Reinventing the Male Homosexual: The Rhetoric and Power of the Gay Gene.

• Author: Sloop, John M.
• Position: Book Review

Reinventing the Male Homosexual: The Rhetoric and Power of the Gay Gene. By Robert Alan Brookey. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002; pp. ix + 167. $27.95.

Evidence of the ongoing maturation of rhetorical studies comes in many forms, and most assuredly, one of them is the inclusion of works by rhetorical critics in interdisciplinary book series. At their best, such books offer the opportunity for a wider academic audience to understand, through example, the types of insights that rhetorical criticism is uniquely able to provide. Robert Brookey's able entry in Anne Fausto-Sterling's "Race, Gender, and Science" series at Indiana University Press places him in the midst of scientists, mathematicians, literary critics and others interested in delineating the problematics of the representation of race and gender in the work of scientists and in the translation of scientific arguments in the realm of the wider public. Brookey's Reinventing the Male Homosexual works well both as a critique of scientific and public arguments designed to encourage "gay rights," but it also works as an illustration of the potential fruits of rhetorical criticism.

Brookey opens by referencing the dominant frames of the contemporary public argument over gay rights, a public argument that drives the historical inquiry of most of the book and which ultimately drives the strong obsevations of its conclusion. The notion of "choice," Brookey observes, has become a very problematic basis on which arguments for and against gay rights are based. That is, public argument over gay rights assumes either that homosexuals deserve legal rights if homosexuality is not a choice but is rather biologically determined, or they assume that homosexuals don't deserve equal rights because homosexuality is a lifestyle choice. The problem with such a logic, Brookey notes, is that "participants on both sides of the debate seldom question why gays and lesbians should not have rights if sexuality is chosen, or why they should have rights if it is not" (p. 1). For Brookey, a reasonable understanding of this debate can only emerge by tracing out the way in which homosexuality-specifically in this wo rk, male homosexuality-has been understood in scientific, psychiatric and other circles, how these "rhetorics of sexuality" have entered the public realm, how the debate has been shaped by such rhetorics, and, ultimately, how these debates might be rethought. In this way, Brookey provides both a...