Re: Homosexuality and What's in a Name

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> plf13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 12/05/00 01:46AM >>>
Gary writes:

>It is my opinion that there can be behaviour, feelings etc without words
>for them.  I think that Phil, Yoshie and others border on what Bhaskar
>terms the linguistic fallacy, that is the claim that language calls the
>world/reality into being.

I would argue that we are doing the opposite.  That we are saying the
material conditions did not exist for a section of the population to lead
gay lives, therefore homosexuals and homosexuality as we know it today did
not and could not exist, and that explains why there were no words for it.

I don't think the 'linguistic fallacy' critique of what Yoshie and I are
saying holds up even at the most rudimentary level - after all, same-sex
sex has been a feature of all human history.  It is a bit unbelievable that
there were no words for a section of society (such as 'homosexuals) if such
a section of society (homosexuals) actually existed throughout all that
time.

By the way, I'm not disputing, and I don't think Yoshie is either, that
there were a few individuals at the top of society, like kings, who could
live according to their own lights.

(((((((((((((((

CB: Doesn't this mean that there were the material conditions for a section of 
the
population to lead male-male sexual lives ? Wasn't it more than just a few
individuals, but large numbers of members of ruling classes in each of the 
different
European historical periods ?

((((((((((



But this is entirely different from
the situation in industrial capitalist society in which *the mass of
people* can *exist as individuals* for the first time in history.  It is
only at this point that the homosexual, the heterosexual, the bisexual can
come into being as categories.