title: How we got this way: the sciences of homosexuality and the Christian right.
abstract: The discourse of the new sciences of homosexuality interacts with, reproduces, and sometimes challenges other discourses that inform and intersect it--popular discussions of scientific discoveries, legal discourse, debates about gay and lesbian identity, and religious discourse. Despite their different intentions and vocabularies, what links the discourse of the Christian right to that of contemporary sexology research and its popularized versions is its reproduction of a binary gender system, in which women are figured as both within and outside of "nature." Researchers in gay, lesbian, and bisexual sexuality can make a significant contribution by exposing the ways their research contends with discursive practices that have a context and a history (in connections between Aquinas's theology and Aristotle's science, for example). The narrative, rooted in traditional Christian theology and early Western science, that produces gender as binary and heterosexuality as normative can be rewritten to reveal the constructedness of both gender and sexuality.
authors.affiliation: English Department, University of Oregon, Eugene 97403, USA. mewood@oregon.uoregon.edu
authors.forename: M E
authors.initials: ME
authors.lastname: Wood
mesh_terms: D002835:Christianity; D006716:Homosexuality; D006801:Humans; D011057:Politics; D012069:Religion and Psychology; D012071:Religion and Sex