RE: Special Report on Sexuality and Gender by New Atlantis
October 14, 2016 at 9:14 am
(This post was last modified: October 14, 2016 at 9:15 am by Neo-Scholastic.)
(October 13, 2016 at 4:03 pm)Emjay Wrote: ...it's perfectly reasonable to be suspicious when a known homophobe brings something as innocuous looking as this to the table.
One of the most interesting parts of the report is the discussion in Part One of the lack of a consistent nomenclature across studies. There seems to be no true consensus in the scientific literature about the meaning of terms like sexual orientation, heterosexuality, homosexuality, sexuality, gender, and sexual identity. If we assume that the various researchers took great pains to define their terms but came to widely divergent meanings, then it is safe to assume that derivative terms, like homophobe, suffer from the same ambiguities.
For example, does the term homophobe apply equally to person A who finds affection between two men so repugnant that it justifies physical violence and person B who feels no such aversion but does not believe homosexuality should serve as the basis for creating a legally protected class? Is this a difference of purely degree or purely in kind. On the one hand they differ by degree of affect, from disgust to indifference. On the other hand, their motivations differ by kind. Person A is motivated emotionally by his/her anger whereas, person B has a political opinion based on abstract considerations. The imprecision of the pejorative renders it virtually meaningless and makes it useful only as a rhetorical device to invalidate the opinions of others.
It seems to me that the report points to a dilemma faced by scientific researchers caused by trying to adapt nomenclature from both popular culture and critical theory (as seen in Part Three) into useful study categories. This is what I meant earlier by the appeal to essentialism. In some sense, science wants to know what the nature of things are whether it is an electron or a giraffe. It is in some sense relies on the idea that things have a essential nature that defines what things are and how they behave. It means something to be an electron. It means something to be a giraffe. In contrast to this many of the terms, like gender, adopted by the researchers originate in postmodern literary theories. Critical theory takes an existential approach that focuses on things like narratives and power structures.
