Conservative and liberal sexuality

Shared among conservative and liberal moralists is an assumption that sexuality is a natural ground for personal identity. This stems from a notion of human identity bound to universal experiences and possibilities, a sort of ontological egalitarianism. What does everyone care about? Food, water, shelter, sex, etc. Human identity based on a universal hierarchy of needs, defined and refined by biological arguments.

Even the conservative school of thought regarding sexuality is in fact thoroughly modern, thoroughly contemporary, in that it makes sexual identity and expression out to be a valid base for political activity.

The right blames the left for this, the left blames capitalism. Chicken and egg. Maybe class politics opens the whole thing up by expressing political identity in terms of class, in terms of what one does with one's body. Maybe such a thing is inevitable, given that all knowledge is definitely embodied, and so any politics that isn't simply lying to itself must include a deeply embodied aspect. And embodied knowledge very easily becomes construed as "natural" because it is to a very large degree immediate yet nondiscursive at least as we experience it day to day. Hell, maybe Descartes is ultimately to blame, or empiricists, or both.

The fact remains that a politics based entirely on the body is dangerous, for the simple reason that bodies are polydifferentiated, and tend towards clustering based on exclusion.That they tend towards a presumption of "natural" categories or "natural" points of interest, and so fall prey to an easy inertia, an easy ignorance of and apathy towards what could be, the possibility of change or innovation or transformation in the world. They individualize, and because the chief locus of political experience is a single and individual body, the power of action of any actor is reduced tremendously.

So rather than pick sides, it might be more significant to point out that a shared focus on individual bodily experience as the ground of human identity is itself dangerous and limiting.

A fundamentally different way of considering things might be to look towards a sort of joint identity- bodies and the collective expressions in which they engage. For instance, a business or workplace, a church, a union, a club, a local subculture based around a practice, etc.