The initial task involved in the denaturalization of the sexual is a critical examination of the categories of the sexual that reinforce the illusion of compelling homogeneities. By far the most important of the categorizations must be and continue to be those based on object choice. The notion of object choice, however rich with meaning it might be, refers, almost without exception, to gender.
Perhaps it is the seeming visibility of gender and, as part of that, gender’s direct reference to the reproductive aspect of sexual behavior that established claims for naturalization, for admitting to sexual theory the naive functionalism of general biologies. Even for sexual actors whose object choice and sexual practice appear to circumvent reproductive consequences, this linkage with the phylogenetic provides comfort by establishing a strong, almost independent basis for the assumed strength of sexual desire.
Clearly the powers of sexual instincts are often seen as a better explanation or apology for sexual behavior than preferences that emerge from the vagaries of individual history. Such a view is equally useful to those who would have chastity or adherence to highly restrictive sexual standards elevated to the status of exemplary behavior.
The view of object choice as the expression of a powerful biological mandate frees the observer from the embarrassments created by the plenitude of other attributes that variably and significantly enter into object choice. The seeming simplicity and obviousness of gender create a bright light effect that either obscures other dimensions of object choice or establishes the gender of the object as the encompassing distinction that renders all other attributes subordinate. However, as should be obvious, gender without further specification provides only a neutered mannequin, one with only the most limited potential for eliciting sexual interest. The most one can say about the dominance of gender in eliciting sexual interest or excitement is that it is a minimal precondition for most individuals most of the time, and even then not necessarily for the same reasons. The issues of age, race, physical appearance, social status, quality and history of relationship and the specif ics of context, among other attributes, also play roles as compelling, if not more so, than that played by gender. Indeed, gender limited to sheer biological definition may be little more than a signifier whose larger content is totally dependent upon a history of experience and a promise of future uses.
This is not to say that object choice, even when defined exclusively in terms of the gender of the object, is without substantial influence in the shaping of the sexual identity of individuals, as well as their sexual and nonsexual histories. To the contrary, it may be among the most significant determinants of the history of the individual, one that perhaps explains more of the nonsexual aspects of such individual history than it does the intrinsically sexual.
Object choice viewed in its fullness of detail, viewed as a balance of permissions and exclusions, can only be understood as a process of construction and, at times, of negotiation; a process that may differ in critical details not only among individuals but also over time in the history of the same individual. Freud (1905), in focusing our attention on explicitly sexual motives, insisted on a clear distinction between the object of sexual interest and aim of sexual interest. By making gender the focus and explanation of sexual behavior we have dissolved the enormously complex issue of the aim into an excessively simplified conception of the object, and in doing so, we have created versions of the “normal” heterosexual, the “normal” homosexual, and we are currently in the process of attempting to create the “normal” bisexual (Weinberg et al. 1994). We are thus creating versions of a “normality” whose precise appearance in living form may be sufficiently rare to truly earn them representation in museums of natural history.
Object choice is not a simple fact. It is an evolving of sexual scripts, scripts potentially rich with metaphor and metonymy. Sexual scripts, in turn, are not special creations of and are not singularly occasioned by the sexual possibility. Nor are they predominantly products of the compressed preparations of earlier experience (the epigenetic) merely waiting for the internal pressures of biological change or the external shift of interpersonal expectations to make their presence known.
Object choice may properly claim its critical importance not only as an expression of the sexual actor’s underlying sexual identity but also because of its relationship to the actor’s identity in the broadest terms: from the “I” of personal narration to the “me” responded to by the surrounding social world; from the subject of consciousness to the object embedded in and dependent upon social life. Sexual desire is often seen as requiring the attention of special agencies of control and repression when it should be obvious that the major agencies of control and repression are the weight of nonsexual identifications, commitments, and relationships. The sexual is simultaneously characterological and contingent: sometimes our destiny and sometimes the altering of that destiny.
While the current anomic division of labor describing the human sciences encourages the view of the development of a sexual identity in relative isolation from the formation of identity as a whole and continuous process, a postmodern perspective is compelled to struggle towards the holistic, if only because the sense of the problematic experienced by the individual is itself a reflection of the problematic nature of the self in social life.
Few instances of human experience are more fully reflective of the dialogical character of human existence than is the relationship of object choice to sexual identity and of the relationship of both to social life.
I am a Y, I must desire an X.
or
If I desire an X, I must be a Y.
If I am a Y, I must desire an X.
If I want to be a Y, I must desire an X.
or
Z wants/expects me to be Y, so I should try to desire X.
or
If I am X, I should/have to be Xb X2, X3,.. ,Xn, or
Being X, it is easier to be Xb X2, X3,.Xn.
Combinations and propositions, such as these, multiply and increase in importance as the larger society is less able to impose responses or ensure a consistency of response across the different activities of everyday life. As gender rules move from the imperative to the declarative to the conditional and even, in some cases, to the optative, there must be an implicit decline of a coercive social logic, such as the decline of the imperatives of God and tradition, which occasions a rise in the prestige of psycho-logics and sociologics. Such logics allow individuals to volunteer for standardized identities that organize standardized scripts in order to avoid a crisis of individual cohesion occasioned by a failure of societal integration.