Normal Sex and Sexuality

In class several weeks ago, we found ourselves giving opposite answers to empirical questions. When asking whether a biological basis exists for claims to one’s "biological clock ticking" and the subsequently quickened desire for a child, we recognized that there are outliers to any rule, dissolving the rule. Much like Professor Terjesen’s professed lack of awe when confronted by supposedly "beautiful" natural phenomena, certain assumptions of a universal condition among women, as among humans, are specious, ignoring the diversity of embodied human experience. However, Prof. Terjesen’s situation may be a biological issue, akin to the lack of bodily yearning for a child experienced by some women, or a social contingency (he was raised in an urban environment). Still, we could compare such a social situation to the same lack of yearning for a child. While we cannot dispense with biological realities as mere “social constructs,” with such statements as “men and women are exactly the same,” we cannot assume culture to arise totally from biology either. To acknowledge the exceptions to the "rule," cultural or biological, is to begin dispensing with stereotypes and hasty generalizations; some women choose not to have children, while others may simply not feel the initial urge to have them.

This discussion was telling of the ways in which people construct concepts like gender or sexuality; they are often framed within the types of biological questions we are asking. The common conception of intersexed individuals as biological "errors" shows how our views of the science of sex are limited by the kinds of questions being asked within the medical field itself: Are intersexed individuals errors of nature? If their births occurred naturally, what is natural? Is there then a viable ideal of “normal”? How intersexed individuals are treated, as a result of these questions, depends upon whatever discourse is dominant, whichever paradigm is currently in place and seen as normal. Feminism is treated as abnormal discourse, placing pressure upon current cultural constructions of gender/sex, offering the "abnormal" perspective which eventually (and in this case, hopefully) forces the dominant discourse to either perish or reformulate.

It is to proponents of the "normal" discourse that pressure must be applied through abnormal discourse’s constant questioning: Should homosexuality be considered an aberration in the sense that Down's Syndrome or autism is an aberration? Can we even call homosexuality an aberration, and what constitutes an aberration? A divergence from the norm, i.e., the dominant mode of human experience, heterosexuality? If so, what would make a homosexual individual less functional in society than a heterosexual individual? The further one burrows into the conceptual framework of the normal discourse, the more one must face these questions. The goal and purpose of the abnormal discourse is to provide new theory, which is to say, new tools by which to "dismantle the master's house."

Thus, in challenging the normal discourse concerning sex and sexuality, both in their medical or more broadly cultural manifestations, we come to a more complete critique of currently dominant practices and attitudes. To consider the potential biological realities of sex and sexuality, we must be careful not to advance the arguments of the vulgar social constructivist, who states that sexuality as such is totally constructed by social forces. It may be strange to conclude with this point, but vulgar social constructivism would be exactly the sort of viewpoint by which the True Directions counselors in “But I’m A Cheerleader” hope to find a “root” cause for each person’s homosexuality within their social situatedness.