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Sexuality, Authenticity, and Modernity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2015

Leslie Green
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Extract

In his Journals for 26 December 1921, André Gide wrote:

The borrowed truths are the ones to which one clings most tenaciously, and all the more so since they remain foreign to our intimate self. It takes much more precaution to deliver one's own message, much more boldness and prudence, than to sign up with and add one's voice to an already existing party .... I believed that it is above all to oneself that it is important to remain faithful.

This celebration of fidelity to oneself gives voice to a central theme of modern consciousness: the search for authenticity. The idea that there is an ‘intimate self’ whose needs cannot be fulfilled by following ‘borrowed truths’ is a familiar modern notion and one that contrasts sharply with traditional outlooks. In many pre-modern societies value was believed to be less responsive to the individual: gods, natures, or history were the sort of things that inscribed value on states of affairs, and thus on our lives. Living well was not, therefore, a matter of being true to ourselves, but being true to our creators, natures, or traditions. Moral truths were precisely those things that were borrowed; that was what made them true

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , January 1995 , pp. 67 - 82
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 1995

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References

1. André Gide, Journals ii 282; as cited in Dollimore, Jonathan Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) at 39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. The ideas of ‘modernity’ and ‘modern thought’ are, of course, unavoidably controversial. For one influential account see Berman, Marshall All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982).And, although I cannot defend the claim here, it seems to me that the idea of ‘post-modern’ thought is simply a misnomer. In one version it is but a retreat to a pre-modern irrationalism, in another it is a highly sceptical version of modernism itself.Google Scholar

3. For evidence that, in the American context at least, memories of traditional family life are mostly mythical, see Coontz, Stephanie The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Viking Books, 1992).Google Scholar

4. For some astonishing parallels in the case of sexuality, see Showalter, Elaine Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Penguin Books, 1990).Google Scholar

5. For some roots of this, see Showalter, Elaine Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (3vols.)(New York: Vintage Books, 1978–86).Google Scholar

6. Taylor, Charles The Malaise of Modernity (Concord, Ont.: Anansi Press, 1991).Google ScholarPublished in the U.S. as The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Page references to this work are included parenthetically in the text.

7. It is important to note that Taylor is himself sympathetic so some forms of a politics of recognition. See Taylor, C. etal., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition with commentary by Gutmann, A. ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).Google Scholar

8. An entry into the literature might begin with Bell, P. Weinberg, Martin S. and Hammersmith, Sue Kiefer Sexual Preference: Its Development in Men and Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981).Google Scholar Ruse, Michael Homosexuality Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981);Google ScholarPubMed and Gonsiorek, John C. & Weinrich, James D. eds, Homosexuality: Research Implications for Public Policy (Newbury Park, CA: Publications, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. I am not, of course, claiming that the only way to live in harmony with one’s feelings is to act on them. There may, for instance, be some celibate gay priests who have made authentic lifechoices. They would be cloistered, so to speak, without being closeted. And the same would apply to some cross-orientation relationships: see, e.g., Whitney, Catherine Uncommon Lives: Gay Men and Straight Women (New York: New American Library, 1990).Google Scholar

10. See Weston, Kath Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).Google Scholar

11. Skinner remarks of Taylor’s philosophy in general that ‘what Taylor fears above all is loss of meaning, a fear he appears to experience almost as a phobia.’ Q. Skinner, “Who are ‘We’? Ambiguities of theModern Self” (1991) 34 Inquiry 133 at 142.

12. The hair colour example is an interesting one. If a man in our society were gender-indifferent but blond(e)-exclusive in his object choice, he would be classified as a bisexual man who only has sex with blond(e)s. We have no name for blond(e)-sexuals, but not because that sexual orientation does not exist. We do not name it because we do not care about it; our cultural anxieties about sexuality focus on gender almost to the exclusion of anything else.

13. As cited in, Phalen, Shane Identity Politics: Lesbian Feminism and the Limits of Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989) at 123.Google Scholar

14. 478 U.S. 186(1986).

15. And, of course, that his choices did not offend other constitutional values; but that was not at issue here. The fact that our sexual choices must respect the rights of others does not show that choice is irrelevant to their value for us. It shows that authenticity, being true to oneself, is not the only thing at stake in sexuality.

16. For discussion of some of the literature, see Gonsiorek, John C. “The Empirical Basis for the Demise of the Illness Model of Homosexuality” in Homosexuality: Research Implications for Public Policy supra note 8 at 133–34.Google Scholar

17. As cited in, Boswell, John Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980);Google Scholar and Boswell, John Same-sex Unions in Premodern Europe (New York: Villard Books, 1994).Google Scholar