Of course, my counter-argument would be that the essentialists (
who never regained as much of a foothold in most of Europe as they have done in the US, anyway) simply - or should I say wilfully? - interpreted Foucault and his kith and kin in too literal a way.
While constructionism certainly uses methods developed from linguistics to show up the arbtrariness of labels, this does not have to mean that this simply "dissolves" the referents of those labels into a meaningless nothing
(unless, that is, if one employs a "bare bones" caricature of constructionism). Rather, its interest lies in showing that, as constructed terms assigned to group together various disparate experiential phenomena, these labels remain an inadequate shorthand, shaped by
external considerations and viewpoints (none of which is intrinsic to what is being 'described'), and enforcing rhetorical limits on what a labeled phenomenon (such as 'bisexuality')
may or
may not be.
The goal, in my interpretation and use of constructionism at least, was never to undermine any kind of solidarity among people who identify themselves as gay, bi, architects, philatelists,
etc., but rather to highlight the fact that the
post hoc application of labels
to experiential phenomena is
always predicated by concerns/discourses which are
external to the phenomenon, and which thus differ from person to person using the label, depending on their agenda(s).
In that sense, constructionism offers a useful tool for reminding pro-diversity movements to look beyond (definitionally arbitrary and unstable) labels to actually engage with the notions of diversity and fluidity; and a reminder that those who use labels merely to delimit and 'punish' always have their viewpoints shaped by external discourse.
Thus, when one argues that "homosexual", for example, is a recent form of identity label (extending back no further than nineteenth century sexological discourse), this does not mean that people have not conceptualised male-male sexual and romantic identity in different ways prior to the emergence of that designation, or that the phenomenon may not just have existed in a non-labeled, non-codified form. It simply means that "homosexuality", as a defined concept with parameters and referents who might identify themselves within the category, is a recent application of terminology that has facilitated solidarity among those who consider themselves 'homosexual', but also among those who consider the phenomenon execrable/unnatural. Give people a definitional pigeonhole, and it can be used both to find meaning in themselves through perceived shared traits, and also to 'contain' them within as bogeypersons.
Of course, the word "heterosexual" could be used in place of "homosexual" throughout this paragraph, since it too is a recent (nineteenth-century) terminological construction with its own label; which no more means that male-female sex and relationships didn't exist prior to the emergence of the term either, it merely codified them in terms of a shorthand pigeonhole.
However, I would agree that the distinction between questioning 'labels' and questioning the 'experiential phenomena' underlying them... may well have been too subtle for those seeking to embark on a solidarity movement that required broad appeal and comprehension. If the constructionists lost out due to anything, then, it was perhaps the subtlety/complexity of their argument, which offered less chances for straightforward essentialist label-embracing statements along the lines of "we're here, we're queer, deal with it".
Stating that one simply "is" is always far less problematic than stating that one "identifies with certain socio-culturally defined labels that can be applied in highly divergent ways by different people to describe one's perceived 'state of being'."
