Imitation and the Image of Man Book

Alan Sinfield's book, On Sexuality and Power, is a carefully considered, thought-provoking analysis of how we think about sex, sexuality, culture and power. Its central thesis - that, despite our contemporary aspirations towards egalitarian sexual relationships, sexual attraction is essentially a function of hierarchy and power differentials (e.g. differences in age, gender, status, wealth, etc) - may very well be as accurate as a bulls eye, but not for the reasons cited by Sinfield. The evidence he brings to bear in support of his thesis comes primarily from literary examples, with a few pop culture examples (e.g. movies) thrown in. But there is no clear connection between the cultural expressions he cites (e.g. fiction novels) and empirical reality; I'm not suggesting there is no connection, but rather that to make the argument he attempts in this book requires that he establish such a connection and then provide an explication of the mechanism(s) by which this connection takes place (a tall order in that this would require looking across cultures and time periods for such mechanisms). Rather than literature, he could find more convincing, experimental, and empirical evidence for his thesis - which I think is a viable and important theory to explore - by looking at brain studies, primate studies, evolutionary biology, and cross-cultural studies. But Sinfield's area of expertise is literature, and so this study is largely bounded by literary studies and abetted by cultural and post-structural theory.
 
Let me say one more time - there is much in this book that is worth extended consideration. It's well thought out, internally consistent, and, within the scope of expertise already mentioned, well argued. It's the necessity of going beyond its stated scope that highlights its limitations. But even in error, this book is worth our time. How can something be so wrong yet so right, to borrow a phrase? Because it is also full of nascent insights that need the right disciplinary soil to take root, something other than literary theory, and which could be important to the study of sexuality, identity, and culture.
 
Running counter to the mantra that "identity is fluid," or, as he describes it, that identity is "provisional, unstable, fuzzy around the edges," Sinfield posits a taxonomy for understanding sexuality and desire, and, specifically, homosexual identities. There is something to be said for this approach, in principle, because, whether examining Homo sapiens or some other species, all behavior requires a biological underpinning. Evidence from the cognitive, biological, evolutionary, linguistic and neural sciences, despite a host of social theory to the contrary, strongly suggests that there is such a thing as human nature. So, it should, in principle, be possible to arrive at some generalities about its range as a result. However - and get ready for a huge eye-roll here - the range that Sinfield puts forward, as far as gay men go, is twofold: gay men either have 1) a desire to be male coupled with a desire for other males (which he calls the complimentary model) or that gay men 2) have a desire to be female coupled with a desire for other males. Sinfield believes that, mutatis mutandis, this general model can be extended to heterosexuals, lesbians, bisexuals, etc.
 
However, before issuing the aforementioned grand eye roll, give Sinfield his due:  this model, which he spends 200 carefully footnoted pages arguing, is not meant to be reductive, but rather as a kind of generic foundation against which we can coherently map the rich specificity and multiplicity of potential combinations and interactions of many kinds of identities and desires. It's meant as a kind of stripped-down, double-helix code, a psychological DNA, out of which a rich complexity springs. Two psycho-emotional processes fuels Sinfield's model, desiring and identification. The value of the code, together with these processes, is that it helps us think about this complexity by categorizing the capacious richness into a few, manageable categories. Fair enough.
 
The problem is that, unlike real DNA, which can be studied empirically and experimentally and which can ultimately resists research bias over time and study replication, Sinfield's code is anything but resistant to bias. To begin with, it's constructed on a foundation of Freudian theory. Even a causal cross-cultural examination, say, with India, where the infamous and supposedly universal castration complex simply failed to manifest itself and was so noted as early as the 1920's, to say nothing of the utter lack of experimental evidence for any of Freud's ideas in any field, shows that building anything on Freudian psychoanalysis is to build in intellectual quicksand. Further, both of Sinfield's models relies on apparently essentialist notions of what constitutes maleness and femaleness, masculinity and femininity. Sinfield admits this is an issue, but obviously feels it can be overcome. I'm not so sure. Another casual cross-cultural comparison will reveal huge discrepancies about what is considered masculine and what is considered feminine (for instance, is flute playing, considered a manly art in ancient Japan, more manly than American football?).
 
And yet - mightn't Sinfield still be putting his finger on something, despite his faulty intellectual foundations?  There is something about cross-gender identification that persists across many cultures and across great spans of time, even if this phenomenon isn't necessarily universal. We find men who act, dress, or speak in ways associated with women identified in ancient Judea ("kadesh" in Hebrew or "endiellagmenos" in Greek), in ancient China and Japan, and in ancient India. What this cross-gender identification signifies and how it is valued greatly varies, of course, but the fact that such a phenomenon persists across cultures despite varying notions of masculinity and femininity is surely important enough to investigate?  Even if Sinfield's model, as it stands, isn't yet up to the task of helping in such an investigation, the fact that Sinfield was talking about it when this book was first published marks his ideas as worth examining. Perhaps they can be strengthened or used in connection with other bodies of evidence, or used to trigger questions that can actually be researched and get us somewhere besides the quagmire of literary theory.