As I research a paper for my Native American class on the berdache or “Two-Spirit” people, that is, individuals of one gender (primarily men) who assume the roles of the other gender in public, I am struck at the amount of jargon I encounter in some of the articles and books I’ve been reading. Rather than learn about the traditions of the peoples indigenous to this continent, I’m learning instead more about the writers’ theories of gender — and their antipathy to things Western.
I believe that by looking to myths and attitudes toward homosexuality in cultures more open to homosexuality than the Western world has been since the advent of Christianity, we can better develop means to address homosexuality in our own culture. In order to do this, we need to study the myths and traditions as best as we can reconstruct them, rather than see them as data which prove (or disprove) the latest trendy sociological theories. And too many scholars, alas, seem more committed to the latter end.
To be sure, I’ve discovered at least one book which, despite some sociological jargon and a few politically correct asides, looks at the subject in a reasonably dispassionate manner, Will Roscoe’s well-written, The Zuni Man-Woman, the story of We’wha, a Zuni Man who lived as a woman, even meeting President Grover Cleveland in that guise.
As I was wading through the turgid prose of other writers, I received a book I had ordered from Amazon, Willian N. Eskridge and Darren R. Spedale’s Gay Marriage: for Better or for Worse? : What We’ve Learned from the Evidence. In paging through the book, the prose seems a lot more straight-forward than that I have been reading for my paper. And given that it takes seriously an issue that I unlike all too many gay activists believe merits serious debate, I’m finding myself turning to it rather than returning to those scholarly articles.
This heavily-foototed book appears to provide essential information for a serious discussion of gay marriage, with chapters on the debate here and lessons from sixteen years of same-sex unions in Scandinavia. Unlike other advocates of gay marriage, Eskridge and Spedale acknowledge the Vice President’s opposition to the Federal Marriage Amendment and even commend his wife Lynne:
This is not self-serving sympathy on their part, for Lynne Cheney is one of the toughest-minded policy analysts in Washington. We believe that her prounion, and potentially promarriage, stance is a consequence of her attention to the facts: lesbian and gay men are decent citizens; they from committed relationships that work well for them and contribute to the larger family and community.
I’m not yet in a position to offer a thorough review of this book, but on first glance it seems quite well-written and devoid of much of the jargon I’m accustomed to find in books and articles on gay topics (at least in those I’ve been reading on Native American traditions). And, unlike some advocates of gay marriage, these writers at least acknowledges the pro-civil unions stances of the Vice President — and his wife.
-Dan (AKA GayPatriotWest): GayPatriotWest@aol.com
RE: Twin Spirits:
Walter Williams “The Spirit and the Flesh” is probably the original book to explore the two-spirited tradition from an anthropological point of view. Its been many years since I read it, but I remember it being straightforward. He also explained clearly I think how the modern of concept of gay or lesbian does not directly apply to twin-spirit traditions. Or in other words, its not just that the native American cultures often had different ideas about sexual orientation, many of them had radically different ideas about sex and gender in the first place than modern norms. So you really had to work hard to look at things from their point of view rather than your own. It’s tempting to call twin-spirits “gay Indians” but thats not really the case.
I’ve always enjoyed the stories of We’wha, Osch-Tisch & Hastin Clah. Especially Osch-Tisch, “Finds them and Kills them” LOL, when I first read her story I remember thinking, “You GO girl!…” 😉
One thing I’ve also always thought was that there was a certain connection between gays and lesbians, the tradition of two-spirits, and the mythology of Coyote, the Trickster god or arch-type. It sounds like it will be an interesting paper you are writing GPW.
I remember that there is also a book that specifically discusses gay and lesiban anthropologists and the pros and cons of that. I’ll try and see if I can find it when I get home tonight.
I read the first half of Williams book this morning and while it is more straighforward than many of the essays I tried to get through later in the day, it had a little too much jargon for my taste.
Yes, it would be interested to explore the similarities between the notion of \”two-spirit\” and the trickster god. Indeed, the very term hermaphrodite is related to the trickster. In Græco-Roman myth, Hermaphroditus was the son of Hermes (the Greek trickster) and Aphrodite, the goddess of love.
And i would daresay that all the best drag performers have a big of the trickster in them.
Oh, brother. What else is there to say?
The serious debate you so yearn for concerning gay marriage is like debating the horse after the barn door is opened. The actual debate was if gay men and women could be good adoptive parents and was it in the best interest of the children and the states to allow that. Well, that was 20 years ago and by allowing gays to be parents they oficially endorsed gay FAMILY construction. All this so-called debate is about is creating a legal bond between parents. And, as with straight couples, it also generates the legal bond to those without children. All you are debating is a logical consequence of he sequence already approved. The debate should focus on if other peoples religious perception should alter the nature of extending civil marriage to gay couples.
#4
“My dear lady disdained. Are you yet living?”
glisteny says:
Cat got your tongue? Good kitty, (pets cat, gives it some catnip)
I believe that by looking to myths and attitudes toward homosexuality in cultures more open to homosexuality than the Western world has been since the advent of Christianity, we can better develop means to address homosexuality in our own culture.
This would make sense if “homosexuality” inarguably existed as an identity prior to the middle of the 19th century. The “jargon” you are encountering is partly the result of the difficulty of articulating the difference between desire and identity. (Whoops, I just jargonized.)
If you are going to simply dismiss the idea that homosexual identity did not exist prior to the mid-19th century, then, to be taken seriously, you are going to have to address a tremendous amount of scholarship which has evolved ideas and terms (jargon) to describe the way desire was catergorized in the ancient world and later echoed and reorganized into identity. I recommend Halperin’s “How to Do the History of Homosexuality.”
Halperin was a pure Foucauldian who was blown out of the water by Eve Sedgwick’s observation that the Greeks’ categories of desire are echoed enough in the modern identity of the homosexual that you can’t exaclty say homosexuality didn’t predate the mid-19th century. So Halperin, 10 years afer Sister Eve’s evisceration, has developed a really brilliant model of analysis.
By this model myth can be restored to its historical context — which is part of the problem you are encountering — without insistiing on a complete disruption of meaning in the modern context. In other words: the myth can be read at once from the historical and an “ahistorical” perspective. What emerges in that frottage is quite novel.
It made me laugh to hear you referr to Roscoe as politically correct in any respect. I’ve known him for years and that is one of the last terms I would have visited upon him.
Donny, please note that I said that Roscoe had some “politically correct asides,” I so liked his book on We’wha, I ordered (via 1-day delivery because time is short), his second book, Changing Ones which arrived today — and I’m already enjoying.
Please let him know that I appreciate how well he writes — and the thoroughness of his research.