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SubStance 29.1 (2000) 23-38



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Neurological Preference:
LeVay's Study of Sexual Orientation

Elizabeth A. Wilson

Brain Cultures

The discovery that a nucleus [an aggregation of nerve cells in the brain] differs in size between heterosexual and homosexual men illustrates that sexual orientation in humans is amenable to study at the biological level, and this discovery opens the door to studies of neurotransmitters or receptors that might be involved in regulating this aspect of personality. Further interpretation of the results of this study must be considered speculative. (LeVay, 1991, 1036)

Simon LeVay's caveat that interpretation of his data should be delimited has been widely disregarded. In the wake of his 1991 report in Science there has been little in the way of new data on the neurotransmitters and receptors that may be involved in regulating sexuality, and to date there has been no published replication of LeVay's key findings. There has, however, been much in the way of further interpretation of his report by academic, scientific, political, legal and media commentators. 1

For a study that is reliant on simple symmetrical axes of analysis (hetero vs. homo; male-typical vs. female-typical), LeVay's article has incited a curiously variant set of responses: gay activists who welcome the political implications of a biologically conferred homosexuality (Stein, 1993), feminist scientists who doubt the robustness of LeVay's data (Fausto-Sterling, 1992), humanities-trained critics who broach the anti-homophobic possibilities of biological research into sexuality while maintaining reservations about the particularities of LeVay's study (Rosario, 1997), scientists who accommodate LeVay's results within an already contentious body of research on the causes of homosexuality (Swaab, Zhou, Fodor and Hofman, 1997), cultural critics who find LeVay's conceptualization of sexuality and sexual identity too static (Garber, 1995), psychologists who argue alternatively that LeVay's work could be read as latent poststructuralist genealogy (Gordo-López and Cleminson, 1999) or as a conventional reiteration of heterosexist norms (Hegarty, 1997), and legal theorists who warn against the use of biological theories of sexual orientation in pro-gay litigation (Halley, 1994). [End Page 23]

Within the humanities-bound literature there has been extensive commentary on the ways in which LeVay's original study is limited both methodologically and conceptually. For example, it has been argued that the medical records of post-mortem individuals contain insufficient data to reliably allocate those individuals to different categories of sexual identity, that LeVay's use of the categories "heterosexual" and "homosexual" is modeled on outdated notions of sexual identity, that the post-mortem brains of many of the subjects may have been modified by complications from AIDS, that LeVay conflates male homosexuality with femininity, that the sample size is too small for reliable comparisons between groups to be made, that LeVay's hypothesis can only be supported when data from the brains of homosexual women are included in the comparative schema, and that LeVay's assertion that studies of rodent and primate sexuality offer useful behavioral and neurological homologies for humans is not valid. 2 This essay will not offer more in the way of this kind of commentary. Nor will I be concerned with the debates about the nature and nurture of homosexuality that have been re-ignited by LeVay's report and by certain genetic studies of homosexuality published about the same time (Bailey and Pillard, 1991; Hamer, Hu, Magnuson, Hu and Pattatucci, 1993; LeVay and Hamer, 1994).

Instead, this essay will offer some wider speculations about the character of neurological substrate revealed in LeVay's data. The methodological and conceptual limitations of LeVay's study are indispensable to these speculations, not because they constitute errors (that, presumably, another study could correct) but because these methodological and conceptual constraints twist the data in ways that reveal the texture of neurological structure. This essay will argue that one interpretive approach to LeVay's data is to illuminate the relation between, on the one hand, the inertly dimorphic forms of sexuality that his methodology solicits, and on the other hand, the exceptional neurological and sexual...

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