Ty Mansfield on Deconstructing Homosexuality (while preserving heterosexuality)

I have to be completely fair (pun not intended). I did not attend the 2014 FairMormon Conference. But I do not have complete notes of Ty Mansfield’s talk have seen the notes of Ty Mansfield’s article posted at FAIR’s website. All I have are summaries from news articles, like this article from DeseretNews titled “Terms important to same-sex discusion in LDS Church, Ty Mansfield says at FairMormon Conference“, and summaries from people who attended, like Rachel Whipple’s Thursday afternoon session coverage on Times and Seasons. And I am aware that news articles and summaries can’t capture the complete comments of a talk…that’s why they are summaries. So instead, they will highlight the juiciest points…the ones most likely to rustle someone’s jimmies.

Well, my jimmies are rustled.

I don’t know if this is the exact title, but from Rachel’s post, Ty Mansfield (famously known for living with same-sex attraction and being married to his wife, whom he loves [but totally not in a bisexual or even remotely heterosexual way, of course. {and certainly, in this narrative, demisexuality doesn’t exist.}]) spoke at the FairMormon conference on the subject: “Mormons can BE gay, they just can’t do gay”?: Deconstructing Sexuality and Identity from an LDS Perspective.

But as far as I can tell…Mansfield isn’t deconstructing sexuality…he’s just deconstructing homosexuality while leaving heterosexuality intact. (Update: since I first wrote this post, I found a link to Ty’s full comments, and while I like the additional nuances within, it absolutely does seem that he is leaving heterosexuality intact.)

For whatever it’s worth, I’m actually somewhat amenable to social constructionism and the concept of deconstruction. I am not one of the people who think that this is automatically gobbledegook that can’t see what is clearly in front of us…in contrast, I am very curious at the way that what is “clearly” in front of us, what we think to be obvious, has often not been the case, and may not be the case in the future.

But it seems to me that deconstruction is a very volatile tool. It burns all the way down. If someone is going to criticize deconstruction, I am more amenable to a deconstruction that claims that when it’s done, all you have left is nihilism.

So, the jimmy rustling occurs when people want to use deconstruction, but don’t want to use it all the way. I’m too lazy to link, but I have read and heard similar critiques of Mormons (or other religious folks) using a deconstructionist or even a postmodernist critique of, say, science, to prop up the possibility or plausibility of Mormon concepts — it just doesn’t work that way!

I don’t want to go and retype in Rachel’s notes or the DesNews article, so go to the first two posts of the link and read them (in Rachel’s T&S article, it’s the second to last of the talks described).

But the basic concept (all specific phrasings stolen from Rachel’s summary): is that being Gay is a social construct. This isn’t to say that feelings of same-sex attraction are not real, but that the identity of being gay is a construct. This identity is not a scientific idea, but a cultural or philosophical one. But more importantly, instead of this constructed identity getting at a person’s essence, it strips it away. The Gay construct relates to many agendas.

As Rachel summaries, sexuality goes into four tiers — attraction and desire, orientation, behavior, and identity. And Ty goes through each to deconstruct them. For example, for sexual orientation, Ty points to research from Lisa Diamond on female sexual fluidity and says that “homosexuality” as a category may be false because instead, we need to talk about homosexualities. He notes that the idea that gender preference is the primary component of our sexual orientation is a current social construct, but there are many factors required to make someone erotically desirable — after all, we are only generally attracted to a few people of the sex to which we are attracted. (And I’ve already mentioned his critique of the identity aspect in the earlier paragraph.)

…so, what’s the problem?

As I mentioned before, deconstruction goes all the way down. I’d be more OK if Ty’s discussion weren’t so focused on the social situatedness of homosexuality without saying anything at all about heterosexuality.

Because here’s the deal — heterosexuality is also a construct.

And even more importantly, the reason sexualities are constructs is because they are built on a substrate of gender and sex — which are also constructs.

I think Mansfield is correct to point out that we typically aren’t attracted to everyone of the sex we desire. To be same-sex attracted (if we will deign to use this term) doesn’t mean to be attracted to all folks of the same sex. To be opposite-sex attracted isn’t to be attracted to all folks of that opposite sex.

But here’s the thing…what we take to be sex is steeped in cultural and social expectations. Believe it or not, if I’m a man who’s attracted to a woman, that doesn’t somehow mean that my XY chromosomes can sniff out XX chromosomes. It doesn’t mean that my penis is magnetically attracted to vulvae.

To use an unfortunate and transphobic expression, such a person who thinks that’s how it works can be “fooled”. But more importantly, even if we don’t bring in that, the very idea is that there are other factors that contribute to attraction…such that the “ideal” type for me takes into account aspects of personality, maybe some facial features (or other bodily features) I like, and so on.

Why is this problematic?

Why does the glorious PC Gaming Master Race have blond (white?), straight, flowing hair?

I am wary of statements like, “I’m just not into black girls” or “I’m just not into Asian guys” or even “I only want an Asian waifu” or “I want that (oh, man, don’t google for that one at work) BBC” . Here, we seek to essentialize and biologize what we increasingly see as non-essential features into attraction as well. (This is most often inadvertent and unconscious, but some people will consciously go full out in this direction by seeking to explain that features associated with “white” people just happen to be objectively more appealing. The lesson they take away from the white-doll/black-doll experiment is not one of social injustice and internalized racism, but just one pointing out the facts of life.)

But it seems to me that if we call this into question, it seems difficult to say where to stop calling it into question.

And it’s difficult even for me, since in my case, I find that the presence of facial hair on a guy in 7/10 scenarios will bump my evaluation of his attractiveness by some unhealthy factor, but the absence of said hair will return even the same dudes into normal blokes. (And you know, while I feel bad for folks trapped in our modern 21st century beauty regime that typically prioritizes a youthful beauty that life will wear out of us over time, I feel fortunate that for me, dudes tend to just keep looking better with age!)

I digress. (*wipes beads of sweat off forehead*).

If I have to wrap this up, I think the main issue I take with Ty (and others who make similar arguments, whether about sexuality or elsewhere) is this…it seems that he wants to use social constructionism and deconstructionism when it suits him (to show why being gay or adopting a gay identity or whatever is not all it’s cracked up to be)…but then he doesn’t want to apply the same tools elsewhere (to the church’s own identity claims and assumptions on gender, sex or identity.)

I’d feel a whole lot better (even if I wouldn’t necessarily agree) if Ty said something like this:

“Sexual identities are socially constructed, and are tied with competing and sometimes incompatible social narratives and paradigms. Because I choose to participate in the LDS/Mormon social paradigm, I choose not to let the bare facts of my attractions drive my sexual identity, but I recognize that my Mormon paradigm is yet another social paradigm.”

I would think this is a sufficiently humble statement. We could debate the merits of different constructs (namely, I don’t think the LDS construct fits a lot of people’s facts-on-the-ground situations), or maybe talk about what things could be borrowed or adapted between the frameworks (while I don’t think the LDS church is ever really going to be on board with a radical queer theoretical framework [which also bugs me when LDS folks try to use elements of queer theoretical thinking], I think that one could certainly develop a well-intentioned white picket fence homonormativity in the Law of Chastity.)

But I can’t really grasp that from Ty’s message can only partially see that in his final paragraph of his talk. Instead In addition, I suspect that he’s got something like this:

“Non-heteronormative sexual identities are socially constructed, and are tied with an incompatible social narrative to the true, real, actual paradigm that is revealed by the Gospel.”