Some people, homo-, hetero-, and bisexual, experience their sexu-ality as deeply embedded in a matrix of gender meanings and gender differentials. Others of each sexuality do not.

That limitation seems a damaging one chiefly insofar as it echoes and prolongs an already scandalously extended eclipse: the extent to which women's sexual, and specifically homosexual, experience and defi-nition tend to be subsumed by men's during the tum-of-the-century period most focused on in my discussion, and are liable once again to be subsumed in such discussion.

an be done only from the point of view of an alternative:, feminoce~tric theoretical space, not from the heart of the male-centered project itself

vis-3-vis

Thus, it can no.longe_r,.makc;.s~l_!?e, if it eyer did, simply to assume that a male-centered analysis of homo/heterosexual definition will have no lesbian relevance or interest.

Equally, however, the internal perspective of the ,gay movements shows women and men increasingly, though far from uncontestingly and far from equally, working together on mutually ,antihomophobic agendas. T~e contributions of lesbians to current gay and AIDS activism are weighty, not despite, but because of the intervening lessons of feminism. Feminist perspectives on medicine and health-care issues, on civil disobedience, and on the politics of class and race as well as of sexuality have been centrally enabling for the recent waves of AIDS activism.

These challenges have emerged from the "sex wars" within feminism over pornography and s/ m, which seemed to many pro-sex feminists to expose a devastating continuity between a certain, theretofore privileged feminist understanding of a resistant female identity, on the m;ie hand, and on the other the most repressive nineteenth-century bourgeois constructions of a sphere of pure femininity. Such challenges emerged as well from the reclamation and relegitimation of a courageous history of lesbian trans-genger role-playing and identification.36 Along with this new historical making-visible of self-defined mannish lesbians came a new salience of the many ways in which male and female homosexual identi-ties had in fact been constructed through and in relation to each other

Insofar as lesbian object-choice was viewed as epitomizing a specificity of female experience and resistance,

"Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice." By analogy, male homosexuality could be, and often was, seen as the practice for which male supremacy was the theory.34

Thus, women who loved women were seen as more female, men who loved men as quite possibly more male, than those whose desire crossed boundaries of gender.

According to that framework, there were essentially no valid grounds of commonality between gay male and lesbian experience and identity; to the contrary, women-loving women and men-loving men must be at precisely opposite ends of the gender spectrum.

process male-centered reflections on homo/heterosexual issues are in a phase of destabilizing flux and promise.

male sexual definition

Axiom 3: There can't be an a priori decision about how far it will make sense to conceptualize lesbian and gay male identities together. Or separately

What I mean at any rate to emphasize is that the implicit condensation of "sexual theory" into "gay/ lesbian and antihomophobic theory," which corresponds roughly to our by now unquestioned reading of the phrase "sexual orientation" to mean "gender of object-choice," is at the very least damagingly skewed by the specificity of its historical placement

Others, like adult/ child object choice, visibly do nave such importance today, but without being very fully subsumed under the hetero/homosexual binarism.

One used, for instance, to hear a lot about a high developmental stage called "heterosexual genitality," as though cross-gender object-choice automatically erased desires attaching to mouth, anus, breasts, feet, etc.; .a certain anal-erotic salience of male homosexuality is if any-thing increasingly strong under the glare of heterosexist AIDS-phobia; and several different historical influences have led to the de-genitalization and bodily diffusion of many popular, and indeed many lesbian, under-standings of lesbian sexuality.

l;"sduality e"xtellds along so many dimensions that aren't well described in terms of the gender of object-choice at all.

however, it should already be clear that there are certain distortions necessarily built into the relation of gay/lesbian and antihomophobic theory to a larger project of conceiving a theory of sexuality as a whole

The most dramatic difference between gender and sexual orientation-that virtually all people are publicly and unalterably assigned to one or the othergender, and from birth-seems if anything to mean that it is, rather, sexual orientation, with its far greater potential for rearrangement, ambiguity, and represen-tational doubleness, that would offer the apter deconstructive object

dichotomy heterosexual/homosexual fits the deconstructive template much more neatly than male/female itself does, and hence, 'importantly differently.

This has given us ways to ask the question of gender about texts even where the culturally "marked" gender (female) is not present as either author or thematic.

heuristic

"allegory of art and life" was a sufficiently American event to appear in a Philadelphia publisher's magazine nine months before it became a London book-the canonic regimentation that effaces these international bonds has how much the more scope to efface the intertext and the intersexed.

Indeed, it Was the f()~~ p•.linful1reaiizali(i"n, not that all oppressions are congruent, but that they are differently structured and so must intersect in complex embodiments that was the first great heuristic breakthrough of socialist-feminist thought and of the thought of women of color. 3

First, we are by now very used to asking as feminists what we aren't yet used to asking as antihomophobic readers: how a variety of forms of oppression intertwine systemically with each other; and especially how the person who is disabled through one set of oppressions may by the same positioning be enabled through others. For instance, the understated demeanor of educated women in our society tends to mark both their deference to educated men and their expectation of deference from women and men of lower class. Again, a woman's use of a married name makes graphic at the same time her subordination as a woman and her privilege as a presumptive heterosexual. Or, again, the distinctive vulnerability to rape of women of all races has become in this count~y a powerful tool for the racist enforcement by which white people, including women, are privileged at the expense of Black people of both genders.

corollary

Nevertheless it seems predictable that the analytic bite of a purely gender-based account will grow less incisive and direct as the distance of its subject from a social interface between different genders increases. It is unrealistic to expect a close, textured analysis of same-sex relations through an optic calibrated in the first place to the coarser stigmata of gender difference.

It may be, as well, that a damaging bias toward heterosocial or heterosexist assumptions inheres unavoidably in the very concept of gender. This bias would be built into any gender-based analytic perspec-tive to the extent that gender definition and gender identity are necessarily relational between genders-to the extent, that is, that in any gender system, female identity or definition is constructed by analogy, supple-mentarity, or contrast to male, or vice versa.

But many other dimen-sions of sexual choice (auto-or alloerotic, within or between generations, species, etc.) have no such distinctive, explicit definitional connection with gender; indeed, some dimensions of sexuality might be tied, not to gender, but instead to differences or similarities of race or class. The definitional narrowing-down in this century of sexuality as a whole to a binarized calculus of homo-or heterosexuality is a weighty fact but an entirely historical one.

For meanwhile the whole realm of what modern culture refers to as "sexuality" and also calls "sex" -the array of acts, expectations, nar-ratives, pleasures, identity-formations, and knowledges, in both women and men, that tends to cluster most densely around certain genital sensations but is not adequately defined by them-that realm is virtually impossible to situate on a map delimited by the feminist-defined sex/ gender distinction. To the degree that it has a center or starting point in certain physical sites, acts, and rhythll1s associated (however con-tingently) with procreation or the potential for it, "sexuality" in this sense may seem to be of a piece with "chromosomal sex": biologically necessary to species survival, tending toward the individually immanent, the so-cially immutable, the given

For these reasons, even usages involving. the "SfX/gender system" within feminist theory are able to use "sex/ gender" only to deli11:eate a problematical space rather than a crisp ~istinction

Beyond chromosomes, however, the association of "sex," precisely through the physical body, with reproduction and with genital activity and sensation keeps offering new challenges to the concep-tual clarity or even possibility of sex I gender differentiation. There is a powerful argument to be made that a primary ( or the primary) issue in gender differentiation and gender struggle is the question of who is to have control of women's (biologically) distinctive reproductive capability.

"Sex" is, however, a term that extends indefinitely beyond chromo-somal sex. That its history of usage often overlaps with what might, now, more properly be called "gender" is only one problem.

The purpose of that strategy has been to gain analytic and critical leverage on the female-disadvantaging social arrangements that prevail at a given time in a given society, by throwing into question their legitimative ideological grounding in biologically based narratives of the "natural."

Com-pared to chromosomal sex, which is seen (by these definitions) as tending to be immutable, immanent in the individual, and biologically based, the meaning of gender is seen as culturally mutable and variable, highly relational (in the sense that each of the binarized genders is defined primarily by its relation to the other), and inextricable from a history of power differentials between genders.

exiguous

Even identical genital acts mean very different things to different people.

In each of these inquiries, so much has been gained by the different ways we have learned to deconstruct the category of the indi-vidual that it is easy for us now to read, say, Proust as the most expert operator of our modern technologies for dismantling taxonomies of the person.

To \ the contrary, the recent historicizing work has assumed ( 1) that the differences between the homosexuality "we know today" and previous arrangements of same-sex relations may be so profound and so integrally rooted in other cultural differences that there may be no continuous, defining essence of "homosexuality" to be known;

nto the sveltest of metatheoretical disciplines, sleeked down to such elegant operational entities as the mother, the father, the preoedipal, the oedipal, the other or Other.

Deconstruction, founded as a very science of differ(e/a)nce, has both so fetishized the idea of difference and so vaporized its possible embodiments that its most thoroughgoing practitioners are the last people to whom one would now look for help in thinking about particular differences.

For some people, the sustained, foregrounded pressure ofloss in the AIDS years may be making such needs clearer: as one anticipates or tries to deal with the absence of people one loves, it seems absurdly impover-ishing to surrender to theoretical trivialization or to "the sentimental" one's descriptive requirements that the piercing bouquet of a given friend's particularity be done some ju~tice

taxonomy

nonce

A tiny number of inconceivably coarse axes of categorization have been painstakingly inscribed in current critical and political thought: gender, race, class, nationality, sexual orientation are pretty much the available distinctions. They, with the associated demon-strations of the mechanisms by which they are constructed and re-produced, are indispensable, and they may indeed override all or some other forms of difference and similarity. But the sister or brother, the best friend, the classmate, the parent, the child, the lover, the ex-: our families, loves, and enmities alike, not to mention the strange relations of our work, play, and activism, prove that even people who share all or most of our own positionings along these crude axes may still be different enough from us, and from each other, to seem like all but different species

It is astonishing how few respectable conceptual tools we have for dealing with this self-evident fact.

gay and lesbian studies

inexorably

positivist taxonomic neutrality of psychiatry,

nexus

"male homosexual panic"

I used it Jo denominate "the most private, psychologized form in which many twentieth-cenrury West-.,___~~-........ -.... em men experience their vulnerabilfty to the social pressure of homo-phobic blackmail" - as, specifically, "only one path of control, comple-mentary to public sanctions through the institutions described by Foucault and others as defining and regulating the amorphous territory of 'the sexual."

I needed a name for "a strucrural residue of terrorist po-tential, of blackmailability, of Western maleness through the leverage of homophobia," I found myself attracted to just the same phrase, borrowed from the same relatively rare psychiatric diagnosis

The reliance of the homo-sexual panic plea on the fact that this male definitional crisis is systemic and endemic is enabled only, and precisely, by its denial of the same fact.

aegises

Its special plau-sibility, however, seems also to depend on a difference between antigay crime and other bias-related antiminority crime: the difference of how much less clear, perhaps finally how impossible, is the boundary circum-scription of a minoritizing gay identity. After all, the reason why this defense borrows the name of the (formerly rather obscure and Jittle-diagnosed) psychiatric classification "homosexual panic" is that it refers to the supposed uncertainty about his own sexual identity of the perpetrator of the antigay violence.

A lawyer for the National Gay Rights Advocates makes explicit the contrast with legal treatment of other bias-rel~ted crimes: "There is no factual or legal justification for the use of this [homosexual panic] defense. Just as our society will not allow a defendant to use racial or gender-based prejudices as an excuse for his violent acts, a defendant's homophobia is no defense to a violent crime."

Judicially, a "homosexual panic" defense for a person (typically a man) accused of antigay violence implies that his responsibility for the crime was dimin-ished by a pathological psychological condition, perhaps brought on by an unwanted sexual advance from the man whom he then attacked. In addition to the unwarranted assumptions that all gay men may plausibly be accused of making sexual advances to strangers and, worse, that violence, often to the point of homicide, is a legitimate response to any sexual advance whether welcome or not, the "homosexual panic" defense V, ~ .,;,," rests on the falsely individualizing and pathologizing assumption that hatred of homosexuals is so private and so atypical a phenomenon in this culture as to be classifiable as an accountability-reducing illness.

"homosexual panic," a defense strategy that ,is commonly used to prevent conviction or to lighten sentencing of gay-bashers-a term, as well, that names a key analytic tool in the present study.

vitiate

There is reason to believe that gay-bashing is the most common and most rapidly increasing among what are becoming legally known as bias-related or hate-related crimes in the United States. There is no question that the threat of this violent, degrading, and often fatal extrajudicial sanction works even more powerfully than, and in intimately enforcing concert with, more respectably institutionalized sanctions against gay choice, expression, and being.

the most significant stakes for the culture are involved in precisely the volatile, fractured, dangerous relations of visibility and articulation around homosexual possibility makes the pros-pect of its being misread especially fraught; to the predictable egoistic fear of its having no impact or a risible one there is added the dread of its operating destructively

it seems inevitable that the i,~ h 7 <, style of its writing will not conform to everyone's ideal of the p,el!.u!;

p,el!.u!;

When I mean to suggest a more fully, equitably two-sexed phenomenon I refer to "gay men and women," or "lesbians and gay men"; when a more exclusive one, to "gay men.

oddly precise sense of a phenomenon of same-sex desire that is being treated as indicatively but not exclusively male.

this terminological complication is closely responsive to real ambiguities and struggles of gay /lesbian politics and identities: e.g., there are women-loving women who think of them-selves as lesbians but not as gay, and others who think of themselves as gay women but not as lesbians.

The first is the contradic-tion between seeing homo/heterosexual definition on the one hand as an issue of active importance primarily for a small, distinct, relatively fixed homosexual minoriry (what I refer to as a minoritizing view), and seeing it l on the other hand as an issue of continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities (what I refer to as a universalizing view)

series of essays linked closely by their shared project and recurrent topics

Gender has increasingly become a problem for this area of termi-nology, and one to which I have, again, no consistent solution. "Homo-sexual" was a relatively gender-neutral term and I use it as such

I think what underlies this preference is a sense that the association of same-sex desire with the traditional, exciting meanings of the adjective "gay" is still a powerfully assertive act, perhaps not one to be lightly routinized by grammatical adaptations.

"gay"

Ultimately, I do feel, a great deal depends-for all women, for lesbians, for gay men, and possibly for all men-on the fostering of our ability to arrive at un-J) derstandings of sexuality that will respect a certain irreducibility in it to (. the terms and relations of gender

retardataire

gay and lesbian studies, without which, as I've suggested, the present book would have been impossible;

efflorescence

I have made this choice largely because I see feminist analysis as being considerably more developed than gay male or anti-homophobic analysis at present-theoretically, politically, and institu-tionally. There are more people doing feminist analysis, it has been being done longer, it is less precarious and dangerous (still precarious and dangerous enough), and there is by now a much more broadly usable set of tools available for its furtherance.

Between Men focused on the oppressive effects on women and men of a cultural system in which male-male desire became widely intelligible primarily by being routed through triangular relations involving a woman. The inflic-tions of this system, far from disappearing since the tum of the century, have only. become adapted and subtilized.

Between Men ends with a coda pointing toward "the gaping and unbridgeable rift in the male homosocial spectrum" at the end of the nineteenth century, after which "a discussion of male homosocial desire as a whole really gives way to a discussion of male homosexuality and ho\D-ophobia as we know them. "20

Yet even the phrase "the closet" as a publicly intelligible signifier for gay-related epistemological issues is made avail-able, obviously, only by the difference made by the post-Stonewall gay politics oriented around coming out of the closet.

Quite the opposite: a real measure of the success of such an analysis would lie in its ability, in the hands of an inquirer with different needs, talents, or positionings, to clarify the distinctive kinds of resistance offered to it from different spaces on the social map, even though such a project might require revisions or rupturings of the analysis as first proffered. The only imperative that the book means to treat as categorical is the very broad one of pursuing an antihomophobic inquiry.

In particular, the book aims to resist in every way it can the deadening pretended knowingness by which the chisel of modern homo/heterosexual defini-tional crisis tends, in public discourse, to be hammered most fatally home.

resolutely non-algorithmic.

cultural interrogation

After all, the particular kinds of skill that might be required to produce the most telling interpretations have hardly been a valued part of the "common sense" of this epistemologically cloven culture. If a pain-staking process of accumulative reading and historical de-and recontex-tualization does not render these homologies resonant and produqive, that is the only test they can directly fail, the only one they need to pass.

Hypothesizing is easier than proving, but indeed I cannot imagine the protocol by which such hypotheses might be tested; they must be deepened and broadened-not the work of one book-and used, rather than proved or disproved by a few examples.

In arguing that homo/heterosexual definition, has been a presiding master term of the past century, one that has the same, primary importance for all modem Western identity and social organiza-tion ( and not merely for homosexual identity and''culture) as do the more traditionally visible cruxes of gender, class, and race, I'll argue that the-now chronic modern crisis of homo/heterosexual defin.ition has affected our culture through its ineffaceable marking particularly of the categories secrecy/ disclosure, knowledge/ignorance, private/public, masculine/ femmme, ma1oritylminonty, ,mn"oceii'ce/initiation, natural/ artificial, new/ old, discipline/terrorism, canonic/noncanonic, Wholeriess/ deca-dence, urbane/ provincial, domestic/ foreign, health/ illness, same/ different, active/passive, in/ out, cognition /paranoia, art/kitsch, uto-pia/ apocalypse, s!!!._ce_my/ sentimentality, and voluntarity / addiction.19 And rather than embrace an idealist faith in the necessarily, immanently self-corrosive efficacy of the contradictions inherent to these definitional binarisms, I will suggest instead that contests for discursive power can be • specified as competitions for the material or rhetorical leverage required to set the terms of, and to profit in some way from, the operations of such an incoherence of definition

These deconstructive contestations can occur, moreover, only in the 2._ context of an entire cultural network of normative definitions,·definitions themselves equally unstable but responding to different sets of contiguities and often at a different rate.

Quite the opposite: I would suggest that an understanding of their irresolvable .1 instability has been continually available, and has continually lent discur, sive authority, to antigay as well as to gay cultural forces of this century.

Roland Barthes prophesies that "once the paradigm is blurred, utopia begins: meaning and sex become the objects of free play, at the heart of which the (polysemant) forms and the (sensual) practices, liberated from the binary prison, will achieve a state of infinite expan-sion. "

inefficacious or innocuous

The aim must be to reverse the rhetorical opposition of what is "trans-parent" or "natural" and what is "derivative" or "contrived" by demon-strating that the qualities predicated of "homosexuality" (as a dependent term) are in fact a condition of "heterosexuality"; that "heterosexuality," far from possessing a privileged status, must itself be treated as a depen-dent term.

And, of course, it makes every difference that these impactions of homo/heterosexual definition took place in a setting, not of spacious emotional or analytic impartiality, but rather of urgent homophobic pressure to devalue one of the two nominally symmetrical forms of choice.

So, as a result, is the heterosexual, and between these species the human spec:ies has come more and more to be divided.

"the homosexual was now a species. "

Foucault, for instance, mentions the hys-terical woman and themasturbating child, along with "entomologized" sexological categories such as zoophiles, zooerasts, auto-monosexualists, and gynecomasts, as typifying the new sexual taxonomies, the "specifica--tion of individuals" that facilitated the modern freighting of sexual defini-tion with epistemological and power relations.

It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from that of another ( dimensions that include preference for certain acts, certain zones or sensations, certain physical types, a certain frequency, certain symbolic investments, certain relations of age or power, a certain species, a certain number of participants, etc. etc. etc.), precisely one, the gender of object choice, emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, as the dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of "sexual orientation."

Insofar as ignorance is ignorance of a knowledge-a knowledge that may itself, it goes without saying, be seen as either true or false under some other regime of truth-these ignorances, far from being pieces of the originary dark, are produced by and correspond to particular knowledges and circulate as part of particular regimes of truth.

Manichaean, aboriginal maw of darkness

opacities

Rather than sacrifice the notion of "ignorance," then, I would be more interested at this point in trying, as we are getting used to trying with "knowledge," to pluralize and specify it.

cognitive wattage

The chief of these dangers is the scornful, fearful, or_ patheticizing reific~tion of "ignorance"; it goes with tlie unex-amined Enlightenment assumptions by which the labeling of a particular force as "igriorance" seems to place it unappealably in a demonized space on a never quite explicit ethical schema. (It is also dangerously close in structure to the more palpably sentimental privileging of ignorance as an originary, passive innocence.)

narguably, there is a satisfaction in dwelling on the degree to which the power of our enemies over us is implicated, not in their command of X knowledge, but precisely in their ignorance.

One considers: (1) primafacie, nobody could, of course, actually for an instant mistake the intent of the gay advocates as facetious. (2) Secunda facie, it is thus the court itself that is pleased to be facetious. Tr_ading on the assertion's very (3) transparent stupidity (not just the contemptuous dem-onstration that powerful people don't have to be acute or right, but even more, the contemptuous demonstration-this is palpable throughout the majority opinions, but only in ,this word does it bubble up with active pleasure-of how obtuseness itself arms the powerful against their en-emies), the court's joke here (in the wake of the mock-ignorant mock-jocose threat implicit in "at best") is (4) the clownish claim to be able at will to "read"-i.e., project into-the minds of the gay advocates. This being not only (5) a parody of, but ( 6) more intimately a kind of aggressive jamming technique against, (7) the truth/paranoid fantasy that it is gay people who can read, or project their own desires into, the minds of ''straight" people.

indelible

"the most willful blindness"

facetious

Although the simple, stubborn fact or pretense of ignorance (one meaning, the Capital one, of the word "stonewall") can sometimes be enough to enforce discursive power, a far more complex drama of igno-rance and knowledge is the more usual carrier of political struggle

the ostentatious declaration, for the private sector, of an organized open season on gay men.

employer can claim to be ignorant of the medical fact, quoted in the ruling, that there is no known health danger in the workplace from the disease.7

ingenious and patiently instructive orchestration of ignorance,

The epistemological asymmetry of the laws that govern rape, for instance, privileges at the same time men and ignorance, inasmuch as it matters not at all what the raped woman perceives or wants just so long as the man raping her can claim not to have noticed (ignorance in which male sexuality receives careful education)

Such ignorance effects can be harnessed, licensed, and regulated on a mass scale for striking enforcements-perhaps especially around sexu-ality, in modern Western culture the most meaning-intensive of human activities.

"thus more likely to leave a lasting imprint on the common semantic stock than women's. "

the standard ... meaning can be thought of as what is recognizable solely on the basis of interlocutors' murual knowledge of established prac-tices of interpretation," it is the interlocutor who has or pretends to have the less broadly knowledgeable understanding of interpretive practice who will define the terms of the exchange.

Ignorance and opacity collude or compete with knowledge in mobilizing the flows of energy, desire, goods, meanings, persons.

And as C\!.~P.ter 1 will dis,uss, cbr fact thawilence is f rendered as pointed and performative as speech, in relatiOCIS-~!:Q!!nd.the closct,depend7 on 'a_ndhigl,lights more broadlV'the fact that ignorance is as potent and as multi~j,kw,J.,Jedge.

What was said to make this difference? Not a version of "I am gay," which could only have been bathetic between them. What constiruted coming out for --= this man, in this situation, was to use about himself the phrase ''coming out" -to mention, as if casually, having come out to someone else. (Similarly, a T-shirt that ACT UP sells in New York bearing the text, "I am out, therefore I am," is meant to do for the wearer, not the constativework of reporting thats/he is out, but the performative work of coming out in the first place.

est friends, who for years canvassed freely the emotional complications of each other's erotic lives-the man's eroticism happening to focus ex-clusively on men. But it was only after one particular conversational moment, fully a decade into this relationship, that it seemed to either of these friends that permission had been given to the woman to refer to the man, in their conversation together, as a gay man.

"Closeted-ness" itself is a performance initiated as such by the speech act of a silence-not a particular silence, btit a silence that accru!!S particularity by fits and starts, in relation to the discourse that surrounds and differen-tially constitutes it. The speech acts that coming out, in tuin, can com-prise are as strangely specific.

Foucault's demonstration, whose results I will take to be axiomatic, that modern Western culture has placed what it calls sexuality in a more and more distinctively privileged relation to our most prized constructs of individual identity, truth, and.knowledge, it becomes truer and truer that the language of sexuality not only intersects with but transforms the other languages and relations by which we know.

binarized identity that was full of implications, however confusing, for even the ostensibly least sexual aspects of personal existence. It was this new development that left no space in the culture exempt from the potent incoherences of homo/heterosexual definitio

The word "homosexual" entered Euro-American discourse during the last third of the nineteenth century-its popularization preceding, as it happens, even that of the word "heterosexual. "

Instead, I am trying to make the strongest possible 'introductory case for a hypothesis about the centrality of this nominally marginal, conceptually intractable set of definitional issues to the impor-tant knowledges and understandings of twentieth-century Western culture as a whole

The passage of time, the bestowal of thought and necessary political struggle since the tum of the century have only spread and deepened the long crisis of modem sexual definition, dramatizing, often violently, the internal incoherence and mutual contradiction of each of the forms of discursive and institutional "common sense" on this subject inherited from the architects of our present culture.

dern ~tern culture must be, not merely incomplete,'but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modem homo/heterosexual defini-tion; and it will assume that the appropriate place for that critical analysis to begin is from the relatively decentered perspective of modem gay and antihomophobic theory

by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male, dating from the end of the nineteenth century

I hope by now you are laughing softly with me. Lean back against the apple tree. Feel the delicate fire running under your skin. Our vulvae are wondrous to behold. Rejoice at your wondrous vulva and applaud yourself

As should now be clear, knowledges and pleasures are complexly interrelated. Indeed the old adage that "ignorance is bliss" takes on new meanings when read through the lens of an epistemology attentive to both knowledge and ignorance. Whose pleasures were enhanced by ignorance and whose were suppressed by knowledge are complex questions that must be asked repeatedly in any study of the science of sexualit

Here I will simply tantalize by repeating Sprinkle's gospel that we return to our bodies and to our orgasms, and spread the word

Sprinkle is not advocating a new homologous model of female orgasm- women ejaculate too-or an ultimate radical feminist rejection of penetrative sex. Rather than setting up new disciplinary practices with clearly defined markers between "good" feminist sex and "bad" nonfeminist sex, Sprinkle explores pleasure and refers to herself as a "metamorphosexual.

"Some people discover Jesus and want to spread the word. I discovered orgasms and want to spread the word" (Sprinkle 1999). Sprinkle's new produc- tions attempt to refocus attention from power to pleasure. "There's a lot of people who talk about violence, rape, and abuse. But, there's not a lot of people tha

cWhorter, following Foucault, suggests that one path to this playfulness is to deliberately separate practice from goal and simply engage in disciplinary practices for their own sake, for the pleasures they bring, rather than for some purpose beyond them. "What if we used our capacities for temporal development not for preparation for some task beyond that development but for the purpose of development itself, including the development of our capacities for pleasure? What if we used pleasure rather than pain as our primary disciplinary tool?" (19

e facts, it seems, make the dramatic variance in reproductive potential postulated between males and females highly questionable.

Orgasm through intercourse alone and apart from any additional clitoral stimulation is relatively rare for human females: somewhere between 20 to 35 percent of women in the United States report always or almost always experiencing orgasm from intercourse alone (see Hite 1976; Masters and Johnson 1966). Evolutionary theorists want to wed the bonobos-like social bonding function of sexuality to gibbon-like monogamy, but without attention to when we human women are laughing softly

he desire to make the human female orgasm unique was linked to the desire to argue for the so-called "pair-bond," that is, monogamous heterosexual coupling-the family values script. Western sexual values and the sexual antics of bonobos are about as far afield from each other as they can get, but even the more sexually sedate chimpanzee female mates with multiple partners during her estrus.

Jane Goodall, I would add, also notes that adolescent female chimpanzees laugh softly as they masturbate (see Goodall 1988). Dixson concludes that "orgasm should therefore be viewed as a phylogenetically ancient phenomenon among anthropoid primates; the capacity to exhibit orgasm in the human female being an inheritance from ape-like ancestors" (1998, 1

n other words, although it was accepted that male primates exhibit orgasmic responses during ejaculation, most theorists denied that female nonhuman primates experienced orgasm, another piece in an epistemology of ignorance.

After two males fight, one will often place his rump against the other's genitals or reach out and stroke the other's penis, again as a way to release social tension. Females also use sexual behavior to enhance bonding, both with males and with females. Females, who join new communities when they reach sexual maturity, will have sex with each member of the group as a way to gain acceptance. Females also maintain sexual relations with other females as a way to form alliances that will help ensure access to food and collaborative efforts to control male behavior.'

obos, unlike chimpanzees and far more like humans, frequently separate sex from reproduc- tion, and female bonobos' sexuality, like the sexuality of female humans, is not tied to their ovulation cycles. Though female bonobos have pink genital swellings as do chimps, theirs begin and end weeks before and after their fertile periods and last for approximately 70 percent of their cycle. Bonobo sexuality is not only not linked to fertile periods, its functions and enactments go far beyond simple reproductive success. Bonobos use sex to decrease tensions caused by potential competition, typically competition for food. When bonobos come upon a food source such as a tree filled with ripe fruit, their initial response is a sexual freeplay that calms the group down before they turn to feeding. Sexual encounters also often follow displays of aggression, especially among males. After two males fight, one will often place his rump against the other's genitals or reach out and stroke the other's penis, again as a way to release social tension. Females also use sexual behavior to enhance bonding, both with males and with females. Females, who join new communities when they reach sexual maturity, will have sex with each member of the group as a way to gain acceptance. Females also maintain sexual relations with other females as a way to form alliances that will help ensure access to food and collaborative efforts to control male behavior.'

. It is rare to find an account in which sexuality is treated as an autonomous set of functions and activities only partially explained in terms of reproductive function

What we attend to and what we ignore are often complexly interwoven with values and politics. Second, if you discover new knowledge about something others do not take seriously, do not expect your knowledge projects to have much effect. The veil of ignorance is not so easily lifted

Nancy Tuana Kitzinger sums up this view thusly: "Asking whether orgasm is in the clitoris or in the vagina is really the wrong question" (1985, 76). But here, despite feminist insistence that their accounts were about truth-"I think that we were reveal- ing the truth. And how can you argue with anatomy?"l18-we find ourselves in that complex intersection between knowledge-ignorance and power-politics. The desire to "cut nature at its joints" often requires value-laden, strategic decisions. Feminists cut nature at different joints than do others who represent the clitoris because their values concerning the politics of sex differ from the values of nonfeminist anatomists. Perhaps the body speaks, but understanding what it says requires interpretation.

clitoris is always already both. And once one has this richer understanding of all the bits involved in female orgasm, and little political commitment to retaining a teleology of reproduction in accounts of pleasure, then nothing turns on demarcating types of orgasm based on physiological location. In

t once the clitoris and its orgasmic pleasures were seen as inessential to reproduction, few anatomists saw any value in charting its contours and it was relegated into that little undif- ferentiated nub that could easily be deemed "external" and "nonreproductive," with the "true" genitals, those that matter, being the internal genitalia.7

e lots of bits of the penis are internal, one wonders why we even bother to make this distinc- tion. But when it comes to the analogous division of female genitals, more than arbitrariness is at play. The politics of reproduction gets written explicitly into this division, for in the female another descriptive phrase for the internal female sex organs is "the female reproductive system" (Rathus 2002, 106). This

What we have here is an instance of the politics of knowledge-ignorance. This division of female genitals evinces the persistence of a politics of viewing reproduction as central to sexuality, so that it becomes a defining element in the demarcation of female genitalia. If you set sail by Columbus's map, you would not arrive at the planned destination. St

) insisted that we women should all "think clitoris" and reject the myth of the vaginal orgasm. Their concern was to discredit the vaginal orgasm and the years of pressure placed on women who did not have the "right kind." But to make the case, a frustrating reversal occurred where only the clitoris was the source of sensation-and remember we do not yet have the enlarged Our Bodies, Ourselves (1984) conception of the clitoris to turn to. Shulman tells us that the vagina has so little sensation that "women commonly wear a diaphragm or tampon in it, and even undergo surgery on it, without feeling any sensation at all" (1971, 294). And although Shulman does not deny that some women might sometimes experience orgasm through intercourse, for after all some women, she tells us, sometimes experience orgasm through breast stimu- lation or mental stimulation or even through dreams, she does disparage the level of pleasure intercourse can provide: "Masters and Johnson observe that the clitoris is automatically 'stimulated' in intercourse since the hood cover- ing the clitoris is pulled over the clitoris with each thrust of the penis in the vagina-much, I suppose, as a penis is automatically 'stimulated' by a man's underwear whenever he takes a step. I wonder, however, if either is erotically stimulating by itself

These findings were, and still are, met with skepticism in the scientific com- munity, but not in the feminist community.

(notice the functionality of the definition

other words, repressed female sexuality increases male desire-quite a modern trope.

he does so to perpetuate an even older economy that perceives the purpose of female pleasure, when properly channeled, to be heterosexual reproduction

hat is, to become a woman the girl must abandon the pleasures of the clitoris and discover those of the vagina. "W

tions of the male sexual apparatus also appear in women's bodies, though in an atrophied state

umbus acknowledged that it, like the penis, grew in size when aroused, but he did not limit female pleasure to it. He acknowledged other sites of pleasure, s

immature kid sister, the clitoral orgasm (1

must turn to Freud.

hen heterosexuality remains the normalized sexuality, it is perhaps no surprise that far more women than men are dissatisfied when it comes to the issue of pleasure.

t Foucault's account also includes a creative, indeed resistant, aspect of pleasure, in which pleasure could be a site for resisting sexual normalization and a wellspring for enriching the art of living.

s History of Sexuality (1990) documents the uses of pleasure in the practices of normalizing power and includes pleasure, not just desire, as fundamental to understanding the genealogy of sexuality. B

Despite having science and all those measuring tools on our side, efforts con- tinue to suppress this bit of knowledge. As just one example, Donald Symons in The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1979), strikes a typical pose when he assures his readers that the multiply orgasmic woman ". . . is to be found primarily, if not exclusively, in the ideology of feminism, the hopes of boys, and the fears of men" (

s and Johnson also report that with direct clitoral stimulation, such as an electric vibrator, many women have from twenty to fifty orgasms

stud

What was once taken to be ordinary knowledge of women's more robust sexu- ality and her greater orgasmic capacity submerged into the mire of ignorance sometime during the turn of the last century, where it went dormant (or perhaps just pornographic) for about fifty years and then resurfaced in the new science of sexuality.

These are astonishing figures in themselves, but they become all the more startling when set alongside of women's multi-orgasmic capacities. Women'

The pleasure gap surrounding heterosexual women's and men's first coital experiences is even more startling: 79 percent of men reported that they were certain they had an orgasm during their first sexual experience, while only 7 percent of the women could so report (S

. Add to this the fact that almost 25 percent of the women surveyed reported being unable to reach org

A 1994 survey of heterosexual women and men in the United States between the ages of 18 and 59 reveals that one out of every three women surveyed reported that they were uninterested in sex and one out of every five women reported that sex provided little pleasure, in both cases double the number of men reporting a lack of interest or pleasure in

Many of our sociological surveys of sexuality, though not all, figure sex as it is figured in the story of Inanna, between a woman and a man. Although this is far too narrow a story to tell if what we want is an account of bodies and pleasures, let me focus on the differences between this ancient account and contemporary embodiments of heterosexual female sexua

Who would want a shotgun when you can have a semiautomatic?

. As an aside, it should be noted here that Dickinson's gynecological studies included only so-called invert

This image of women's sexuality shifts, at least for certain women, as we move into the nineteenth century, and with this move, we can locate a shift of knowledge-ignoranc

t nonfeminist anatomists sketch seldom goes beyond the identification of this pleasurable (or dangerous) lump of flesh. What I am arguing is that the history of our knowledges-ignorances of the clitoris-indeed, our lived experiences of its beginnings and ends-is part of an embodied discourse and history of bodies and pleasures. It is a chapter in the tale of power/knowledge-ignoranc

The point here is that this epistemology is not about truth.

proof of inferiority would be marked on their genital

. (the "normal" vulva, he apparently drew from memory.

Gynecologist Robert Latou Dickinson, the principle investigator of the Sex Variant study, believed that deviance and degeneration would be mapped on women's genitals. Clito- rises were examined, measured, and sketched, along with the various contours of vulva, breast, and nipple sizes. Dickinson concluded that, indeed, the genitals of inverts were a symbol of their deviance, arguing that their genitals were different from those of "normal" women

Although through images to be kept only for the eyes of professionals, whose objectivity and dispassionate nature would protect them from corrup- tion, science began to turn its gaze on the structures of the clitoris to seek out and control deviancy

men's stinging desire and limb-gnawing passion had been branded the cause of the fall of mankind. W

Now to this view of the function (or lack thereof) of female erotic pleasure add the politics of sex, namely the view that the only or at least the main func- tion of sex is reproduction. To this add the politics of female sexuality, namely the tenet common in scientific and popular accounts well into the nineteenth century that women were more lustful than men and that their sexuality was a danger to men,12 and a path is cleared to an understanding of why clitoral structures get lost in the process. T

en's sexual pleasure came to be seen as inessential to reproduction, alt

e importance of male plea- sure and ejaculation for conception has been little disputed from the Greeks to the present. In contrast, the question of female seed and the link between it and female pleasure was always a point of controversy. M

female reproductive organ

But rather than follow desire and insist that the feminist depictions of the clitoris are the truth, let me rather trace the ebbs and flows of this knowledge/ignorance

include detailed renditions of the structures of the penis, with the corpus cavernosum and the corpus spongiosum, important sites of male engorgement, carefully drawn and labeled, while offering only the merest bit of a nub as a sufficient representation of the clitoris.1

We have a classic case of separate and unequal when it comes to contem- porary nonfeminist depictions of female and male genital

essure on any of these engorged structures can result in pleasure and orgasm

The always-found illustrations of male erections (see Illustration 11), are now accompanied by an illustration of female erections (see Illustration 12), something absent in nonfeminist texts

G-spot.

8,000 nerve fibers, twice the number in the penis, and which, as you know, respond to pressure, temperature, and touc

Our Bodies, Ourselves, the clitoris expanded in size and configuration to include three structures: the shaft, the glans, and the crura.

loving renditio

rticipants in the self-help women's movement, ever believers in taking matters into our own hands, not only took up the speculum as an instrument of knowledge and liberation but questioned standard representations of our anatomy. T

is important to remember that this display, or lack thereof, is happening at a time when displays of the penis are becoming ever more complex

emen swifter than air flows this way and that on account of the pleasure even with them unwilling" (1

heralded as he who discovered the clitoris, re

pha in

hile quite content to chronicle and describe the various parts and functions of women's reproductive organs, refused to discuss what he called this "obscene part," and admonished "those which desire to know more of it" to read the work of anatomists such as Renaldus Columbus and Gabri- ello Fallopius