Cheshire Calhoun

Sexuality injustice differs significantly in form from racial and gender injustice. Because persons who are gay or lesbian can evade being publicly identified and treated as gays or lesbians, sexuality injustice does not consist, as racial and gender injustice does, in the disproportionate occupation of disadvantaging and highly exploitable places in the socio-economic structure. Instead, sexuality injustice consists in the displacement of homosexuality and lesbianism to the outside of society. I examine, in particular, (1) the production of society as heterosexual through the requirement that all citizens adopt a real or pseudonymous heterosexual identity as a condition of access to the public sphere; (2) the reproduction of heterosexual society through legal, psychiatric, educational, and familial practices whose aim is to prevent future generations of lesbian and gay people; and (3) the legitimation of heterosexual society through the construction of criminalizing stereotypes of gay and lesbian identity.

The wrongdoing that feminists critique often occurs at the level of social practice where social acceptance of oppressive practices and the absence of widespread moral critique impede the wrongdoer’s awareness of wrongdoing. This chapter argues that under these circumstances individuals are not blameworthy for participating in conventionalized wrongdoing. However, because social vulnerability to reproach is necessary to publicizing moral standards and conveying the obligatory force of moral requirements, it is sometimes reasonable to reproach moral failings even when individuals are excused.

Kant's Categorical Imperative reveals the injustice of excepting ourselves from conventional social practices like promise keeping. But can it equally reveal the injustice of complying with societally entrenched unjust maxims, e.g., slave-holding maxims in colonial America? Standard Kantian arguments against slavery depend on overly narrow definitions of slavery and an implausible requirement that we universalization across all rational beings. This essay reconstructs the CI-procedure so that it can detect and explain the wrongness of conventionalized injustice. In particular, maxim universalization must thus be combined with discounting socialization and coercion that produce nonrational compliance with a cooperative scheme.

Linda Nicholson argues that because gender is socially constructed, feminist theorizing must be about an expansive multiplicity of subjects called “woman” that bear a family resemblance to each other. But why did feminism expand its category of analysis to apply to all cultures and time periods when social constructionism led lesbian and gay studies to narrow the categories “homosexual” and “lesbian”? And given the multiplicity of genders, why insist that feminist subjects are different, resembling women rather than a multiplicity including women as well as not-women and not-men?