It seems clear to me that the phenomena that Gagnon is describing in Scripts and the Coordination of Sexual Conduct is a real one. It is consistent with what I can understand from introspection into my own thought processes, experiences, actions and reactions. It also powerfully explains the character and impact of the narratives that television, movies, novels, and any other kind of story-telling consist of. Though the cultural construction and transmission of these narratives/scripts must surely take place on a more complex and fragmented inter-personal level, stories and representations of relationships and sexuality in media is such a powerful and clear example of their power and ubiquity that I cannot help but be convinced. The sheer amount of attention that people pay to these narratives and the scripts contained within them, and the obvious thematic patterns that play out in them, and the obvious way that people model their lives after them and question the normalcy and authenticity of their feelings and actions relative to them, make it clear to me that scripting is a real phenomena. Beyond that, the elegance and the simplicity of the idea make it seem likely to me that it is a process inherent to the human mind, though of course the complex and context specific results of that process vary hugely.
In that sense, I believe that scripting theory is an important theory and will inevitably be a part of any broad conception of human behavior and motivation. However, I believe that it is not adequate to answer certain kinds of questions, and as a model for the generation of human behavior tends to obscure certain complexities and interactions between evolved cognitive structures and their effect on behavior and the constructed structures of meaning and behavior that Gagnon is describing. While Gagnon does not make totalizing claims, he does not attempt to create a “grand theory,” there is a tendency in applying scripting theory to make assumptions about the “overwhelming weight” of socialization or the “eclipsing” of evolved cognitive structures that are not adequate to appreciating the complexity of the phenomena being described.
Gagnon also does not, I believe, really address these issues fully in articulating his theory, for the most part he is responding to an “updated Freudian model” (Gagnon, p. 68) of development and not a more sophisticated evolutionary approach to cognition. He is of course not to be blamed for this, Scripts and the Coordination of Sexual Conduct was written in 1974 and the movement toward an evolutionary approach to cognition did not develop until the early 1990s. However, it is my belief that in utilizing theories like scripting theory modern theorists would be well served by considering the relationship of the phenomena of culturally constructed behavior being described to the “essential” characteristics of the evolved organism doing the constructing.
Gagnon states that this process of applying skills and innovating new skills to adapt to changing environmental demands consists, in part, of “culturally provided plans and goals” and that these plans and goals “contain the motives for behavior” and shape and coordinate sexual conduct (Gagnon, p. 61). And of course Gagnon does not limit this description to sexual conduct, sexual scripts being just a “subclass of the general category of scripted social behavior” (Gagnon, p. 61). But what exactly does Gagnon mean when he says that scripts “contain” the motives for behavior? Gagnon of course realizes that “the relation of… scripts to concrete behavior is quite complex and indirect… they are neither direct reflections of any concrete situation nor are they surprise-free in their capacity to control any situation” (Gagnon, p. 61). But is this recognition of an undeterminate relationship between scripts and behavior really adequate? Is there not a great deal of room in that “complex and indirect” relationship for different levels of organizing processes and the generation of motivation?
What is a motivation and what is its relationship to the generation of behavior? Gagnon seems to be conceptualizing motivation in a rather specific way. He states that “the view that personal motives are embedded in these scripts – this is, that our explanatory assertions are deeply associated with our behavioral plans – suggests that motives, in this context, might be called practical motivation or practical explanation” (Gagnon, p. 62). Gagnon seems to be equating motivation here, at least “in this context,” with the explanation that an individual gives himself and others for his behavior. Gagnon goes on to say that he is primarily concerned with the ways that these “ad hoc theories” of behavior “constrain and shape human conduct” (Gagnon, p. 62).
It seems clear to me, and I cannot imagine that it is not clear to Gagnon, that this is a conception of motivation that is limited in its explanatory capacity. It limits itself, as he says, to questions of the constraining and shaping of human conduct, but leaves open the question of the generation of human conduct. Now it is equally clear that behavior cannot be generated without simultaneously being shaped and constrained and that these processes are an inherent part of that generation, but by focusing on what appear to be after-the-fact explanations and “ad hoc theories” we leave open the question of the internal processes that contribute to the generation of behavior.
Gagnon criticizes a “scientific” conception of these “ad hoc theories” as being “naïve” or not being “real,” and points to the significance of even theories of human behavior generated by the academy in shaping motivational accounts (Gagnon, p. 63). Yet despite that criticism of conceptions of the “real” verses the “naïve” there does seem to be a fundamental difference between the generation of a behavior and an account of the generation of that behavior. Asserting that the generalized complex system created by these accounts forms an important part of the environment and shapes and constrains behavior may be correct, but it does not get at the basic question of the relationship between these processes of shaping/constraining and generation.
It’s interesting that Gagnon freely talks of “capacities” and “adaptive responses,” language that has vague essentialist and evolutionary connotations. Specifically, Gagnon states that “the capacity to use responses learned in one concrete situation in another, together with other responses learned in still other situations at other moments in the life cycle, is central to the process of human adaptation” (Gagnon, p. 62). Gagnon seems to be relatively agnostic about the relationship between evolved cognitive structures and concrete behavior. I imagine that he would acknowledge the possibility of their existence but assume that this generalized capacity for learning and thus socialization would subsume any other capacities or adaptive responses into irrelevance.
But is that assumption really justified? Certainly people have this capacity for the recombination and application of learned responses to novel situations, but where did it come from? Of course it must have evolved. Why then would it be the only such capacity, or cognitive structure, to have evolved? Evolutionary psychology has made strong arguments that a purely generalized learning capacity would be computationally inadequate to solve adaptive problems and thus could not have evolved (Tooby & Cosmides, pp. 102-106). A problem-solving system must have a priori “procedures that are specialized to detect and deal with particular kinds of problems, situations, relationships, or contents in ways that differ from any other kind of problem, situation, relationship, or content (Tooby & Cosmides, p. 104) in order to be effective. Indeed, the capacity that Gagnon describes could be conceptualized to fit this description, as long as it is not generalized into an all-purpose learning/adaptive system, as it deals specifically with social behavior and thus inevitably has expectations about the kinds of “problems, situations, relationships, or contents” that need to be faced built into it.
Gagnon states repeatedly that he is interested in the “psychosocial processes and cultural-historical situations that… elicit from an underspecified organism the culturally appropriate responses to novel situations” (Gagnon, p. 68). Of central importance here, I think, is this concept of novelty. I would assert that both novelty and continuity are important components to any situation and a fundamental aspect of the adaptive problem that must be solved, and thus will be reflected in the adaptive mechanisms that are employed. While undoubtedly organisms are “underspecified” in terms of behavior, and particularly culture, at the same time cultural appropriateness is not the only adaptive problem being faced and sexual relations are hardly purely novel.
In conclusion, script theory is a powerful and, I believe, accurate description of a fundamental process governing the generation and organization of human behavior. However, it is not adequate to the task of answering fundamental questions about the relationship between evolved cognitive structures and the culturally mediated generation of behavior, or in fact the nature of the cognitive structure that is at the heart of scripting theory, the capacity to learn skills and apply them to novel situations. This is of course not to be held against it, it is a mid-level theory and does not make totalizing or universal claims. It describes a specific phenomena, a specific process, at a specific level of analysis and that phenomena is observable. However, I believe that there is a tendency to simplify or gloss over critical points of complexity and interaction between the evolved organism and constructed structures of meaning that get in the way of integrating this powerful and useful mid-level theory into a larger understanding of human behavior.
To illustrate this basic point, Gagnon does this himself when he makes a gratifying reference to Chomsky’s notion of “language competence” and “language performance” in explaining his notion of “orgasm competence” and “orgasm performance” (Gagnon, p. 73). The idea is that there is an inherent “tendency toward a specific organization of the biological substrate,” or “competence,” that makes “performance” possible. However, after acknowledging this basic conceptual relationship between the “biological substrate” and “performance” Gagnon states that “I would assign an overwhelming weight to the role that social and psychological factors have in converting orgasm competence into orgasm performance” (Gagnon, p. 73). I assert that this phrase “overwhelming weight” is inadequate to deal with this process of conversion to performance, and that in fact within that process there are profound and fundamental realizations to be made, of which scripting theory will be a large but perhaps not “overwhelming” part.

Bibliography

Gagnon, J. (2004). Scripts and the Coordination of Sexual Conduct. In Gagnon, J., An Interpretation of Desire: Essays in the Study of Sexuality Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (1992). The Psychological Foundations of Culture. In Barkow, J., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (Eds.), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture New York: Oxford University Press

In criticizing what he calls the “repressive hypothesis,” Foucault was attempting to describe and understand a process or pattern that he perceived in modern discourse about sexuality. He was trying to understand discourse itself, to create an “archaeology of knowledge,” that mapped out how discourses came about, what precisely is their character, and how they create “technologies of power” that shape and produce bodies and experiences. Foucault is specifically not trying to answer a historical question about whether or not we are in fact repressed, or have been repressed in the past, or are becoming more or less repressed. He is specifically trying to ask why we are talking about repression in general, how it has become to be regarded with such certainty that we are in fact repressed, and how the sense of progress or escape from repression has come in many ways to define the modern era.
Foucault’s specific criticism was aimed at a conception of repression as being a fundamental social force, general law, or organizing historical principle around which it would be possible to organize a historical description and explanation of sexuality. In doing this Foucault hoped to be able to disengage himself from a set of assumptions that was dominant at the time, and in many ways remains dominant, and in doing so be able to focus his analytical attention upon the assumptions themselves, and say something about their character. Specifically Foucault wanted to get away from a Freudian model whereby productive power was assumed to reside only in “natural” drives or instincts and culture (i.e. discourse) served only to limit or constrain that “natural” abundance (i.e. repression), and move toward a model whereby discourse itself has productive power.
In The Use of Pleasure, Foucault describes a theory as to the ways in which pleasure and desire were transformed through discourse into an ethics of the self. Central to this transformation was the construction of the self as an ethical subject, and specifically the definition of pleasure and desire as a dimension of the self that it was necessarily to regulate and moderate. Thus pleasure and desire became a problem to be solved in the Greek mind, and a set of practices of regulation and normalization resulted from this discourse of sex as a problem.
In identifying this problematization of sex Foucault is not asserting that sex or sexuality was itself constructed as negative, or a “problem” because of its own inherently negative or dangerous features. Rather, sex came to be defined as a bodily practice in need of regulation as a part of a general conception of the relation to the self, defined in terms of moderation. According to Foucault this regime of moderation, or stylization of being, extended far beyond sex to a variety of bodily and social practices in terms of what one did or did not eat and when, the quantity of what one ate and when, the quantity and quality of physical exercise that one took, the management of ones household, and the control one has over others. The moral concern that sex came to be the focus of emanated then not from a construction of sex itself as an evil to be reduced or controlled, but rather from an ethics built around a conception of moderation that was itself the measure of morality.
According to Foucault, moderation came to be the organizing principle of Greek ethics because it was constructed as being the foundational practice whereby a body capable of wielding power could be produced. This foundational relationship between moderation and power came about through the Greek ethical notion of freedom. Freedom, according to the Greeks, was characterized as a state of self-mastery, an ability to control or govern ones desires, and thus an exercise of power over the self. The attainment of this self-mastery, and thus of freedom, was characterized by the ability and the authorization to wield power over others, and thus to take ones place as a citizen of the community. This exercise of power over the self thus constitutes Foucault’s central concept of ethics produced through a relationship to the self, in this case a relationship of self-mastery and control, of monitoring and shaping, naming and delimiting. Freedom was thus the ethical goal of the set of bodily practices geared toward moderation, and the ethical self was evaluated in terms of its relation to that goal.
The ethical subject in Greek thought was primarily constructed as the adult man. This construction is inseparable from the construction of ethics in terms of moderation, power, and freedom described above. Because the ethical self was constructed as the self capable of moderation and self-mastery and thus capable of wielding power, the self capable of being free and free to wield power, that self was necessarily an adult male in a culture as profoundly patriarchal as the Greeks. The nature of this moderation and the associated bodily practices that go along with this stylized mode of existence are thus necessarily related with the relations of adult men to the other members of Greek society, namely boys and women. Foucault describes these bodily practices in the Economics and Erotics sections of The Uses of Pleasure.
Foucault’s concept of the self is defined in terms of the way that selfhood is constituted socially. Foucault is primarily concerned with the productive power of discourse, the ways in which discourse shape and produce our bodies and experiences and the experience of selfhood. In Foucault’s terms then there can be no selfhood outside of sociality, selfhood is created in relation to others, and specifically it is created through discourses that shape and regulate bodies through disciplinary practices. Within this framework the self is totally encapsulated within the social or relational self.
In The Use of Pleasure Foucault is specifically concerned with the ways that the Greeks constructed the self as a moral agent. Foucault is concerned here with an awareness of the self, the attention of the self to the self, the gaze of the self and what is produced through that gaze. According to Foucault what is produced is the “ethical subject” or the selfhood that is defined in terms of ethical action and that is “subject” to ethical law. This “ethical self” then becomes bound and directed along a course of actions, or a stylized way of being, that in turn defines the self, delimits its boundaries, and regulates its relationship to the law.
This “ethical self” is thus defined by a regulatory practice that forces the individual to define parts of himself as the object of ethical practice, and to enact that practice through actions upon the self, attention to the self, and to change and shape the self. In the specific case of the Greeks this regulatory practice is conceived in terms of austerity or moderation of experience, and the production of a moral self through that moderation and austerity.
In terms of the way that this Greek conception of selfhood relates to the experience of things like pleasure, abstinence, and power what is most relevant is the conception of moral behavior as a stylization of being rather than an absolute proscription against certain acts. Rather than a relation to the self that would define the self as immoral if it committed certain acts that are defined as immoral in and of themselves, the ethical self was defined in terms of the character, timing, and magnitude of its actions. Thus there was no discourse that defined pleasure as being inherently evil and conversely abstinence as inherently good, and no conception of the self that rendered the self vulnerable to these evils in absolute terms. The experience of power for the Greeks was directly produced by this self relationship of austerity and moderation, as the control of the self was thought of as the effective exercise of power, and the production of a self capable of using powerful effectively, and thus authorized to use power within the society.
In arguing against a causative role for Christianity in the production of modern negative attitudes toward sex Foucault is continuing his basic criticism of the repressive hypothesis. It is a central assumption of the repressive hypothesis as criticized by Foucault that the repression that we are only now managing to free ourselves from emanated from Christian moral philosophy, and some kind of general sex-negativity fundamental to the Christian world-view. In doing this he is attempting to describe a more complex history of ideas that extends beyond the complex of ideas that flowed through the juridical and social structures of discourse that we label “Christian.”
Specifically, Foucault identifies a history of discourse originating in ancient Greece whereby individuals came to think of themselves as moral subjects in terms of an ethic of austerity and a regulatory regime of bodily practices. In this way the domain of the sexual came to be thought of in moral terms of one of the bodily practices that must be moderated. Foucault recognizes that this is in no way identical to a Christian discourse that identifies sexuality and sexual pleasure as being inherently evil and the discourses of monogamy and absolute chastity that accompany it. However, Foucault recognizes in this basic categorization of a set of acts or a domain of being as being subject to an ethical law a set of basic principles of austerity and moderation that in a sense had only to be revived by later discourses. Thus, the fundamental idea or discourse that Foucault identifies here is not one of repression, but rather a particular way of relating to the self that constructs the self as a moral being.
The change in the conception of sexuality in terms of “sin” to a conception of sexuality in terms of “disease” can be understood through a Foucauldian focus on shifts in discourses and the development of new technologies of power and shifts in the way that they penetrate peoples’ bodies and minds. According to Foucault, the 17th century saw the rise of a new institutional establishment of medical authority, and that accompanying this new institutional authority was a discourse of the medicalization of the human body that both constituted the authority of that institution and created new technologies of power for the ever-greater scrutiny and control of bodies.
Within this framework sexuality became a site for greater regulation and control and the new technologies of power produced new and various ways that power penetrated and shaped bodies, dividing them and categorizing them, naming them and creating them. This process intensified in the 19th century with the virtual eclipse of previous conceptions of regulation and control of the body in terms of “sin” and the taking of the mantle of responsibility by the scientific medical institution for the moral and physical hygiene of the body, and beyond that the purity and vigor of the social body through eugenic practices.
It seems to me that the failure of Foucault’s theory to change policy and the development of the self come from the nature of a theory built around critique. In a sense it seems to me that an intellectual project geared toward cultural criticism is fundamentally unable to generate solutions to that criticism. One way to think about it would be to describe this class of theory as inherently descriptive and reactive. It is descriptive in that Foucault is describing a complex social and discursive phenomena that he perceives in the cultural milieu of which he is a part. It is reactive in that, at least it seems to me, Foucault’s analysis is driven by a step-by-step criticism of a prior descriptive model. The example for this is of course the repressive hypothesis, Foucault’s whole argument in Volume I is based on a refutation of that hypothesis.
The problem with this construction of “theory as critique” is that it is not explanatory. Foucault is able to describe a history of ideas or an “archaeology of knowledge” as he calls it, he is able to trace the contours of that history, its shifts and its fluxes, but his theory, his critique, is fundamentally unable to offer an explanation for those changes. Being unable to offer an explanation for change, it is difficult or impossible to glean from the insights generated from his theory suggestions for how to effect change. This makes it difficult or impossible to generate concrete policy recommendations that would be influential.
As for why the realizations that Foucault’s descriptive insight have not changed the development of the self, I’m not sure. In a sense it seems that they have, Foucault was certainly an intellectual inspiration for the queer movement, and provided ways for interested and focused people to think about the ways that power influences their bodies. But I suppose the question comes back to what are individuals able to then do about their existence. Merely knowing about it doesn’t render one immune. And the power of these discourses affects development from very early on, well before one could become aware of a Foucauldian analysis.

March 24, 2008

Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects
Office for the Protection of Human and Animal Subjects
254 Administration Building
c/o San Francisco State University
1600 Holloway Ave.
San Francisco, CA, 94132


Dear CPHS:

Enclosed please find the research protocol, informed consent form and pertinent documents for the study, "Sexual Identity Formation among Indian MSM."

I propose to conduct a qualitative study examining the experiences of sexual identity formation among Indian men who have sex with men. The study will be based on in-person and online interviews with 10-15 men who have sex with men. It is important to study the actual experiences of people going through the process of sexual identity formation in India in order to 1) provide concrete population-specific data to inform debates about the nature of sexual identity and sexual orientation, 2) inform debates about the transnational diffusion of sexual identities and their internalization.

I would appreciate your informed review and approval of the enclosed material. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact me at (415) 240-0776 or at mstief@gmail.com.

I look forward to your comments and approval.

Sincerely,


Matthew Stief
Master's Degree Candidate
Human Sexuality Studies
San Francisco State University

San Francisco State University
Sexual Identity Formation among Indian MSM

Researcher’s Name: Matthew Stief
Department: Human Sexuality Studies

1. STUDY AIM, BACKGROUND AND DESIGN

a) Research Question
This study is intended to explore the psychological experiences and processes of sexual identity formation among Indian men who have sex with men (MSM). I am specifically concerned with the process of sexual identity formation in the Indian cultural context. I will conduct online interviews with MSM living in India, as well as face-to-face interviews with Indian men who have emigrated to the US but who were socialized and developed sexually in India. My research question would therefore be:

· Are Indian MSM constructing identities around their sexuality, and if so, how?

b) Overview
To answer this question I will conduct a series of 10-15 semi-structured interviews with adult self-identified male MSM divided into two approximately even groups; the first living in India and the second having emigrated from India to the US. I will conduct 60-90 minute face-to-face interview with participants living in the US. Face-to-face interviews will be audio-recorded and transcribed. Participants living in the US will be recruited both actively and passively through mailing lists and snowball sampling. For participants living in India I will conduct 90-120 minute online interviews through a text-based messaging service. The transcript of the interview will be directly copied-and-pasted into a Word document. Online participants will be recruited both passively and actively through mailing lists and chat rooms specific to Indian MSM. For all participants I will ask questions that will elicit descriptions of their lived experience. I will be primarily interested in experiences of sexual behavior, developing self-concept and self-identity, relationships with the world and various communities, and interactions with media and globalized discourses of sexual identity.

I will conduct an interpretive qualitative analysis of the transcription of these interviews. To do this I will create a codebook of emergent themes from an initial reading of the transcripts. I will then read through the transcripts a second time applying the codes formulated in the first reading. I will then separate out the sections according to each code and discuss the variability and similarities in participants’ experiences and discuss the theoretical implications of that variability and similarity.

c) Significance
This study is situated at a complex intersection of literatures and discourses dealing with the nature of sexual orientation, the globalization of sexual identities, and the definition of what is or should be “Indian.” It is my hope and intention that this study will in turn inform those discourses and add to those literatures in a way that provides population-specific detail and theoretical clarity. Primarily, my study is situated within a growing and contentious body of literature debating the nature of sexual orientation. This literature is far from consensus on this issue and a great deal of theoretical and methodological confusion remains as to the kinds of questions that