"Gay Genes" and the Contested Origins of Same-Sex Desire

Abstract:This essay interrogates the increasingly widespread popularity of biological explanations for gay and lesbian identity, to consider what it means for queer and feminist politics when biological etiology is held up as the central facet of a progressive agenda. It asks how might we explain the fact that, despite the robust critique of biologization in feminist scholarship, this thinking has become even more pervasive in recent years. Tracing how the very invention of our contemporary understanding of homosexuality as a distinct category of identity is inextricably linked to the scientific justification of white supremacy, as racial difference was established in large part through the imagined sexual difference of African women that continues to have an impact on all people of African descent, I argue that the biological framework for understanding sexual identity is not only inadequate to the complexity of lived experience, but also antithetical to the political work of liberation. It is in linking sex to power, not biologized identity, that feminist critique finds one of its most powerful tools. The very omnipresent nature of heteronormativity makes choosing not to be heterosexual a radical reminder that heteronormativity continues to be a central facet of the subordination of women. This is a call, then, for a renewed feminist interrogation of the danger of making biology do the work of politics.