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2.2 The Essential Static of Flesh in Science

Scott’s statement defining perversion could, and definitely would, be further developed and fine-tuned if a patient exhibited behavior that could not under any circumstances fit in with Scott’s definition of ‘normal’. If psychical and biological excavation found nothing else to blame, the definition of perversion would not spread, rather the definition of normal would evolve. Normalization becomes hyper explicit in order to maintain perversion as unarticulated, or broadly articulated. Compare how very simple and easy to identify is the psychoanalytic definition of normal sexuality, yet all psychoanalysis is about everything that falls outside of it. Thousands of words in texts articulate why, how and when people fall outside this definition. Rarely if ever do texts deal with model behavior that is precisely and perfectly contained within ‘normal’ sexuality. Currently, there are so many cross referential terms psychoanalytically for perverted behavior, that any thing which arises can be, with the help of multiple terms colliding, clinically ‘diagnosed’. No paedophile is ever just a paedophile, but upon analysis is a paedophile with borderline delusional behavior and a denial of his/her mother’s castration. Change in subjectivity is the enemy of normality. The fear of change presumes a constant subject who was once base level ‘normal’ and who became a ‘pervert’. The excavation of a pervert’s childhood to find out what perverted the subject presumes a flat-line of normality at which all children are born, as if subjectivity is a blank canvass upon which perversion is heaped. Normality is there already and must, seemingly, be overwritten with perversion, in the same way as femininity overwrites the blank model of ‘man’, and homosexuality overwrites heterosexuality. [31]

In order to begin to theorize the subject perverting at every moment hence creating for itself a celebratory being as perversion, I wish to briefly point out another form of ‘celebration of perversion’. At once an attempt to affirm ‘perverse’ or other sexuality, perversion is concurrently used to biologize and hence perhaps set up a cure for the formation of a gay body. In her introduction to Epistemology of the Closet Eve Sedgwick posits the two axes of sexuality, as a means of deconstruction rather than a suggestion for readings of perverted sexuality. She claims that along with the axes of race, nationality, sex (gender) and class is the dichotomy hetero/homo that creates meaning behind every act performed by a subject. Her elucidation of this binary of today’s human sexuality is more an analysis of the potential acceptance boundaries of any notion of perversion in culture.  Sedgwick points to the current frenzied studies of the ‘homosexual’ as both a means of making homosexuality visible, acceptable and eventually perhaps biological, while at the same time stating that any firm acceptance of homosexuality within a binary system of sexuality will further make strange the endless perversions of which the human body is potentially capable.  In the section titled ‘People are Different’ [32] Sedgwick begins to touch upon the multiple ways in which even identical acts may be read, and hence, rather than indicating a starter catalogue of perversions she merely suggests the infinity of sexuality that presents in the human embodied desiring subject. Her discussion points to culture’s demand for a theorization of homosexuality: as nature and nurture; as biological or cultural; whatever binary is theorized as at any particular moment, but always within this economy of hetero/homo (with the possible aberration of bisexuality), and never outside of this immediately comprehensible and study-able, from every discursive angle, system. Whether the figure of the gay subject is accepted or not, it is identified and biologically validated at the peril of any other sexuality. This threat of exclusion was part of the need to begin a theory of ‘queerness’ rather than gay theory, not simply due to the masculine bias gay studies exhibited but also for the range currently articulated which the term ‘gay’ could not encompass. By biologizing gay subjectivity, science both creates a fixed pervert (whatever falls outside of this is queerer than queer) and also a mode of behavior normal for gay subjectivity. Thus by affixing a system of normalization upon gay identity, any subversive powers gay subjectivity might wish to utilize simply by speaking for itself, defining itself or indeed refusing to define itself are closed off. Jennifer Terry has written extensively on ‘gay biology’ and the problems of both biologizing sexuality and of biology itself. ‘Gay’ biology is embedded within a concept of potential truth, but truth defined traditionally by certain kinds of either hetero- or homo-sexual people, with identifiable levels of economic wealth and whiteness that make such a science, like most other sciences, conditional. In ‘The Seductive Power of Science in the Making of Deviant Subjectivity’ Terry states

The argument for homosexual immutability betrays a misreading of the scientific research itself. Nothing in any of these studies can fully support the idea that homosexuality is biologically immutable; each study leaves open the possibility that homosexuality is the result of a combination of biological and environmental factors, and several suggest that homosexuality may be tied to a predisposition in temperament that could manifest in a number of ways. [33]  

Science desires the claim to immutability for two reasons, firstly it means knowledge has been located because the predictability of such knowledge exists as a constant, and secondly it means there is always an ease with which the deviant subject can be recognized (hence prevented, cured, avoided). Terry worries that those gay rights advocates who wish for a discourse of the scientific truth of gay-ness are closing off any potential for diversity and difference to be an acceptable cultural fact. By solidly valuing any single subjective axis, all others are closed off. Any normalization, even of gayness, sets a standard from which other pathologies, even pathologies of the other, can emerge. Terry uses race in a similar way to argue that predictable differences are as dangerous as not recognizing difference at all. Feminism has through all its varying incarnations, also expressed anxieties towards biological essentialism. By gaining recognition homosexuals (and inevitably all ‘deviants’) lose as much, if not more, than they gain.

What would it mean if ‘homosexuality as we know it today’ [Sedgwick] became reduced in the popular imagination to a strip of DNA, or to a region of the brain, or to a hormonal condition? What would we lose in the defensive move to believe science to be our rational savior and to base our politics in biology? What does science do for us? What does it do to us? And where can we turn for a new question of the self and new ways of performing - as opposed to biologically manifesting - deviance? [34]

Pathologizing non-normal bodies has reduced in size, in material terms, to the cellular genetic code. Technology has transformed difference from the gross to the minute, from size and shape to proteins invisible to the naked and untrained eye. For some reason the miniaturization of the essence of anatomy seems less offensive, and less stratified in value, than claims of large, visible and what will later be discussed as ‘monstrous’ differences. Dorothy Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee in ‘The Media-ted Gene: Stories of Gender and Race’ state “But the images of pathology have moved from gross to hidden body systems. Once blacks were portrayed with large genitalia and women with small brains; today the differences lie in their genes.” [35] Miniaturization of corporeal knowledge ‘found’ in science mirrors the miniaturization of access to knowledge, and disguises the responsibilities and powers of offensiveness, previously writ large, within claims to essential difference. This miniaturization pushes the episteme of genetic differences into a hyper-elite realm that demands the right equipment and the right mode of reading the information. The study of chromosomes and genes somehow makes statements that cement truth in biology as more truthful, less accessible and hence easier for the general populace to accept without question. Nelkin and Lindee discuss a narrative of stories of biological truth systems of difference that intersect all axes, from sex and gender to race, nationality, sexuality and beyond. They finish their article by saying

Scientific claims become a way to reinforce such stereotypes. While science is a form of cultural knowledge, it is often seen to represent a natural reality, an unbiased, objective approximation of truth. Thus to say that ‘everything is assembled according to instructions in its chromosomes’ seems more acceptable than saying ‘blacks are less intelligent’ or ‘women cannot do math’. But explanations based on ‘natural’ or inherent abilities serve the same social purposes. They place people in desired contexts - women in the home, blacks in sports - and exclude them from other contexts - mathematics, departments or managerial positions. They are, in effect, a way to construct the body in ways that will legitimate existing social categories. [36]

While Nelkin and Lindee are right to point out the seeming decline in offence that ‘chromosomal’ science posits over that of gross anatomical science they fail to suggest why. Why is the tiny, the exclusively microscopic and impossibly complex, hence specifically knowable by a small amount of specialized persons, the answer modern science turns to without questions of cultural difference? Is it harder for us to de-construct chromosomal science than it is to deconstruct gross generalized visible scientific claims of color and sex because chromosomal science is so secretive and inaccessible? The body in chromosomal science seems to be a vessel of secrets, in the same way that Sedgwick theorizes the gay body as a culturally constructed secret waiting to come out. The chromosomal body is waiting to ‘come out’ as it is, as patently exhibiting on gene strips its entire destiny in identity. Whether it is a sick body, a sexually deviant body, a black or female body all its ‘secrets’ are waiting on that tiny strip. This achieves two things - first, that there is after all only the axes available to us in popular discourse for the human subject to choose from - these can all be found and proven on that gene strip. Secondly by placing certain traits in acceptable positions it becomes very clear that there are only a limited number of positions in the world and therefore there are some behaviors (though science would say genetic sexualities) for which there is absolutely no place in culture whatsoever. Or, in terms of genetics, a limited amount of positions which are biologically possible, hence anything that falls outside is aberrant or diseased, which suggests an essentialized or biological truth. If Nelkin and Lindee are advocating the transgression by women to managerial positions or blacks to math departments what then would happen to a truly deviant subject that does not have a place (except perhaps a penitentiary) from which to transgress? In this respect I agree with Terry, Lindee and Nelkin who mistrust science, but I want to take their anxieties further by suggesting a refusal of any form of perversion, be it woman, black, homosexual and so on, that science accepts as potentially ‘normal’. As soon as any perversion becomes normalized, both it and all perversions that fall outside it are constituted specifically ‘within’ and ‘outside’, creating yet more boundaries of specifically advocated behaviors and modes of being. As long as everything that is not white, male, middle class, normalized and phallologocentrically perfect remains in the realm of the perverted, it can remain outside the specific and increasingly naturalized scientific control of that system which deemed it perverted in the first place. Better the majoritarian move to the realm of pervert than former perverts become subsumed in traditional discursive and social systems.

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