Re: Homosexuality and surplus value

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mine:

>People were asexual before capitalism then?

No.  One could then -- unlike now -- enjoy eros without thinking of
oneself as homo, hetero, bi, etc., and that's what folks -- I mean
those who were in a position to enjoy eros -- did before the rise of
urbanized industrial capitalism.

>In the Ottoman
>empire, many Sultans were known to be developing homosexual
>relations not simply
>as a _sexual act_ in the sense of ass fucking, but also for
>pleasure, eroticism,
>(gay love etc..) in the sense of developing _homosexual identity_. There were
>self identified gays among Sultans. They were heavily repressed by
>the religious
>authorities of the palace who were concerned with the pro-creation
>abilities of
>Sultans. Homosexuality was considered to be an _unnatural thing_
>because it was
>believed to go against the _divine order of things_. Gay sultans, _seen_ as
>lacking the _capacity_ to fuck women, were constituting a major threat to the
>continuation of the sultane institution based on male lineage. Property
>relations built upon male privilege/palace aristocracy were at stake
>there, and
>homosexuality had to be controlled to protect this privilege.  That
>under modern
>times gay oppression became more modernized due to science, capitalism, nation
>state, etc.. does not mean that oppression of homosexuality did not
>exist before
>then.

It would be very interesting if you could take the trouble to
document the above.

It is not wholly improbable that, in some pre-capitalist societies,
certain individuals exempt from direct production & endowed with
leisure for self-reflection -- such as "gay Sultans" you mention --
developed by chance a sense of self-understanding that resembled our
modern notion of homosexuality.  In such societies, however, there
was no material condition that would give rise to a hegemonic
ideology based upon categories of "sexual identities" by which
_everyone's self_ had to be defined.

Robert Padgug writes: "It was only with the development of capitalist
societies that 'sexuality' and 'the economy' became [ideologically]
separable from other spheres of society and could be counterposed to
one another as realities of different sorts" ("Sexual Matters:
Rethinking Sexuality in History," _Hidden from History: Reclaiming
the Gay and Lesbian Past_, eds. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and
George Chauncey, Jr., NY: Meridian, 1989, p. 62).  Only recently did
"sexuality" become a relatively autonomous sphere, ideologically
separable from "economy" & "procreation."  In the world before
urbanized industrial capitalism, it was impossible to detach
[ideologically] a private & individual realm of "'sexuality' from the
household (_oikos_), with its economic, political, and religious
functions; from the state...; from religion...; or from class and
estate (as the determinant of the propriety of sexual acts, and the
like)" (Padgug, p. 62).

>I guess that was what you were trying to get at in your
>distinction between sodomy (sexual act) and homosexuality (as an
>identity)-- but
>how do you define sexual *identity*? Is it something so easily identifiable?

Boundaries are never clear, but the ideological imperative of
heterosexism compels us to constantly draw & redraw the boundaries,
creating "sexual identities" of homo, hetero, & bi.  The social act
of drawing the boundaries itself is what matters ideologically.

Yoshie