Gelation in Scientific Research

By using jellification, solid data is received, and statistical analyses can be conducted, whereby the data’s firm qualities are associated with objectivity, reliability and truth. These considerations often disregard the cast form, in which the initially unprocessed information has set. To become scientifically proven, the fluid phenomenon is mingled with a gelling agent, and ultimately consolidates into a hard fact.

Besides its usefulness in making sense of the world, the common practice of solidification also entails serious dangers of producing rigid and brittle states of something that virtually constitutes itself by being dynamic and flowy. Ever since its emergence in the 19th century, the term homosexuality has been accompanied by ongoing scientific research obsessed with finding biological determinants for sexual orientation – alongside people from the queer community being subjected to gross human rights violations and atrocities.

Two containers in which the jelly sets, two terms, which already preceded scientific research as a part of everyday understanding by operating with the same linguistic categorisation systems. The expression vom anderen Ufer sein is a phrase in the German language, which illustrates the common binary thinking by envisioning categories such as sex, gender and sexual orientation. It describes being gay literally as being from the other shore, and therefore draws on the traditional dichotomy of hetero- and homosexuality. It declares two locations, here and there: Here as the norm and as the standard, and There as the other place, in which someone cannot simply be, but needs to have moved to at one point in time – the heteros are, the homos become.

Throughout the last century, quite a lot of advocates of biological essentialism intended to uncover what appeared as a white spot in their understandings of sexuality. Their reductionist approach follows the top-down view of mechanistic materialism, as the scientific analysis relies on dissecting the parts of a system, in this case by trying to physically take sexual desire apart, to the lowest level of organisation, instead of looking at it as a whole. [1] Findings were made that centred around brain anatomy such as a decreased volume in the interstitial nucleus of the anterior hypothalamus (INAH) [2], the gene Xq28, a subtelomeric region on the long arm of the X chromosome, which was concluded as a maternal transmission of male homosexuality [3], or the fraternal birth order, when proposing that a male fetus induces a maternal immune reaction of antibodies towards subsequent male fetuses, which were thought to interfere in the development of sex-dimorphic brain structures of male fetuses in subsequent pregnancies. [4]

The striving for understanding sexual behaviour through measuring the body only became viable when the sexual act carried out between two (or more) people was transformed into the personality of the homosexual. An identity equipped with its own specific history, characteristics, morphology, and anatomy, or as Foucault expresses it: Homosexuality became a species in its own right. [5] By locating sexual orientation not only within a person, but also within their very corporeality, it paved the way for scientific examinations of the queer body.

Only in 2019, an article titled Large-scale GWAS reveals insights into the genetic architecture of same-sex sexual behavior was published in Science by Ganna et al., in which the research group identified five loci on the human genome that show a statistical significance in the association with same-sex sexual behaviour. To do so, the data of about half a million probands was pressed into the two moulds of a never-vs.-ever-have-I-had-sex-with-someone-of-the-same-sex binary, regardless of being collected in much more nuanced ranks and ratios beforehand. Also, to make their method feasible, every person, that identified themselves not as cisgender male or female, was cut away from the research. [6]

Once flowy, sparkly, and effervescent, sexual orientation becomes a firm matter, sliceable and purified from any queer complexities, and the processing of the extracted DNA information forces it into a translucent state. Mistaken as sound knowledge or even abused in homophobic ideology, such research will be threatening the queer body’s very matter in its further existence by bioinformatic fortune telling.