Fausto-Sterling - Sexing the Body

262 Notes
ple, through his public speaking engagements), he picked up more people,
some volunteering after hearing him speak. Although he actively sought out
people from different environments, there seems little doubt that he selected
a segment of the population who was especially willing, and in some cases
even eager, to talk about sex. Might this have accounted for the high frequencies
of homosexual encounters in his reports
On the positive side, Kinsey and a small number of highly trained co-workers
(in a fashion true to the racism and sexism of the period, Kinsey’s interviewers
had to be male, white, and WASP) conducted all of the interviews.
Rather than use preset questionnaires, they followed a memorized procedure
and had the leeway to pursue lines of questioning in order to be sure they had
gotten complete answers. More modern survey approaches have exchanged
this more flexible, but also more idiosyncratic, interview process for a level
of standardization that permits using less highly trained interview personnel.
It is very hard to know whether important data are lost as a result. I owe
this point to James Weinrich (personal communication) (Brecher and Brecher
1986; Irvine 1990a, b).
43. This is a necessary feature of doing molecular linkage studies (for any
multifactorial trait) because the power of resolution is so low. (See Larder and
Scherk 1994.) If the trait is not narrowed enormously, it is impossible to find
statistically significant association. But narrowing the trait makes it inappropriate
to generalize a finding to the general population (Pattatucci 1998).
44. For the grid model, see Klein 1990. For one version of an orthogonal
model, see Weinrich 1987.
45. Chung and Katayama 1996.
In the most important recent survey of human sexual practices in the
United States, Edward O. Laumann, John H. Gagnon, Robert T. Michael, and
Stuart Michaels categorized their results along three axes: same-sex sexual
behavior, desire, and identity (Laumann, Gagnow, et al. 1994). For example,
Laumann and colleagues found that 59 percent of women with at least some
homosexual interest expressed same-sex desire but no other behaviors, and
15 percent reported that they had same-sex desire, behaviors, and self-identity
as lesbian. Thirteen percent reported same-sex behaviors (sexual interactions)
but without strong homosexual desire and without identifying as lesbian.
Although the precise distributions for men differed, the same general
conclusion held. There is a ‘‘high degree of variability in the way that differing
elements of homosexuality are distributed in the population. This variability
relates to the way that homosexuality is organized as a set of behaviors and
practices and experience subjectively, and it raises provocative questions
about the definition of homosexuality’’ (Laumann Gagnow et al. 1994,p.300).
The sample size for these studies was 3,432, age range 18 to 59. There were
discrepancies in the data, which the authors note and discuss. Among them: