At the Borders of Queer Nation
< < Voices 1 || Nationalities > >
Essences
Culture is not the only thing cited as a
unifying
essence for social identities such as
nationalisms,
race and sexualities. A closely related claim is shared
life experience, which feeds into shared
worldviews.
History, which may create the sense that the identity is
primordial in some way, can be another way of "vertically" (through time) making a connection (see
Anderson 1983; Friedman 1992; Grahn 1984; Handler 1988); and it is one of the common themes of
lesbian and
gay writing. For ethnic/racial and sometimes
nationalist ideologies, identity is considered to be based in the
physical,
objective,
biological "fact" of
descent -
blood. While the claim of blood is mainly irrelevant to lesbian and gay sexualities (and the issue of whether
sexuality may be biologically rooted is the site of strongly
ambivalent argument), there is a sense of an
inherent gay essence which is part of a person's
nature, apparent in
narratives of
honesty and
self-discovery such as "
coming out" stories, and the ubiquity of phrases like "what I really am," or "truth" versus "false conciousness," or hiding.
Treating sexuality as ethnicity requires a certain amount of essentialism. By this I mean that sexuality must come to seem as much a matter of "primordial affinities and attachments" as ethnicity does to most Americans... {Stability of behavior} should then be described as resting upon or resulting from a sexual identity, a persistent attribute beyond "behavior." This interpretation of sexuality in fact coincides with prevailing United States characterizations, in which people "really are" heterosexual or homosexual. (Phelan 1994:61).
< < Voices 1 || Nationalities > >