Thread by @shengokai

Since my book deals with affect and gender, one of the things I've been thinking about is sexual orientation as a description the direction of one's affective (not necessarily sexual) desire. That is, how one is affectively oriented towards some people and not others.

Now, I'm not so concerned about the origins of such things as, for me, the only reason to consider the origin of sexual orientation is if you want to impose control over it. Further, origin often has little to do with the existing direction unless you're thinking in process.

Putting origin aside, I do want to acknowledge that regardless of the starting point, the direction of our affective desire and the shape that it takes emerges in transaction with the environment. I say in transaction because people make misguided claims about such things.

To say that our affective direction emerges in transaction with the environment is to say that how we come to be oriented, to determine our direction, is developed within an environment and through appropriating the resources, including cultural resources, of that environment.

Put simply: we learn how to be oriented through transaction with our environment. And this is an expansive "how" which includes mode of expression, mode of description, mode of perception, all within regulatory structures that instruct us in how to be oriented.

As an example, the language we use to talk about sexual orientation is learned through transaction with culture and then applied IN REFLECTION upon our experience of the direction of our affective desires. We learn to name an experience so that we can be "directed."

Again, I'm indebted to Sara Ahmed on this point, particularly her chapter "Objects and Orientations" in Queer Phenomenology, who lays the ground for how I'm thinking about this in an incredibly insightful way.

Back to the subject, how we are oriented is both qualitative and discursive: orientation is a feeling of directedness towards that is named only in reflection upon that directedness towards. It is through culture that we learn to name, embody, and make present our orientation.

Having said that, the language we use for orientation strikes me as out of step with lived experience. For example, "bisexual" might be better described as a feeling of directedness towards partners of different and similar affective organizations, rather than our common use.

Here, I say "different" and "similar" affective organizations because we might have an cis-person who is attracted to partners who affectively present as female and who affectively present as non-binary or agender. "Different" would cover spaces that "opposite" does not.

I should pause here and say that queer folks have long since recognized (with caveats) this understanding in experience: our language (and theory, tbh) lags significantly behind the actual experience in this case.

To wit, this doesn't actually overcome many of the problems: our sense of the affective organization of persons is still culturally organized, and our culture still privileges specific materialities of the body as indicative of who we "should" be attracted to.

Which is the nice way of saying that our society is still transphobic and queer-phobic as fuck, especially when the affective organization of a person doesn't correspond with the materiality of the body, or renders that materiality unintelligible to our affective perception.

This is a long way of saying that the very language we use to talk about sexual orientation and gender is so far behind our lived experience of sexual orientation and gender, that the cultural structures that rely on this language fail to account for our experience.

That is, we can barely talk about bisexuality as such, much less a sexual orientation directed towards non-binary or agender people, given the ways that we've tied the language of sexual orientation to assumptions about gender, the materiality of the body, and attraction.

So how can we expect to develop social structures that include and allow for the cultivation of wider affective perceptions of other people? How can we develop new ways of being in nature through culture that actuallize new possibilities for gendering and sexual orientation?

Anyway, these are partially formed thoughts on the subject that need more time to cook.