Week 4 Day 2 Response

 

The standardization of intangible concepts is a problem that has presented itself to many over the years. Hume, in his “Of the Standard of Taste,” argues that standardization is necessary for the most accurate and useful interpretations of art. The concept of taste is one that, especially in Hume’s discussion, is heavily informed by race, class, and gender. These concepts – race, class, and gender – have faced their own standardizations, and criticisms of those standardizations, recently. In “Types, Acts, or What? Regulation of Sexuality in Nineteenth Century Iran,” Afsaneh Najmabadi explores how the modern standardization of sex and gender does not hold up when compared against conceptions of sex and gender in 1800’s Iran. Najmabadi expands on her research into sexuality and relationships in “Beyond the Americas: Are Gender and Sexuality Useful Categories of Historical Analysis,” going into the divisions made between male sexuality and gender and the comparative homogenizing of female sexuality and gender. Finally, Dennis Altman examines the standardization of a global gay identity in “Rupture or Continuity? The Internationalization of Gay Identities,” bringing in elements of class and national identity into how homosexuality specifically exists around the world.

“Types, Acts, or What” begins with Najmabadi’s interpretation of a short narrative, launching her exploration of the “refusal of the hailing categories useful for studying genders and sexualities in Qajar Iran, where genders do not respond to ‘Are you a man, or are you a woman?’ and sexual subjectivities cannot be named homosexual or heterosexual” (Najmabadi 275).

During this period in Iran, despite gender and sexuality not conforming to the binaries commonly understood in modern analysis, standardization and inherent categorization of sexual relationships between individuals remained. As Najmabadi explains, there is a “hierarchy of sacredness of bodily orifices” where male anuses are the most pleasurable and female’s the least (Najmabadi 279). The existence of a hierarchy, combined with the fact that notions of gender, albeit not the same notions generally held today, are present suggests a sort of standardization of gender and sexuality. While the searching for a singular, underpinning logic to the hierarchization that took place would be misguided, in Najmabadi’s opinion, the hierarchization itself, the assessing, ordering, naming, and regulating, of sexual relationships, does point to the categories of gender and sexuality becoming in some way standardized.

Unpacking the term “same-sex”, Najmabadi acknowledges the standardization that exists within the term itself, here in “Beyond the Americas,” and how that standardization can be detrimental to a true understanding of relationships in a given time or place. She argues that, with the term “same-sex”, “not only have we made “sex” the truth of these relationships, by attaching “same” onto that truth, we may have become participants in regenerating the binary of male and female bio-genital difference as the defining mark of that truth,” and goes on to write “moreover, the notion of same-sex implies an opposite-sex, indeed a very modernist concept in many societies, including the Islamicate world” (Najmabadi 17). Attempts to use the term same-sex, in both the context of Qajar Iran and other contexts, apply certain notions to the histories of interest that do not reflect the complexities or entire differences of modern conceptions of gender and sexuality. Here, standardization can be not only harmful but actually obscure a real understanding of an object of study.

Dennis Altman also comes to the issue of standardization in “Rupture or Continuity”, and looks at how the standardization of a gay identity is impacted by Westernism and capitalism. The importation of the First-World Gay is examined by Altman when he writes, “the ever-expanding impact of (post)modern capitalism is clearly redrawing traditional sex/gender orders to match the ideology and consciousness imposed by huge changes in the economy. The impact of economic growth, consumerism, urbanization, social mobility, and improving telecommunications places great strains on existing familial and personal relations, and on the very conceptions of self with which people make sense of these arrangements” (Altman 86). The standardization of the global gay is not one that arises naturally, independent from the economic forces that necessitate a standard to which economic benefit can be siphoned. The struggle against the specific capitalist form of standardization is “a choice between political economy, which argues for universalizing trends, and anthropology, which argues for cultural specificities,” though cultural specificities do not necessarily do away with standardization as a tool (Altman 87). It is not standardization itself that is inherently problematic, but the absence of an acknowledgement in the historical diversity of standardizations that causes misinterpretation of the supposed global gay identity.

While all three pieces critique in some way the modern conceptions and existing categories for gender and sexuality, all also deal with the concept of standardization, and its seeming inescapability. Just as taste was questioned in Hume’s day, leading him to argue for a standardization that would clear up confusion and dissatisfaction with subjective readings of art, the categories of gender and sexuality are similarly questioned today, leading scholars to assess how standardization has impacted the topics both historically and in the modern period. In looking to escape the boundaries of existing or previously existing standardizations, though, these three pieces recognize that this often leads to more uncertainty. Najmabadi ends “Types,Acts, or What?” with an acknowledgement that this discussion has just gotten started, and begins and ends “Beyond the Americas” with questions. All three pieces include questions in their titles. The topic of the usefulness, or even honesty, of the categorization of gender and sexuality is one that, when viewed through the lens of standardization, leaves much unanswered.