les voix: For/Getting｜Re/Membering

最近讀到Rachel Dolezal的新聞，覺得詭異又有趣，在種族主義和文化認同之間，一個天生白皮膚的人到底有沒有可能是個「黑人」？白皮黑魂是黑人嗎？什麼是黑人？為什麼是「消費」黑人？ MtF是在消費女人嗎？那試圖漂／被漂「白」的亞裔移民呢？

相對於白的黑才是黑；所以膚色是相對的，是習得的，因此膚色的「黑」的概念上的真實還是經驗上的事實？ 如果是黑人國裡的黑人小孩，能理解自己是「黑人」嗎？當然，沒有人能遺世獨立，所以必定會發現他／我的差別，但這後驗事實能被用來證成「天生論」嗎？

於是我又想，女人／男人島上的小女孩、小男孩，會如何認識自己的身體呢？會需要「男」、「女」的生理或心理等性別分類嗎？若非，將可能只有「有性」與「無性」（asexual）的差別嗎？誠然，上述這些二分法仍是本質主義了，卻也突顯「本質」的荒謬。

這誘發我開始思考一件事，那就是「性傾向如何可能是天生的？」因為一個人一定要先習得、認識、學會辨識生理性別（sexual difference），才有可能確認或否認自己的社會性別認同（gender identity），才會再進一步探索、感受、了解自己情慾的傾向性。

也就是說，在學會辨識生理與心理性別之前，人如何可能有性傾向呢？所以「性傾向」這個概念，其實只是接受、援用、複製「異性戀世界觀」主體化「非異性戀者」的產物而已吧？是嗎？也因此，性傾向的「存在」，反而會僵化性別的分類法吧？

換個例子，關於「種族」或「膚色」的認同如何可能是天生的？在習得顏色前、在認識「非黃種人」前，我知道自己「是」黃種人嗎？相同或類似膚色之間的人所存在的情慾，是一種「性傾向」嗎？若非，那interracial sex又應該怎麼被理解或定義呢？

又，年齡與「習得數字」之間的關係又是怎樣呢？成熟（自主）或幼稚（無行為能力）是一種社會性的氣質嗎（social expression）？若是，那成年人對未成年人（或相反）的情慾，是一種「性傾向」嗎？若非，intergenerational sex應如何評價？

若倒數兩個例子的最後答案都為是，則表示sexual orientation裡的sexual，不是「生理性別」（sex）的形容詞，而是「性事」（sexuality）的形容詞。不過我想這應該是普遍無法被接受的結論，因為將偏離「性傾向」當初「被創造」出來的意旨與用途。

所以，sexual orientation裡的sexual，到底是sex還是sexuality的形容詞呢？是指「性別」這個特徵，還是「性」這件事呢？而orientation又如何能夠不顧「被傾向者」的自我認同呢？怎麼覺得好像在哪裡讀過這個問題的討論，可是怎麼也想不起來，可惡！

就是要先有一個「對象」，透過經驗累積，整理出「喔！被我慾望的人們的共相是男／女」，但為什麼專挑「性別」作為篩選機制呢？若非同性戀被異性戀主導的社會機制與話語主體化，假如今天是個gender neutral的社會，會不會就不需要sexual orientation呢？

‧。‧。《同性愛百年史》節錄‧。‧。

感謝施舜翔的提醒，我趕快去找出下面的段落來看：

Sexuality is thus the inmost part of an individual human nature. It is the feature of a person that takes longest to get to know well, and knowing it renders transparent and intelligible to the knower the person to whom it belongs. Sexuality holds the key to unlocking the deepest mysteries of the human personality: it lies at the center of the hermeneutics of the self.

Before the scientific construction of “sexuality” as a supposedly positive, distinct, and constitutive feature of individual human beings-an autonomous system within the physiological and psychological economy of the human organism-certain kinds of sexual acts could be individual\ y evaluated and categorized, and so could certain sexual tastes or inclinations, but there was no conceptual apparatus available for identifying a person’s fixed and determinate sexual orientation, m u eh less for assessing and classifying it.

That human beings differ, often markedly, from one another in their sexual tastes in a great variety of ways (of which sexual object-choice-the liking for a sexual partner of a specific sex-is only one, and not necessarily the most significant one) is an unexceptionable and, indeed, an ancient observation; but it is not immediately evident that differences in sexual preference are by their very nature more revealing about the temperament of individual human beings, more significant determinants of personal identity than, for example, differences in dietary preference.

And yet, it would never occur to us to refer a person’s dietary object-choice to some innate, characterological disposition or to see in his or her strongly expressed and even unvarying preference for the white meat of chicken the symptom of a profound psychophysical orientation, leading us to identify him or her in contexts quite removed from that of the eating of food as, say (to continue the practice of combining Greek and Latin roots), a “pectoriphage” or a “stethovore” nor would we be likely to inquire further, making nicer discrimination according to whether an individual’s predilection for chicken breasts expressed itself in a tendency to eat them quickly or slowly, seldom or often, alone or in company, under normal circumstances or only in periods of great stress, with a guilty or a clear conscience, beginning in earliest childhood or originating with a gastronomic trauma suffered in adolescence.

lf such questions did occur to us, moreover, I very much doubt whether we would turn to the academic disciplines of anatomy, neurology, clinical psychology, genetics, or sociobiology in the hope of obtaining a clear causal solution to them. That is because (1) we regard the liking for certain foods as a matter of taste; (2) we currently lack a theory of taste; and (3) in the absence of a theory we do not normally subject our behavior to intense, scientific or aetiological, scrutiny.

In the same way, it never occurred to pre-modem cultures to ascribe a person’s sexual tastes to some positive, structural, or constitutive feature of his or her personality. Just as we tend to assume that human beings are not individuated at the level of dietary preference and that we all, despite many pronounced and frankly acknowledged differences from one another in dietary habits, share the same fundamental set of alimentary appetites, and hence the same “dieticity” or “edility,” so most pre-modem and non-Western cultures, despite an awareness of the range of possible variations in human sexual behavior, refuse to individuate human beings at the level of sexual preference and assume, instead, that we all share the same fundamental set of sexual appetites, the same “sexuality.”

For most of the world’s inhabitants, in other words, “sexuality” is no more a fact of life than “dieticity.” Far from being a necessary or intrinsic constituent of the eternal grammar of human subjectivity, “sexuality” seems to be one of those cultural fictions which in every society give human beings access to themselves as meaning actors in their world, and which are thereby objectivated. To say that sexual categories and identities are objectivated fictions is not to say they are false or unreal, merely that they are not positive, natural, or essential features of the world, outside of history and culture.
Homosexuals and heterosexuals do exist, after all, at least nowadays; they actually desire what they do: they are not deluded participants in some cultural charade, or victims of “false consciousness.” Moreover, the modern term “homosexual” does indeed refer to any person, whether ancient or modern, who seeks sexual contact with another person of the same sex; it is not, strictly speaking, incorrect to predicate that term of some classical Greeks.

But the issue before us is not captured by the problematics of reference: it cannot be innocently reformulated as the issue of whether or not we can accurately apply our concept of homosexuality to the ancients—whether or not, that is, we can discover in the historical record of classical antiquity evidence of behaviors or psychologies that are amenable to classification in our own terms (obviously, we can, give the supposedly descriptive, trans-historical nature of those terms); the issue isn’t even whether or not the ancients were able to express within the terms provided by their own conceptual schemes an experience of something approximating to homosexuality as we understand it today.

The real issue confronting any cultural historian of antiquity, and any critic of contemporary culture, is, first of all, how to recover the terms m which the experiences of individuals belonging to past societies were actually constituted and, second, how to measure and assess the differences between those terms and the ones we currently employ. For, as this very controversy over the scope and applicability of sexual categories illustrates, concepts in the human sciences—unlike in this respect, perhaps, concepts in the natural sciences (such as gravity) – do not merely describe reality but, at least partly, constitute it.

What this implies about the issue before us may sound paradoxical but it is, I believe, profound—or, at least, worth pondering: although there have been, in many different times and places (including classical Greece), persons who sought sexual contact with other persons of the same sex as themselves, it is only within the last hundred years or so that such persons (or some portion of them, at any rate) have been homosexuals.

以上節錄自：David M. Halperin (1990), One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: And Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge), pp. 26-29; along with footnotes 51-59. 不過，這裡的argument比較是conceptual level的，而不是屬於empirical level的討論，所以可能有若干回應到一些提問，但對於個人層次的提問，就比較沒有直接對應了。

‧。‧。新書／花邊／挪用啟示‧。‧。

最後，最近兩個世仇幾乎又同時出書了，而且這次是講好的嗎？──都用戰爭當譬喻，而且還把對方本來愛用的字詞挪為標題所用──Dennis Altman大叔明明早期很討厭queer這個詞，還曾寫書評批評David Halperin大叔，後者還被逼著出來回應（1996）；而前者的新書，用了queer這個字，真是有點玄妙。光看目錄和Introduction的話，其實似乎沒有什麼新意，但不能否認，重彈老調的必要性本身或許也是一種政治力；至少，是個企圖。

Dennis Altman & Jonathan Symons, Queer Wars (Polity, 2016)
David M. Halperin & Trevor Hoppe (eds.), The War on Sex (Duke University Press, 2017)

洪凌在版上推薦的一本新書也很有趣，令人想到Robert McRuer的#crip_theory，他們反詰：disability是如何被健全主義建構而成，並以同悲且急切的情感賦予「欠缺、不足」（deficit）的意念──和queer_theory對性／別的詰問很類似。儘管被「實務界」（或權利倡議者）視為曲高和寡，但不得不承認其中批判並非言之不成理，只是社會尚未且可能永遠無法準備好而已，這不等於不切實際；混為一談的人，對這個世界的想像力顯然deficit了。

Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (Duke University Press, 2015)
Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (Duke University Press, 2017)