Philosophy

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PHILOSOPHY

The modern discipline of philosophy has resisted the explicit inclusion of LGBT areas of inquiry. Official recognition of LGBT scholarly work was initiated in 1988, when John Pugh organized the first newsletter of the Society for Lesbian and Gay Philosophy. Pugh and Claudia Card were the initial cochairs of this pioneering organization, which first offered a program at the 1990 American Philosophical Association (APA) meeting in New Orleans. In 1997 an official APA Committee on the Status of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People in the Profession was formed. Its "Newsletter on Philosophy and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Issues," first edited by Timothy Murphy, was regularly published in the APA Newsletter beginning in 1999. The APA Committee was cochaired by Edward Stein and Jacob Hale for its first three years, and then by Mark Chekola and Christopher Horvath. Card celebrated the opening of philosophy's closet by proclaiming:

This committee differs from all of the other committees in the APA in backing outlaws….Beingoutlaws means we risk censure for being shameless enough not to hide, or else we lead a life of duplicity that produces real shame because it makes us dishonest in acquiescing in others' false assumptions and accepting trust we might not otherwise have been given. (APA Newsletter, Spring 1999)

Card also called for the collection of narratives about LGBT philosophers' experiences in the discipline, which were later published in the APA Newsletter.

Lesbian Feminist Philosophy

While the formation of the APA Committee was a milestone in the history of professional philosophy in the United States, there was prior to this a groundswell of lesbian feminist philosophy that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s in the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP). Especially in the midwestern SWIP, lesbian feminist philosophy took root and flourished in a set of distinctive theoretical works first published after nearly a decade of conference presentations and discussions. These include Sara Lucia Hoagland's Lesbian Ethics (1988), Claudia Card's Adventures in Lesbian Philosophy (1994) and Lesbian Choices (1995), Marilyn Frye's Politics of Reality (1983) and Willful Virgin (1992), Joyce Trebilcot's Mothering (1983) and Dyke Ideas (1994), and Jeffner Allen's Lesbian Philosophies and Cultures (1990) and Lesbian Philosophy (1986). While influenced by second wave feminism in the 1970s, these feminist philosophers attempted to place female heterosexuality at the center of feminist analyses of the oppression of women, foregrounding the institution of heterosexuality and women's sexual subordination to men as major impediments to a more fully emancipated female sex. Many lesbian feminist philosophers attempted to theorize "lesbian" as a site of resistance to male heteronormative sexual oppression.

According to Frye and Monique Wittig, for example, restricting male access to women is the first act of challenging male power, as the social construction of male dominance relies on nearly unconditional access to women's sexual, reproductive, spiritual, and physical energies. Wittig argued that "women" constitute a class of people appropriated by men and that "lesbian" offers a site of resistance to sexual captivity. She offered the provocative claim that if lesbians are not "women" to men, then lesbians are not "women." This highlighted the social construction of gender as a sexual project and the social appropriation of female anatomy and sexuality as phenomena that serve heterosexualized male hegemony. Lesbian feminist philosophy and practice created a renaissance in writing and new social organizations that prioritized the ontology and values of lesbian sex, love, and community. While the more recent emergence of queer theory has largely overshadowed these feminist philosophical writings (even while building on their insights), lesbian feminist philosophy still offers a challenging paradigm for thinking about the oppression of women; its entanglements with sexual violence, misogyny, lesbophobia, and compulsory heterosexuality; and the possibilities of female agency, sexual liberation, and alternative communities of resistance.

The enclaves of SWIP chapters and the disruptions caused by early lesbian feminist philosophy linked feminist movements and artistic literatures with academic philosophy, but lesbian feminist influence in the APA was limited. Meanwhile, the paradigm of lesbian feminist philosophy was complicated in the 1980s by questions about race, class, culture, status, and sexual differences, which challenged some of the universalizing claims made by lesbian feminist philosophers. In the same period, the AIDS crisis disrupted allegiances to lesbian separatist trajectories and offered instead new and more inclusive social movements engaging in civil rights struggles for LGBT people and in transgressive queer politics.

Philosophical Queer Theory

In the early 1990s, postmodern queer theory emerged as a more exciting hot spot for philosophical work on the body, sex, gender, sexuality, desire, and agency. Queer theory quickly overshadowed lesbian feminism philosophy, largely by replacing feminism's growing commitment to exploring social differences with a new emphasis on desire, pleasure, and—despite claims to the contrary— new forms of humanist individualism centered on the body. Queer theory, however, was not initially embraced in the circles and societies of academic philosophy in the United States, despite the fact that some of the most influential queer theorists such as Judith Butler are philosophers. This is partially a reflection of U.S. philosophical traditions that swing mostly counter to continental philosophy and the philosophical metaphysicians used in high queer theory, such as Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Georg Hegel, Louis Althusser, and Slavoj Zizek. Although queer theory has influenced philosophical analyses of postmodernity, it has had much greater influence in providing philosophical animation for work in areas outside of academic philosophy, such as literary criticism, film studies, cultural studies, rhetoric, speech communication, sociology, political science, history, and anthropology. Queer theory has also been very influential in interdisciplinary areas such as women's and gender studies, LGBT and sexuality studies, and more recently transgender and gender identity studies. This has had the effect of situating profound philosophical challenges related to sex, gender, and sexuality in places where this type of thinking is allowed, which encouraged and reinforced the separation of queer theory from academic philosophy.

The durable resistance of U.S. academic philosophy to lesbian feminist, queer, and transgender theory can also be seen in the fragile "love of knowledge" practices that define the discipline itself. Identified by some scholars (Evelyn Fox Keller, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and David M. Halperin) as remarkably homoerotic, the practices of philosophy's love of wisdom (stretching back to the Greeks) have traditionally involved intense textual exchange and an intimate dialectic between aged male philosophers and their aspiring male students. Academic philosophy pictures itself as a discipline based on the preservation and reading of canonical philosophical texts, a highly regulated analytic method of inquiry, writing, and critique, and on a recurring set of unanswerable questions that ignore or sidestep more contemporary questions about sex and gender in all of their variations. The notion that philosophy commonly takes place on the streets or in the sheets is only of remote professional interest to a largely Cartesianized priesthood of philosophical experts practicing the mind's labors of abstraction. While normative bodies present challenges to American philosophy's mind-centered practices, queering the body is even more deeply unsettling.

Social Justice and State Politics

What one finds more commonly in contemporary U.S. academic philosophy is a different kind of heretical courage, one that has emerged in new LGBT philosophical inquiry into the foundational values and policies of social justice and liberal state politics. These new explorations, influenced by developments in political philosophy, differ from earlier, more conventional modes of sex inquiry (such as Roger Baker and Frederick Elliston's Philosophy and Sex, 1975) that focused on the morality of specific sexual acts, the nature of perversion, and the cogency of scientific etiological accounts of homosexuality. In addition to exploring these topics, new LGBT philosophical work tends to focus on issues of social justice and the erotic rights of individuals, largely in response to the growing visibility of LGBT movements. These topics are often framed by a "queering" of liberal politics. Examining identity politics, the empirical truth of sexuality for the self, and the representation of LGBT minoritarian suffering, these analyses circulate around issues of rights, responsibilities, and discrimination against LGBT people. Published work includes legal, ethical, and civil rights arguments for and against same-sex marriage, same-sex parenting, same-sex adoptions, surrogacy rights and responsibilities, rights to privacy and outing practices, military and Reserve Officer Training Corps regulations concerning homosexuality, state regulation of sex acts and pornography, sex education in the schools, homophobia and institutional practices, desire and obligation in the age of AIDS, and other questions related to the personal ethics of relationships and the incursions of state and institutional disciplinary power into personal life.

Many of these philosophical controversies query the relationship of the state to the individual and explore the rights, responsibilities, and harms of calling on the state or the higher powers of law to protect or prohibit human sexual behaviors and to regulate the lives of sexual subjects. Typically, philosophical journals have cast these questions as controversies, allowing for the anti-LGBT positions of, for example, John Finnis, Michael Levin, and Roger Scruton, to be matched with the supportive LGBT positions exemplified in the work of Timothy Murphy, David Mayo, Elizabeth Daumer, Frederick Suppe, Mark Chekola, Richard Mohr, Claudia Card, Edward Stein, Lisa Heldke, Jacob Hale, John Corvino, and Abby Wilkerson.

Conceptual and Normative Philosophy

Alan Soble, in "The Fundamentals of the Philosophy of Sex" (2002), makes a primary distinction between conceptual and normative philosophical analysis. In LGBT philosophy, "conceptual analysis" refers to the analysis and clarification of central notions, such as what counts as "a sex act," "sexual activity," "sexual desire," "homosexual acts," "homoeroticism," and " sex difference." Examples include Frye's analysis of "lesbian sex"; Heldke's, Peg O'Connor's and Amanda Udis-Kessler's writings on bisexuality; Hale's and Jacquelyn N. Zita's work on transgender concepts; and Butler's work on the ontology of sex, gender, and resistance. In contrast, "normative analysis" is concerned with the value and evaluation of sexual activities and sexual pleasures, as exemplified by the work of Murphy, Janice Moulton, Michael Slote, Graham Priest, and Linda LeMoncheck, all of whom interrogate the values of various sexual practices and the cogency of normative judgments regarding "sexual perversions."

Alan Soble contrasts "moral evaluations" with "non-moral evaluations" of sex: "Nonmorally good sex is sexual activity that provides pleasure to the participants or is physically or emotionally satisfying, while nonmorally bad sex is unexciting, tedious, boring, unenjoyable, or even unpleasant" (Philosophy of Sex). In other words, good sex can be morally bad or good, depending on the value and ethical systems deployed in a philosophical analysis. These value inquiries can be further separated from "pragmatic considerations" related to sexual practices and questions about what is safe, useful, and effective, both at the level of physical sex acts and in the intersubjective sexual encounters of emotional intimacy. Alongside these types of analyses, political and social philosophy take up questions related to the state and social regulation of human sexuality: legal permissibility; civic rights and responsibilities; privacy entitlements; institutional regulations; and individual and community rights to erotic self-determination and access to space, resources, and protection from harm.

The Natural and Unnatural

The question of the "naturalness" of LGBT activities, including various sexual practices such as sadomasochism and fetishism, and the "naturalness" of transgender and transsexual bodies still produces an annual harvest of academic philosophical work that draws upon queer, intersex, transgender, and sex theory developed mostly outside of academic philosophy. In traditionally conservative philosophy, what is "unnatural" in human sexuality is based on appeals to the ontology of human nature or its normative imprinting on the body (in particular, on sexual organs and the uses to which they can be put). Given that LGBT bodies, desires, and practices have been considered "unnatural" in many, but not all, human cultures, the question of the natural versus the unnatural is recast in philosophy as a moral controversy grounded in a normative ontology of the body's nature. In these controversies, LGBT critics have often invoked the naturalistic fallacy to argue against any easy alignment between what is (in nature) and what should be (in cultural practices).

A second line of philosophical analysis interrogates the cogency of biological explanations for LGBT bodies, practices, and desires. In these inquiries, nature is often positioned as a limit-concept, establishing what the body cannot but otherwise do. Inquiry into the ontology of sex, gender, and sexuality—the question of whether sexed bodies, gendered identities, or sexual orientations are culturally constructed categories or expressions of deeply personal and hence revealing facts of constitutional being—remains a lively and interminable domain of philosophical debate between social constructionists and essentialists of various types. Edward Stein has argued philosophically that the relevance of scientific research into the origins of sexual orientation does not imply any conclusions about moral entitlements or civil rights.

Conclusion

Philosophy as a discipline has always prided itself in asking the grand and mostly indeterminate questions of human existence: What can I/we know? How should I/we live? What exists? What is the good? What is right? What has been done to me/us? What can I/we hope for? What is to be done? Philosophy offers a palette of the grandest of the grand human universals, often pondering the meaning of value, truth, being, meaning, self, personhood, subject, agency, power, matter, and reality. To challenge the construction of these universals in the name of particularity or in the name of identitarian interests such as those emerging in LGBT philosophy is to make note of a possible contaminant in philosophy's closet. When the contaminants speak, this also calls attention to the (phallicized) male heterosexual body—the hidden body of the mind-body dualism that has determined the endgame of philosophy in Western culture. Queer philosophical writing about the body offers challenges to the austerely kept body of philosophy, a challenge articulated in the feel of the slimy holes in Christine Pierce's analysis of Jean-Paul Sartre, the oozing drips in Elizabeth Grosz's analysis of women's bodies, the gaping holes in Leo Bersani's anal writing, and the melancholic velvet in Judith Butler's theorization of the heteronormative bodily ego. In this movement of LGBT theorizing, difference over deviance, fluidity over rigidity, plurality over dualism, and bodily pleasure over disdain show signs of emerging in the future of philosophical writing, most assuredly when queer philosophers acquire the securities of post-tenured life.

At this time, however, emergent LGBT work in feminist theory, race theory, queer theory, and intersex and transgender theory has not reshaped the categorical paradigms of mainstream academic philosophy. However, LGBT academic philosophers have made some inroads using traditional methods to frame new questions and queries. This new work in conceptual, normative, ethical, ontological, social, and political philosophy has made its own mark. The slow but steady emergence of LGBT philosophy on the sidelines of this long-standing and largely somatophobic discipline is a remarkable moment in U.S. philosophy, often making dangerous demands on those who "risk censure for being shameless enough not to hide." Within new LGBT academic philosophy, the philosopher's body and the place from which she or he thinks are changing and becoming visible. Standpoint theory and the partial and subjugated knowledges that have been articulated in the work of LGBT theorists may someday help bring about a new period of philosophical thought, perhaps not a future that will turn philosophy on its head, but one that will enable philosophy to embrace the sex and gender variant body.

Bibliography

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——. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex." New York: Routledge, 1993.

——. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performance. New York: Routledge, 1997.

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Jacqueline N. Zita