EndGender

When you study gender, you sometimes come across historical “facts” that really go against everything you knew or thought was a “given.” For example, the whole blue/pink thing.

“In Western culture, the practice of assigning pink to an individual gender began in the 1920s^[7]. From then until the 1940s, pink was considered appropriate for boys because it was the more masculine and decided color while blue was considered appropriate for girls because it was the more delicate and dainty color^[8][9]. [Emphasis EG]. Since the 1940s, the societal norm apparently inverted so that pink became appropriate for girls and blue appropriate for boys, a practice that has continued into the 21st century^[10].” (from Wikipedia article, which references this study).

I first heard this fact a few years ago, after a decade plus studying feminist and gender topics! I was like, “Are you kidding me? Really?”

Another example, on an even bigger scale, is the “natural” order of heterosexuality and homosexuality. I’m a believer in a much richer concept of gender, identity, sexuality and experience than the homo-hetero binary, and I don’t subscribe to the notion of a two-party system of gender, but until I came across a certain book, I had always assumed that the h/h division has been the standard for a long, long time, not an invention of the last 300 years!

In Jonathan Ned Katz’ The Invention of Heterosexuality, he describes how the words “heterosexual” and “homosexual” were coined in the second half of the 1800’s, followed by the creation of social and legal categories that people could be grouped into, and rewarded or punished accordingly.

Today’s quotes are from the introduction to the book by Gore Vidal. I am an enormous Gore Vidal fan and will recommend Myra Breckenridge to anyone in earshot (except kids, this is adult stuff people!). His recent political writing is incredible, I heartily recommend Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace and Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta. Here’s Mr. Vidal on the theory of heterosexuality.

“Heterosexuality, a weird concept of recent origin but terrible consequences, is, of course, central to those very strange notions of human sexuality with which Freud and his apostles saddled us for a century.” (vii)

“Freudians were never able to come up with a proper word (instead of a hybrid Greek-Latin one) for heterosexuality because the Greeks didn’t know what it was. They knew about reproduction. They knew about lust and love. They knew about the intensity of sexual desire between men and men, women and women, but for them, Lesbos was just an island off the coast of Asia Minor while Sappho was your average Pulitzer Prize winning poet.” (ix)

“By analyzing the stages by which these sloppy words become concepts that then become “facts,” Katz nicely undermines the whole false division. I have often – perhaps too often – made the point that there are no homosexual people and no heterosexual people, only hetero or homo acts, and most people, at one time or another, despite horrendous taboos, mess around ….” [Emphasis EG]

Vidal then quotes James Baldwin: “It is quite impossible to write a worth-while novel about a Jew or a Gentile or a Homosexual, for people refuse, unhappily, to function in so neat and one-dimensional a fashion.” (x)

True enough!

Vidal concludes (and invites the reader to join him): Katz … manages to deconstruct two nouns whose invention created false categories, thus making it possible to control the people at large through legal taboos that must now be revoked, as any non- superstitious reader of Katz will conclude.”

Color us non-superstitious! Up next: quotes from Jonathan Ned Katz “On the Invention of Heterosexuality.”