[MUSIC] One of the most fascinating aspects of sexual identity in the concept of sexuality more broadly is that these terms would make very little sense to anyone anywhere in the world approximately 200 years ago. Even further the practice of telling people about our sexual identities or confessing our sexuality as a truth itself would be foreign to people of the past. This is not to say that we didn't talk about sex in the past. People had a tremendous amount to say about sex in nearly every generation. You can find books, both pseudomedical texts and fiction about sex in just about any century that had access to printing. And even before this, there are folk tales and stories about sex that pre-exist print. But the term sexuality, our sense of an inner self that is defined by a sexual orientation was not in use. Most of the terms that make up the acronym LGBTQIA are less than 100 years old. Now it might make sense to claim that we just hadn't developed the language to define what was already there. However, it's worth asking just how central language and the terms we use now are to our understanding of sexuality and sexual identity. How we think about self and others if we didn't use the terms that we currently use to organize and categorize. Are there better terms, better ways thinking about sexuality perhaps ways of thinking that might actually liberates from restrictive assumptions about sex, love and intimacy. What does ever increasing level of categorizing to define different sexuality tell us. This lecture explores these ideas via a brief history of sexual identity and their relationship between identity and the LGBTQIA rights movement. In 1976, the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, published the first volume of his three volume text entitled, The History of Sexuality. In the first volume of this work, Foucault outlines the various and complex historical processes that have led us to organize ourselves around and understand ourselves through the language of sexuality. Put more simply, Foucault examines the very idea of sexuality, something people have accepted as the natural truth of the self. And it provides a critical history of the development of discourse on sexuality. In part, this is a history of the development of a medical therapeutic language of sexuality. In Western medical discourse, doctors have obsessively catalogued so called sexual perversions and sexual abnormalities. As an example in 1886, the German Psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, published Psychopath Sexualis. A study with hundreds of sexual case histories that came to define sexual types and sexual pathologies. Krafft-Ebing was among a few doctors who'd advised the legal community to consider the mental health records of criminals who had committed sexual offenses. Through this what was once considered a criminal, sexual act gets read as behavior that is specific to a distinct sexual type. And at times something that might be congenital, an inborn or inherited trait. For Foucault, this marks a slow shift from seeing sexual acts as actions that anyone could participate in to seeing sexual acts as evidence of a particular sexual type of person with the specific sexual identity. Foucault argues that these new terms and new identities get adopted in various domains. The medical and juridical most notably, but they take on a new social reality when we use them to describe our differences and peculiarities. Even further, when we embrace these categories we help to secure the meaningfulness of sexual identity. Arguably in a totally liberated society, we wouldn't be socially compelled to identify ourselves via our sexual identity. Our sexual orientation differences or just differences in sexual taste, might be meaningful or notable. But they wouldn't have the depth of meaning they do in the present. They would not be an index of our value in our community, and they wouldn't be grounds for granting or taking rights away. One other key element of Foucault's work is his discussion of the confession. Foucault traces a long history of linking confession to repression, truth and power. Historically and still somewhat in the present, we treat sexuality as a hidden truth. Something meaningful but hidden, something that needs work to divulge and to explicate. Because of these people claim to experience liberation when they come out as gay or when they share a secret that they feel some pressure to hide. Some refer to confession or just speaking your truth broadly is deeply cathartic. This feeling of liberation compels us to confess. By making sexuality a medical issue, we also handed over quite a bit of authority to medical professionals doctors, psychiatrists, and therapists who are paid to witness, diagnose, treat and advise us based on these confessions. In other words, the promise of liberation compels us to confess, but the confession itself is handed over to a professional for analysis and judgement. Foucault's work is primarily invested in unveiling this process and motivating people to take interest in these complex practices. All of which we might broadly call the discursive aspects of subject formation. Put another way, Foucault reveals how discourse on sexuality shapes our individual experiences of sexuality, language frames how we see and how we understand sex. And for this reason, language affects how we experience sex, including how we see our sexual identities. Lots of theories have followed Foucault's call to see sexual identity as a historically specific phenomenon. However, interestingly much of the LGBTQIA movement has relied on a form of rights base discourse that requires an essentialist view of sexual identity. Legislation focusses on the sexual orientation of a protected class or a protected identity. It could be argued that this has fostered a sense of difference based on sexual orientation. A difference that in many ways is not very accurate. As an example, consider the work of biologist and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. Kinsey's most well-known contribution to sexuality studies is the Kinsey Scale, a scale that rates sexual orientation via 6 degrees. A 0 is exclusively heterosexual and a 6 is exclusively homosexual. People were also rated X for no sexual interest. His results show that's there's a range of experiences that are not very easily categorized as heterosexual or homosexual. His work was published in 1948, since then, there's been a tremendous amount of research on the limits of identity. Slowly from the 1950s to the present, we've seen a rise in social movement for LGBTQIA people globally. Most of which focuses on visibility, identity, and rights. The last decade has witnessed a tremendous amount of social justice activism invested in improving the lives of the LGBTQIA people. If identity based social justice has solidified differences between people through a right space discourse that speaks of separate but equal people, it has also helped to move LGBTQIA people toward inclusion. Thinking about the long history of what we call sexual identity is not simply an intellectual pastime. Our movement politics use nearly the same terms that the medical doctors once used to pathologize homosexual people. We should be wary of sensuous discourse that attempts to mark people as different based on sexual preference. Why is this difference so key? How might our politics contribute to prolonging the meaningfulness of sexual identity? On the other hand, LGBTQIA identities are also deeply meaningful to individuals. We might think it's a good idea to give up our emphasis on sexual identity in theory, but this isn't always easy in practice. Language is central to self discovery. Heterosexual people are provided with a range of cultural examples and how to navigate the world we share. The rest of us are left a bit in the dark, because it's much less common to see sexual minorities celebrated in the public sphere. The goal of this lecture is to invite us all to think more critically about identity. Through this, we might be less inclined to pathologize difference. [MUSIC]
