Looking for Alternative Sexual Desire Across History: Connectivity as the Ontological Basis of Sexual Orientation

Drawing on Miranda Fricker's "hermeneutical marginalization" and Martin Meeker's "sexual communication network," this article retraces how the adoption and therefore the existence of queer identities are predicated on the availability of alternative models of understanding sexuality. "Loci of increased human connection," such as cities, media, and the Internet, are recognized as disseminators of hermeneutical resources and catalysts for "sexual communication networks." By following this throughline, this article provides a framework for the social ontology of sexual orientation that is intended to be usable across history. The author renegotiates the debate about the applicability of sexual orientation lingo to queer pre-modern history by iterating on William Wilkerson's emerging fusion theory of sexual identity. Sexual orientation is a self-interpretation of desires, which emerge, or remain hermeneutically marginalized, under the available social models that are specific to each society (and time). Historiography, in this way, can realistically enquire about sexual preference in its search for "gay history"; particular focus must be put, however, on "loci of increased human connection," because they are the most likely sites where hermeneutically underserved desires might emerge explicitly as alternative social categories. These alternative categories might have lived only in limited contexts before the invention of modern communication technologies.