

i've been trying to square the experience most of us on this group
have had of *discovering* our sexuality (or sexualities), of
*recognizing* it or *finding it out*, with the absurdity - so well
mocked by arne adolphson in a posting a little while ago - of talking
about sexuality as prenatally fixed and enduring unchanged through
time.  and with the very clear sense i have that when i was 16 i was
in fact straight - that this was a simple, accurate description of my
orientation - and then when i was 30 i was bi (in this same sense),
and that when i was 46 i was gay (again in this same sense), that i
was not "confused" about my sexuality at any one of these points.  and
this in turn with the recognition that other people's lives have
unfolded in ways very different from this (and that for the most part
their descriptions of their feelings, often so different from mine,
should be taken at face value).

the metaphor i want to offer is of your sexuality as an organism,
which comes equipped with a genetic program that directs, to some
extent, the way your sexuality and sexual imagination will develop
through time and, again to some extent, the way these aspects
of your being will alter in response to the accidents of your
history, to the events that occur to you and the contexts that
you find yourself in.

the thing is that there are *many* (i don't know how many, but
certainly more than two or three) species of these sexuality
organisms.  some have rather rigid programs (largely unaffected by
what happens in the context), others very plastic ones (exquisitely
sensitive to events in the context).  different ones have programs
that attend to different aspects of the context, or to the same
aspects at different times, and of course different ones have
different unfoldings in time.  some species early on take a form that
remains the same in most respects throughout their development; others
are programmed to undergo metamorphoses (or to do so if an appropriate
triggering event comes along), perhaps several of them.

this, it seems to me, is the right order of magnitude of complexity
for thinking usefully about issues of sexuality and identity.  yes,
it's too rich a universe.  but it's potentially an adequate one.  the
task would be to discover which sexuality organisms are possible ones,
a task we'd start on by investigating which ones actually occur.
(which is just the way many linguists, me in particular, go about
theorizing about languages: we devise a framework that is rich enough
to encompass all the phenomena we know to occur in language, then
search for further assumptions that will pick out systems that are
possible languages, which we get some foothold on by investigating
what actually occurring languages are like.)

not that any of this is easy to do...

arnold (barely averting a discussion of the principle of
         phonology-free syntax...i mean, that was *close*!)

       (again thanking rob bernardo, who a couple of years ago
         planted the seeds of this idea and also of the analogy to 
         theoretical linguistics)