24 - “Instead, this essay will offer some wider speculations about the character of neurological substrate revealed in LeVay’s data. The methodological and conceptual limitations of LeVay’s study are indispensable to these speculations, not because they constitute errors (that, presumably, another study could correct) but because these methodological and conceptual constraints twist the data in ways that reveal the texture of neurological structure.”
- “I am interested not so much in what LeVay’s data might be able to tell us about sexuality (for indeed LeVay presumes a somewhat conventional theory of gender-bound sexuality3 ), but rather the way in which the reticulation of neurology by a dimorphic sexuality provides an insight into the constitution of neurological material. “
25 - “I will recruit ‘reticulation’ as a way of elucidating the relation between dimorphic articulations (homo/hetero; large/small) on the one hand and the circuitry of neurological structures and the exceptionality of outlying data on the other, that occupies the center of any interpretation of LeVay’s 1991 study. Rather than argue that there is an interpretive choice (or a political imperative) to favor disseminated differences over dimorphic differences, I will suggest that these two kinds of neurological difference are in a reticulated relation—wherein dimorphic divisions are irreducibly, agonistically, generatively conjoined with networks of disseminating differences.4” 35 - “While LeVay’s data has facilitated a literature that reduces sexuality to binarized forms (Ellis and Ebertz, 1997), it also (accidentally, necessarily) opens sexuality into a broader field of material instantiation. We are thus enabled to think the neurology/sexuality interface more exhaustively—not as an insular coupling, but as a node in a reticulating physiological organization. It is clear enough that LeVay’s 1991 report seriously simplifies sexuality and does not provide data sufficiently robust to support the conclusions that LeVay draws there and in other contexts. It is also the case, however, that the data—generated through a conceptually awkward attempt to envisage the conjunction of neurology and sexuality—reveal a certain neurological complexity that LeVay has been able to register but not fully pursue.” Questions: This is another piece that I struggled to fully comprehend. The use of data and neurological terminology was hard for me to understand. The above citations helped me understand the core aspects of this article, however I still don’t understand everything that Wilson was trying to say. What was the neurological value of LeVay’s work and how does it benefit thinking about sexuality? How does this piece fit into the body of literature on gender and sexuality?