nomadthethird
more issues than Time mag
I'm reminded of the still somewhat paranoid obsession with a 'homosexual gene' (those 'evolutionary psychologists' again), but no corresponding obsession with a 'heteronormative' gene, or a 'bisexual' gene, or a 'non-sexual' gene, or a 'trans-sexual' gene, or a 'transvestite' gene, with the scientific discourse itself anthropomorphizing 'sex' everywhere.
Yes. What 'de-ontologizes' all of this too - whether sex or race - is, ironically, biogenetics itself, because if genetic (re)engineering is able to reduce the human psyche to an object of manipulation ( what someone like Heidegger feared as the 'danger' inherent in modern science and technology), to fundamentally reconfigure and reduce a human being to a natural object whose physical features can be altered, then it is not just humanity which is retrospectively problematized and undermined, but nature itself is lost, is 'denaturalized.' It is not just sex and race, as (voided) master signifiers, that then destitute the discursive consistency of gender and 'skin colour', respectively, but nature itself can longer be invoked as humanism's stabilizing MacGuffin (that 'unfathomable dimension of ourselves' we call 'human nature' goes the way of the present financial meltdown). Those who perceive a basic incompatibility between their biological and psychic-discursive identities can already directly manipulate such a symbolic blockage: for instance undergoing a sex-change if someone believes their gender to be 'trapped' in the wrong sex (not so easy in relation to 'colour', as Michael Jackson's tragic surgery revealed). This reaches its 'discursive limit' when a parent is permitted to 'choose' the sex of her/his child: all becomes merely contingent.
The idea that sexuality can be reduced to genes in a one-to-one sort of correspondence is, of course, ridiclous.
I find it strange that the promise of a "homosexual gene" is supposed to allay the fears of the homophobic, as if somehow if it's proven to be a "born in" trait that straight people will stop being threatened by departures from heteronorms such as "gay marriage"...seems to me that this will more likely feed homophobia because it's essentially the same justification racists use for their hatred of black people (their "inferior" genes)...
Great argument for post-humanism btw