December 16, 2022
When I wrote a newsletter about masculinity a few weeks ago, I knew that I risked giving the appearance of accepting a heteronormative paradigm. I wrote within the framework of heterosexual assumptions, not because I accept them as final, but because they remain overwhelmingly in place, structuring our society and conditioning everyone in it. I wanted to talk about the problems faced by the millions of people who do live their lives more or less voluntarily within that framework. But I already knew that at some point there needed to be another newsletter expanding that perspective, and that moment has arrived. The position throughout The Productions of Time is that gender and sexual identity are not biologically fixed but imaginatively created, and therefore polymorphous, a word taken from Freud, although his full phrase was “polymorphous perverse” because to him adult sexuality was perverse if it was not geared towards reproduction, and therefore heterosexual marriage. I discarded the value judgment, but the polymorphous nature of human identity is not some radical, fringe theory but an overwhelmingly documented fact—not just in these postmodern times when supposed cultural decadence is leading to all sorts of allegedly pathological behavior but throughout human history.
It is the history of the polymorphous, especially as reflected in mythology and the arts, that is my concern. I am deeply interested in what light the historical data throw upon the explosion of diversity of all sorts that has happened within my lifetime, but I want to make clear at the outset of what is admittedly a risky enterprise that I—a heterosexual male of an older generation—claim no authority to define or speak for those who define themselves otherwise. I have no business telling other people who and what they are. What I do claim is that the common assumption that most of the human race has always, with a few exceptions, unquestioningly accepted and comfortably lived within the heterosexual paradigm, accepting it as natural and inevitable, has turned out to be at least partly a mere appearance, not according to radical activists but according to eminent historians. I am not a historian, but a literary critic can read the signs in literary and mythical texts. The heterosexual norm has been imposed upon people rather as Christianity was imposed upon a pagan Europe, and with the same result: superficial acceptance disguising underlying restlessness, and a tendency of the repressed to return. My question is about what insight we can gain from the historical data into the present outbreak of non-normative behavior. Any answer is bound to be tentative, largely speculative, and humbly aware of its own limitations. But the question is deeply worth asking. We are desperate for insight, if only so that we can treat one another more kindly and compassionately in recognition of a common humanity that underlies all difference, but also, too, so that we may learn how to value the differences and not just the commonality.
The debate about whether gender derives from biology or is socially constructed has been going on for half a century. Biologism has one thing going for it, or, rather, two things: the human body is anatomically binary, made so by genitalia and by the hormones that create and govern the genitalia. The one fact of nature is that reproduction depends on the interaction of male and female bodies. (In vitro fertilization and surrogate pregnancies do not change the fact that egg must meet sperm, and anyway I am speaking historically here: such technologies have been around for barely a century).
But that physical difference is quickly transformed into an ideological one, becomes the basis of social order. Children are created by biology, but they are raised by culture: that is, marriage exists for the raising of children, and children are essential to the family for the sake of shared labor in the lower classes, for purposes of inheritance and family influence in the upper classes. Out of the need for social order, then, strict gender roles are created that are then said to be “natural.” Upon male and female bodies are superimposed the ideological constructs of masculine and feminine. These roles may still have some basis in biology, with women pushed into a more passive, nurturing role because of the requirements of childbearing and nursing, men pushed into roles of hunter and warrior because of their greater size and muscle mass. But the role distinctions are kept in place largely by social convention, as women may be hunters and warriors and men can raise children. What rigidifies social convention are two things. One is power: men are tempted into male dominance because of their greater physical strength and independence from birth-giving and nursing. The other is a deeper, less conscious motive. Like other binary categories of thought, the gender binary offers the security of clear-cut, either-or distinctions, reassuring people that they live in an order and not in chaos.
The irony is that it is binary gender distinctions that are “unnatural”: the animal world knows nothing of them. With his usual sly subversiveness, the Roman poet Ovid, in Book 10 of the Metamorphoses, has a girl named Myrrha psych herself up to seduce her own father by delivering the following soliloquy:
Devotion cannot Condemn such love as crime; the beasts, I notice, Mate as they will, and no one calls a heifer Disgraced to have her father on her back, And no one thinks a filly should not welcome Her sire as stallion; the ram goes in to ewes He has begotten, and the birds are treaded By cocks whose treading gave them life. How happy They are, to be so free! But human culture Has made malignant laws, laws against nature, Envious, jealous laws. (Rolfe Humphries translation, p. 244)
But Myrrha knows why these unnatural laws exist: to prevent social and psychological chaos:
All names, all titles, vanish in confusion: A mother’s rival, and a father’s mistress, Sisters of sons, and mother of your brothers! (p. 245)
In both smaller and more complex urban societies, couples are not formed by love and natural impulse. Marriages are arranged: kinship laws as studied by anthropologists in village or clan-based societies can have an algebraic complexity.
The incest taboo made famous by Freud is only one manifestation of this will to live in an order, a binary order created out of the chaos of the natural world—which is polymorphous.
But humanity chafes under the binary limit of desire, and repressed desire finds ways to manifest itself, ways that have always been known but mostly not talked about. One is within same-sex friendship. Deep and loving friendships between two men may harbor latent homoerotic impulses. The relationship between Achilles and Patroclus is not shown as “queer” in Homer’s Iliad, but is definitely so in some later texts, right down to Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. In 2 Samuel 1:26, David grieves his lost Jonathan, whose love for him surpassed the love of women. While the Bible does not portray this love as homoerotic, some argue that it falls into an area of ambiguity, as same-sex friendships often have, even down to our own time. It has been the same for women. Whatever is true now, certainly in my parents’ generation two unmarried women who lived together for a lifetime were tacitly assumed to be lesbians: it is just that no one openly acknowledged it. See no evil. Shakespeare’s “beautiful youth” sonnet sequence expresses the love of an aging male poet for a beautiful youth, complete with jealousy because of a rival poet. Homophobic critics like Coleridge tied themselves in knots trying to deny the obvious.
Shakespeare knew all about polymorphous desire and the fluidity of gender identity. Twelfth Night is an entire play about it: its subtitle is Or, What You Will, “will” signifying desire in the usage of the time as well as being a pun on Shakespeare’s own name, a pun that also occurs in the sonnets. The main plot is driven by gender bending: the heroine, Viola, after a shipwreck, cuts her hair and dresses as a male, thereby becoming identical in appearance to her twin brother, whom she assumes drowned, though of course he is not. Viola falls in love with Duke Orsino, though, dressed as a boy, she dares not declare her love. Besides, the Duke thinks he is in love with Olivia—who is also in love with Viola, not realizing she is infatuated with another woman. Meanwhile, the Duke keeps finding Viola strangely attractive and wishing “he” were a girl. Shakespeare uses the convention of a woman dressing as a man in a number of his romantic comedies, capitalizing on a quirk of the Elizabethan theatre: because women were not allowed on stage, female parts had to be played by males, often by adolescents whose voices had not yet changed. So on the stage of the Globe Theatre, a male actor played Viola who in turn was dressed as a male. The suggestion is that gender is a role we play, an adjunct to the larger Shakespearean theme that all identity is role playing. When he wrote that all the world’s a stage, he meant it in a deep way.
All the gender roleplay takes place within a larger perspective indicated by the title of Twelfth Night, which hints at the fact that the twelve days of Christmas were an English instance of what has been called “carnival.” In order to bleed off some of the pressure of the repression mandated by all social order, some societies designate holidays in which the ordinary rules, including those of gender roles, are temporarily paused. For a limited period of time, society returns to something resembling original chaos—or, more significantly, to the paradisal state before coercive laws were imposed. The Roman festival of this sort was called the Saturnalia in honor of the age of Saturn, who ruled during the Golden Age. One definition of paradise is of a state without repression, and therefore without laws. This kind of “carnival” permits a certain amount of behavior, including the orgiastic, that would become illegal again after the holiday is over. The villain of Twelfth Night is Malvolio, whose name means “ill will,” because he is obsessed with power and control and therefore is a quintessential party poop. Carnival behavior is not revolutionary: it is in fact designed to reinforce the social order by providing an outlet for unruly impulses, like the “bread and circuses” of the Roman Empire. But carnival is a calculated risk, because it could easily turn revolutionary. The 60’s were exactly that—which is why some of us remember them with nostalgia, as a period in which American and European society were seized by a carnival spirit that for a moment aspired to return us to the Woodstock nation of original paradise, including “free love” and sexual revolution, but also Stonewall and the beginning of the gay rights movement, and, of course, the civil rights movement. In the early days of the Internet in the 90’s, some people hoped for a cybertopia and an electronic frontier, but in fact the Internet’s tendency is anti-carnival. Where carnival is communal, the Internet only collectivizes people, turns them into a mob, pushes them towards what is ultimately fascism. It is no accident that the increasingly fascistic Elon Musk took over Twitter and is weaponizing it to serve right-wing purposes. My students cling to social media because they are lonely and depressed, but in the long run social media seem, by their own account, to exacerbate their loneliness and depression.
What has been said thus far will be more or less familiar to those with an academic background in the humanities. But these ideological tensions and contradictions have a larger mythical background. There is a human yearning, not just for wiggle room in the margins of social repressiveness but for a transcendence involving liberation from opposites of all sorts, including those of gender and sexuality. Like all undisplaced visions of what Dante in the Paradiso called transhumanization, it comes fenced about with taboos, warnings about nihilism that should in fact be taken seriously—but not to the extent of passive resignation to a fallen world and fallen human nature. Visions of gender transcendence seem to be of two kinds, both-and and neither-nor.
The traditional name for a both-and condition is androgyny. The term androgyny more accurately refers to gender, not anatomy. The biological both-and is hermaphroditism, possessing both male and female organs. But the distinction gets rather muddled, as it seems to in the story in Book 4 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses of the pursuit of the beautiful youth Hermaphroditus by the nymph Salmacis, who prays that she and Hermaphroditus become one. The wish is granted, and their bodies merge. But Hermaphroditus is already hermaphroditic, being the offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite. One of the forms of Hermes is as the herm, a head atop a pillar representing the phallus, and Aphrodite is of course the goddess of sexual love. Another tale in which androgyny is more ridiculous than sublime is that of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium. Human beings were once all spherical hermaphroditic creatures, but of three types: male-male, female-female, and male-female. Zeus split all of them, so that human beings all wander around seeking to reunite with their other half. The separated male-male halves are gay, the separated female-female halves are lesbian, and the male-female halves are heterosexual. Putting this in the mouth of the famous writer of sardonic Old Comedy may be Plato’s way of tipping us off that the intent is satiric.
The moral of such satires may be that departure from the binary condition of order simply results in chaos. But there are affirmative versions of androgyny, and in these what may result from a union of male and female is a third identity that is more than the sum of the binary opposites but is rather something new that transcends the limitations of binary thought. That is what happens in Samuel R. Delany’s amazing science fiction novel A Fabulous, Formless Darkness (originally published as The Einstein Intersection, 1967). Written in 1966, when Delany was only 24, the book represents the first attempt of an African-American gay writer of genius to come to terms with his sexuality in an era in which homosexuality was both pathologized and illegal. The novel is set in a far-future world in which there are three sexes, male, female, and androgynous, represented by gender markers Lo, La, and Le respectively. Early in the story, the protagonist, Lobey, repudiates his former lover, Le Dorik, when he discovers that Le Dorik is hermaphroditic, which Lobey finds disgusting. Yet later he is strongly allured by the Dove, a seemingly female temptress who also turns out to be “Le.” Yet, rather inconsistently, there is no suggestion that she is hermaphroditic. More muddle. But what comes through is the theme of being “different,” a key word in the text. Again and again, and not just about gender, there is a third factor that renders the old binary oppositions obsolete. Delany has always identified as gay, but the vision at which this early, somewhat enigmatic, yet powerfully intuitive text seems to be trying to arrive might be better described as non-binary. This is what I mean by the neither-nor variation. The title phrase is taken from Yeats, and in the storyline the fabulous, formless darkness is interstellar space in which the story’s characters were once energy beings without form and therefore without gender. But it suggests how the neither-nor way of thinking may be a kind of via negativa, a pursuit of knowledge by means of subverting or deconstructing binaries—“not this, not that,” in an old Sanskrit phrase.
A certain type of Christian asceticism seems to long for escape from everything bodily, including not only gender and sexuality but even the senses. However, not everybody finds eternal existence as a disembodied spook who is “beyond all that sort of thing” highly appealing. The alternative is a vision of spiritual androgyny that can be traced back from its vestigial survival in modern times a very long way indeed. Mircea Eliade begins his long essay “Mephistopheles and the Androgyne or The Mystery of the Whole” with a reference to Balzac’s visionary novel Séraphita (1834), in which the title character is loved by both a woman and a man, appearing as a male, Séraphitus, to the woman and as a woman, Séraphita, to the man. Séraphita was born to parents who were followers of the 18th-century visionary writer Emmanuel Swedenborg and represents a perfected condition of humanity. A little before Balzac, a number of Romantic writers derived the ideal of androgyny from another early visionary, the 17th-century thesophist Jakob Boehme, who in turn took it from alchemy, in which the androgyne is born of a love-death union of an archetypal King and Queen, and is another form of the ultimate goal, the Philosopher’s Stone. Boehme, who was an influence on William Blake, recast the story of the Fall with Adam as a primal man. As Eliade explains, “For Boehme, Adam’s sleep represents the first fall: Adam separated himself from the divine world and ‘imagined himself’ immersed in Nature, by which he lowered himself and became earthly. The appearance of the sexes is a direct consequence of this first fall” (102). All this may sound eccentric and marginal enough, but Eliade contends that such strange visions express a deeply buried but universal human dream of “a transcending of one’s own historically controlled situation, and a recovering of an original situation, no longer human or historical since it precedes the foundation of human society” (113). The dream of androgyny is a dream of transcending the limits of the human condition, of finding a lost wholeness.
Surely only a few eccentrics and misfits would aspire to such a grandiose dream. Maybe: but it seems that things have changed, and are changing. Fifty years ago, some feminist theorists rejected Virginia Woolf’s assertion that the writer, as writer, is androgynous. Some said, with pride, “My identity is inescapably gendered: I cannot think or write except as a woman. I write out of my life experience, and my whole life experience has been as a woman, for better or worse. To be an androgyne is to be no one, a vacuous universal.” People went through an era of asserting pride in one’s identity—as a woman, as gay, as Black or Latina. Insofar as it was coherent at all, which was not very, some such “gender exists” assertiveness seems to have been behind J.K. Rowling’s recent meltdown.
However, the young generation that I teach seems to be in search of a form of identity that is more fluid and flexible, less fixed, and, especially, less fixed into clear binary categories. This is true of race as well as of sexuality. We are told that perhaps as many as 20% of them identify outside of heteronormative categories. They seem to me to be groping towards an insight that all identity, including gender and sexual identity, is polymorphous: that is how I understand the plus sign at the end of LBGTQ+. There are Wikipedia sites that expand the plus into dozens of terms indicating fine shades of identity and difference, and projects of constructing flags whose various colors symbolize the particular shades under whose banner one is willing to march. Trans people have tragically been turned into projections of social anxieties, sometimes mounting to complete and potentially violent hysteria, about the ongoing transformation of identity from fixed and binary to polymorphous and metamorphic.
The social hysteria sees the current explosion of diversity as a result of social breakdown. The progressive alternative is to see it as another instance of “expanding eyes,” of the imagination’s attempt to see differences to which historically it has been blind. The young are in the vanguard of this quest, as the young always are. I admire their aspirations, and wish them well. They may seem confused and neurotic at times, and no doubt they sometimes are. As were we. But I think if they continue to seek after a new freedom from gender and sexual constraints, they may find that their quest is from the biological grounding of the human species of animal to its cultural remaking and ultimately to a goal that is in fact spiritual and imaginative. Eliade has a remarkable passage about the earliest gender-transcending figure of them all, the shaman:
In Siberian shamanism, the shaman will symbolically assume both sexes: his dress is decorated with female symbols and in certain cases he tries to imitate female behaviour….This ritual bisexuality—or asexuality—is believed to be at once a sign of spirituality, of commerce with gods and spirits, and a source of sacred power. For the shaman unites in himself the two contrary principles; and since his own person constitutes a holy marriage, he symbolically restores the unity of Sky and Earth, and consequently assures communication between Gods and men. This bisexuality is lived ritually and ecstatically; it is assumed as an indispensable condition for transcending the condition of profane man. (116)
Androgyny is a symbolic union of opposites, and signifies, among other things, that polymorphous does not mean formless. It is not done with binaries, because, as Blake said, without Contraries is no progression. Desire is always desire for an Other, and, at the same time, as the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan shrewdly observed, it is also the desire to be desired by the Other. Androgyny, then, is an ancient symbol for a condition in which opposites are dynamic and transformative rather than fixed and coercive.
The most extraordinary version of the polymorphous imagination that I know of is found, in all places, in the third-century Christian theologian Origen, as described in historian Peter Brown’s magisterial book The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity:
Origen bequeathed to his successors a view of the human person that continued to aspire, to fascinate, and to dismay all later generations. He conveyed, above all, a profound sense of the fluidity of the body. Basic aspects of human beings, such as sexuality, sexual differences, and other seemingly indestructible aspects of the person struck Origen as no more than provisional. The present human body reflected the needs of a single, somewhat cramped moment in the spirit’s progress back to a former, limitless identity. (167)
Rather than the body being left behind by the spirit, Origen believed that body and spirit would be transformed together in “a long, mysterious process, as splendid in its final outcome as was the pure, ‘healed’ matter that emerged from the alchemist’s crucible as gold” (168).
Brown rises to a pitch of eloquence in summing up Origen’s astonishingly original and audacious vision:
It meant that Origen was prepared to look at sexuality in the human person as if it were a mere passing phase. It was a dispensable adjunct of the personality that played no role in defining the essence of the human spirit. Men and women could do without it even in this present existence. Human life, lived in a body endowed with sexual characteristics, was but the last dark hour of a long night that would vanish with the dawn. The body was poised on the edge of a transformation so enormous as to make all present notions of identity tied to sexual differences , and all social roles based upon marriage, procreation, and childbirth, seem as fragile as dust dancing in a sunbeam. (168)
What is most exciting about Origen’s vision of transhumanization, at least in Brown’s description of it, is that it avoided the dualistic rat-trap that has captured so many over time, right up to present versions of “transhumanism” which attempt to flee from the body and the senses, which means also to flee from the emotions, which are bodily and sensory, into such cold comfort as being uploaded as data into a computer. The idea is not to abandon the body, the senses, the emotions, and sexual desires, but to expand and liberate them, which makes Origen a direct ancestor of Milton and Blake:
For Origen, everything perceived with senses could be thought of as existing in undimmed intensity in God, the source of all being. The spiritual realm was alive with joys whose sensuous delight was veiled from the pious only by the present numbness of their spirits. Those who could thaw their frozen hearts would once again experience the sharp, precise impression of a wealth of spiritual sensations. The prophets and Evangelists had “felt” the original joy of God’s Wisdom. In a manner that escaped normal experience, they had actually “tasted,” “smelled,” and “drunk” it. (172)
Origen was “an exponent of what has been aptly called the ‘wild’ Platonism of his generation. In such a Platonism, sensuality could not simply be abandoned or repressed. Rather, the sharpness of sensual experience was brought back to its primordial intensity: it was reawakened, in the mystic’s heart, at its true level—the level of the spirit” (172-73).
This makes Origen an unexpected ancestor of Milton, who not only celebrates human sexuality in Paradise Lost but speculates that, if humanity had not fallen, human bodies would have evolved by a process of the spiritualization of matter until they resembled the spiritual bodies of the angels, who not only have sex but “may either sex assume,” and whose entire bodies interpenetrate in the process. In turn, from Milton derives Blake, who said in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that the apocalypse would come by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.
Of course, Origen was declared heretical. But Brown says that “The most obvious feature of such a view was an unrelieved feeling of ‘divine discontent’ with the present limitations of the human person. A vast impatience ran through the universe” (163). I think that vast impatience is running through our society right now, and that those who yearn to break the “mind forg’d manacles” of gender and sexuality might look to “wild” writers like Origen, Milton, and Blake as kindred spirits.
References
Eliade, Mircea. “Mephistopheles and the Androgyne or The Mystery of the Whole.” In The Two and the One, translated by J.M. Cohen. University of Chicago Press, 1979 (English translation originally published in 1965). 78-124.