I don’t know what TheOtherDave means, but I have heard it said before that the notion of treating sexual preference as identity is relatively recent. In the past—or so the claim goes—people did of course recognize that some people prefer to have intercourse with members the opposite sex, whereas others did not. But this was seen as merely a preference, similar to disliking broccoli or liking the color red or whatever. A person wouldn’t identify as “a heterosexual” or “a homosexual”, no more than one would identify as “an anti-broccolist” or a “red-ist” or whatever.
That brings up some interesting questions about the way people thought about identity. An awful lot of identity groups got launched around the same time, including some of the first ones I can think of that’re based around behavior—the temperance movement originated in the mid-1830s, for example. I wonder if some shift in the political climate in the early-to-mid 1800s suddenly made it practical to advocate for some behavior or lack thereof by adopting it into a group identity and then using that to argue for a protected category?
Insofar as there’s a point to such distinctions, I expect the frontlines of that shift to have been cultural and scientific rather than political. “Advocating a behavior by adopting it into a group identity and using that to argue for a protected category” sounds awfully meta; I expect the crucial changes were simpler, more fundamental and centered around what enabled people to argue for a protected category in the first place. I’m thinking along lines like this:
A number of technological advances were made around that time that made setting up movements far easier. The proliferation of various movements coincides nicely with such stuff as improved methods of agriculture (leading to population growth and urbanization), the invention of the telegraph (bridging distances), better transportation in the form of railways and ever faster ships (mobilization, etc.) and probably others that escape me at the moment. A bit later on Darwin and the theory of evolution paved the way for eugenics-style thinking and concepts of inherent superiority between races and nations, and around the turn of the century the rise of scientific (or semi-scientific) psychology opened the doors for minting all kinds of novel ingroup-outgroup divisions. I expect identity-builders had a field day with the concept of the subconscious mind in particular. “You can’t help it, those people are just made that way. Fortunately not us, though, haw haw.”
On the non-scientific side, there are a number of converging cultural trends and phenomena to take into account.
The decline of the church was an example of how a firmly established institution wasn’t necessarily a permanent feature of society.
There’s been a general decline in violence throughout society, which made resisting the establishment less scary.
Western Romanticism and the advent of nationalism were a fairly clear case of deliberate identity-building, and it set a precedent for doing the same on a smaller scale.
Not all movements appeared from nowhere; workers’ unions had been around for centuries in the form of guilds and such, so all those movements springing up wasn’t so much groundbreaking novelty as it was just more of the same.
These aren’t exhaustive lists, but I hope the gist is clear.
I don’t know what TheOtherDave means, but I have heard it said before that the notion of treating sexual preference as identity is relatively recent. In the past—or so the claim goes—people did of course recognize that some people prefer to have intercourse with members the opposite sex, whereas others did not. But this was seen as merely a preference, similar to disliking broccoli or liking the color red or whatever. A person wouldn’t identify as “a heterosexual” or “a homosexual”, no more than one would identify as “an anti-broccolist” or a “red-ist” or whatever.
That brings up some interesting questions about the way people thought about identity. An awful lot of identity groups got launched around the same time, including some of the first ones I can think of that’re based around behavior—the temperance movement originated in the mid-1830s, for example. I wonder if some shift in the political climate in the early-to-mid 1800s suddenly made it practical to advocate for some behavior or lack thereof by adopting it into a group identity and then using that to argue for a protected category?
Insofar as there’s a point to such distinctions, I expect the frontlines of that shift to have been cultural and scientific rather than political. “Advocating a behavior by adopting it into a group identity and using that to argue for a protected category” sounds awfully meta; I expect the crucial changes were simpler, more fundamental and centered around what enabled people to argue for a protected category in the first place. I’m thinking along lines like this:
A number of technological advances were made around that time that made setting up movements far easier. The proliferation of various movements coincides nicely with such stuff as improved methods of agriculture (leading to population growth and urbanization), the invention of the telegraph (bridging distances), better transportation in the form of railways and ever faster ships (mobilization, etc.) and probably others that escape me at the moment. A bit later on Darwin and the theory of evolution paved the way for eugenics-style thinking and concepts of inherent superiority between races and nations, and around the turn of the century the rise of scientific (or semi-scientific) psychology opened the doors for minting all kinds of novel ingroup-outgroup divisions. I expect identity-builders had a field day with the concept of the subconscious mind in particular. “You can’t help it, those people are just made that way. Fortunately not us, though, haw haw.”
On the non-scientific side, there are a number of converging cultural trends and phenomena to take into account.
The decline of the church was an example of how a firmly established institution wasn’t necessarily a permanent feature of society.
There’s been a general decline in violence throughout society, which made resisting the establishment less scary.
Western Romanticism and the advent of nationalism were a fairly clear case of deliberate identity-building, and it set a precedent for doing the same on a smaller scale.
Not all movements appeared from nowhere; workers’ unions had been around for centuries in the form of guilds and such, so all those movements springing up wasn’t so much groundbreaking novelty as it was just more of the same.
These aren’t exhaustive lists, but I hope the gist is clear.