Free Straight by Hanne Blank Page A

law, the media, and so on—can exert a lot of influence on doxa, but they cannot simply create it from nothing. The creation of doxa is a folk process. We all create it, together, mostly unintentionally.
    The folk process of doxa becomes very clear to us when we look at the different ways that the things “everyone knows” about heterosexuality have been created. Whether it involves assimilating information that originates with authority figures, creating marked categories, invoking God and nature, or interpreting statistics with a decidedly populist bent, we take part in a large cultural conversation that selects, shapes, and distributes knowledge. In these ways and many others, we participate—and are always participating, whether we realize it or not—in the process of creating what “everyone knows” about heterosexuality.
    HOMEOPATHIC FREUD
    The process by which cultures create doxa is noisy. It relies on the existence of many different voices, a vast cloud of information and opinion and back-and-forth with a decidedly low ratio of signal to noise. Noisy, however, does not mean random. If you are familiar with the social media platform Twitter, you have probably already seen the phenomenon of a large cultural conversation taking on distinct moods and subjects at specific times, simply by glancing at Twitter’s automatically generated “trending topics” list. “Heterosexual” gained prominence in our thinking and our vocabulary in pretty much the same way as a trending topic does online: more and more people started talking about it until finally it came into its own.
    Before this could happen, however, “heterosexual” had to get into the conversational flow. For Kertbeny and Krafft-Ebing, you will recall, “heterosexual” was nothing more than an experiment in classification, an attempt to define and categorize something that had notpreviously had a name. For us, “heterosexual” is not an experiment but a cornerstone of how we organize our ideology of sex. As a culture, we believe that a thing called “heterosexuality” exists, inherent and irreducible. We believe it produces certain kinds of desires, behaviors, and relationships. In the late 1800s, hardly anyone had heard of such a thing as a “heterosexual.” By 1950, “heterosexuals” were everywhere, and most people firmly believed they always had been. Quite a bit had to happen in the intervening decades in order for “heterosexual” to go from being just an awkward neologism to being a primary and unquestioned tenet of sexuality doxa. One of the major forces in this transition was Sigmund Freud and, more importantly, the popularization of his work.
    Freud was simultaneously a simplistic and a highly critical thinker when it came to heterosexuality. More than once he admitted that the “exclusive sexual interest felt by men for women is also a problem that needs elucidating and is not a self-evident fact based on an attraction that is ultimately of a chemical nature,”[ 5 ] and acknowledged, in an equally radical insight, that heterosexuality required just as much restriction in its choice of object as homosexuality. But at the same time as he made these incisive observations about the complexity of sexual desires, he also accepted without reservation that heterosexuality existed. Freud’s belief that heterosexuality was a genuine human phenomenon and a normative characteristic of human behavior is reflected throughout his work. It was this large-scale Freudianism—and not the nuanced asides—that made Freud’s name in the English-speaking world, especially in America.
    Freudian theories on sex began to percolate through the European and American intelligentsia in the 1910s and ’20s, gaining momentum and visibility to the point where they more or less ruled the psychological roost well into the second half of the twentieth century.