>>4114>That's like saying heterosexual people never existed until industrial capitalismThat's true. Before the modern period, European society was much more sexually fluid and there were harsh punishments for sex acts that violated the moral law. Monks would mock 'marry' their cloister brothers while remaining celibate while sodomy was a mortal sin. Pederasty and child sexuality were common. Even then, the Church barely enforced punishments for sodomy until the Crusades, after which pederasty and sodomy became associated with 'Saracens' and Jews. Even the term 'heterosexual' was coined by Victorian sexologists like Krafft-Ebing as the mental disease of "excessive attachment to the opposite sex" way back in the 1880s.
>Or it's also like saying "Black" or "white" people never existed before colonialism.If you were a Zulu tribesman in the 1600s, would you have identified yourself as a black person? As someone who's skin color was black? Its colonialism and enslavement that opened the door for a common black identity because it ripped enslaved Africans out of their native culture, severing their family ties, severing them from their language and region and placing them in a lower caste called 'black.' Its only through enslavement that people came to be classified according to their skin color and built a shared culture based on the class position they'd been forced into. There were no "black people" before colonialism. People saw themselves as Hausa, Igbo, Zulu etc. they related to their own tribes, languages, and religions, and practically everyone around them had dark skin, so there was no sense of being "black" as some special identifier. In texts written in native African languages like Ge'ez or Hausa, the authors never self identify as black.
>"Straight" is the social construct. Gay is not.Straight and gay both go together. A straight person is someone who, by definition, is not gay and a gay person is someone who, by definition, is not straight. You can't know one without knowing the other. If queer is defined by exclusion from bourgeois society, then queer is a social construct because its contingent on bourgeois society for it to come into existence in the first place. Like how 'proletarian' is a product of bourgeois society and didn't exist
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