Returning to LeVay

"For example, it has been argued that the medical records of post-mortem individuals contain insufficient data to reliably allocate those individuals to different categories of sexual identity, that LeVay's use of the categories "heterosexual" and "homosexual" is modeled on outdated notions of sexual identity, that the post-mortem brains of many of the subjects may have been modified by complications from AIDS, that LeVay conflates male homosexuality with femininity, that the sample size is too small for reliable comparisons between groups to be made, that LeVay's hypothesis can only be supported when data from the brains of homosexual women are included in the comparative schema, and that LeVay's assertion that studies of rodent and primate sexuality offer useful behavioral and neurological homologies for humans is not valid" (24)"This essay will argue that one interpretive approach to LeVay's data is to illuminate the relation between, on the one hand, the inertly dimorphic forms of sexuality that his methodology solicits, and on the other hand, the exceptional neurological and sexual forms that his data discloses" (24)"I am interested not so much in what LeVay's data might be able to tell us about sexuality (for indeed LeVay presumes a somewhat conventional theory of gender-bound sexuality), but rather the way in which the reticulation of neurology by a dimorphic sexuality provides an insight into the constitution of neurological material" (24)"Janet Halley (1994)... "LeVay's method excludes form consideration the complex social patterns of identity profession and ascription, the refracting layers of representation in which the image of sexual orientation is managed, groomed, appropriated, negotiated, and captured. He reduced this complexity to a single characteristic: essential sexual orientation lodged neatly within the atomized individual who has died... As a matter of theoretical assumption, he eliminates the possibility of a person with a sexuality that is neither heterosexual or homosexual... He has changed the nature of his categories from the merely lexical to the ontological"" (29)"What LeVay's data show is neither two discretely sexualized nuclei nor an aimless pattern of nucleic volumes. Rather, the data demonstrate a reticulating pattern - a co-implication of the disseminated (ranging) with the dimorphic (divided). In this reticulating structure, neither of these patterns governs the field of neurological possibilities to the exclusion of the other. Instead, the data invite another, perhaps more difficult, interpretive challenge: to envisage how dimorphic patterns might relate to, be implicated in, arrest and cleave, but also be partially generative of, more distributed organizations" (30)"how does a rudimentary division - large/small - participate in an expansive field of neurological and sexual ontologies? Is a dimorphic analytic axis simply an error - a failure to accommodate difference - or does it offer a particular approach to the notion of (sexual and neurological) differences that, while rudimentary, is nonetheless generative? The argument following on from here presumes that a non-trivial distinction can be made between a dimorphism (the division into two forms, e.g., large/small) and a binary (wherein there is less a cleaving into two forms, than an ordering according to one form and its "supplement," e.g. man/woman, human/technology, speech/writing)" (30)"In a preamble on the term "queer," Sedgwick notes, "Given the historical and contemporary force of the prohibitions against every same-sexual expression, for anyone to disavow those meanings, or to displace them from the term's definitional center, would be to dematerialze any possibility of queerness itself" (1993, 8). That is, the couplet homo/hetero stands in a reticulating relation to queer; the dimorphic and binarized instantiations of homosexuality and heterosexuality are not an impediment to queer materializations, but rather are peculiarly potent, peculiarly incoherent mechanisms of sexual generativity as such" (31)"In relation to LeVay's study, the conceptual space I am attempting to occupy is one where the possibility of a dimorphic pattern (n=2) isn't obliterated by an imperative for de-binarized organization... heterogeneity isn't simply the opposite (or negation) of a dimorphic pattern" (31)"So while the anatomy of neuronal connections suggests an almost boundless functional capacity, it is also the case that there are constraints in terms of which neurons can participate in what functions. The visual areas of the brain, for example, have an architectual structure quite different from that of subcortical regions such as the hypothalamus; and in a rudimentary way the cortex itself is divided into areas of functional specialization: motor cortex, association cortex, visual cortex etc. ... the brain is seen as either one of the most complex structures in the universe, or as an organ delimitable to simple, localized constraints" (33)"It seems to me, however, that sexuality cannot be partitioned within the hypothalamus in this way: orientation here, circadian rhythms there. The extent to which any hypothalamic function can be "aside" from sexuality is the very question that LeVay's study most fruitfully put into circulation" (35)"While LeVay's data has facilitated a literature that reduces sexuality to binarized forms (Ellis and Ebertz, 1997), it also (accidentally, necessarily) opens sexuality into a broader field of material instantiation... not as an insular coupling, but as a note in a reticulating physiological organization" (35)