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i don't have much time at the moment, but it seems to me that at one level the thread is jammed up around a kind of equation between what is socially constructed (this is not precise...it's more complicated not like an erector set) and what's "real" or "exists" as if there are things that somehow just "are" that are "real" and other things that social formations name for themselves which aren't. i have no idea what these things that simply "are" would look like. and i doubt that you or anyone else could refer to those things, given that the medium that allows you to communicate is a primary medium for the social construction/positing that you're getting at.
from this viewpoint, any classification, any system of classification is not "real" because any system of classification leans on a previous history (or plural) of systems of classification/ways of thinking about classification, etc. and it's also pretty obvious that in binary thinking x implies not-x, presupposes it, is defined with reference to it.
so yeah.
recognition of constructedness, or historical contingency *can be* a way for people socialized into a particular social form to relativize what shapes their perceptions (again, this is too fast and it sounds loopier than i want it to) but relativizing these frames doesn't mean that the frames somehow cease to function.
so it's not like one fine morning anyone wakes up and thinks:
my god the way i think feel and everything else follows from the historical situation in which i live
and then gets to step outside that situation in the way that you can take off a hat and be out from under that hat.
so i'm a bit confused by the conceptual underpinning of all this.
that's what i think keeps tangling up the points that nm seems to want to make about sexual orientation and/or gender.
as for hetero/homo sexualities being functions of binary thinking...that's really close to tautological in its self-evidence, ain't it?
does it follow then that hetero/homo sexualities don't exist? not outside the peculiar assumption that pits "the constructed" over against some (imaginary) always-already there....
gotta go.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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