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Fragments When I examine my instances of awareness all I am aware of is those objects of which I am aware. I am not, in addition to this, aware of some extra thing or event which could be called an ' act' of awareness. Of course the objects of which I am visually aware exist for me in a different way from those objects of which I am auditorily aware. But this is not because they are attended or grapsed by a different ' act' of awareness, it is simply because they are different sort of objects: one is a visual object of awareness and one is an auditory object of awareness.
[T]he hand which allows me to feel the fluidlity of the water, the warmth of the air, or the texture of my other hand, is not a hand which enters into my perception of the world; it is my perception of the world. More precisely, it is my manual tactile perception of the world. Thus, from the first-person perspective my body is a maze of centres of perception which constitute my phenomenological point of view of the world.
It is as if the physical world were a pool and my body were a vortex in the middle of the pool. Because a vortex is literally a whole in the water, the existence of the vortex is logically dependent upon the existence of the water. The vortex is just a certain ordering or configuration of the water. Thus if I consider what my eyes are for my own vision, I see they are merely the place round which all lines of perspective diverge; they are the perspectival opposite of that point in the distance to which things converge; the vanishing point.
A study of sexuality whose conclusions support conservative moral or religious values is one that should be subjected to scrutiny. For the history of writings on sexuality is swarming with moral and religious influences that have little to do with scientific data.
One of the things that makes social constructionism appealing is that it seems to acknowledge the humanistic features of our existence by freeing us from biological constraints and placing us within the human world of culture. The problem here, however, is that in the same stroke that we are set free from biology we are also swept up into a prison of cultural controls. The advancement of the phenomenological theory is that it releases us from both forms of incarceration. In this view, sexual desire is neither created by our biology nor by cultural diktats. It is rather our own response to our human condition. We are still, of course, constrained to respond, but that is part of what it means to be human.
This is why Kessler's (1998, p. 132) obscure remark that there are other ways besides reference to the genitals "to 'do' male or female" makes no sense. For our experience of maleness and femaleness are inescapably tied to our experience of the genitals—and the existence of individuals whose hermaphroditic condition renders them neither male nor female does not change this. In other words, in the realm of gender the genitals reign supreme.
The problem, then, is that upon arriving at the verge of the fulfillment of his desire, the bearer of sexual despair, as he might be called, suddenly casts off the emerging Gestalt but nevertheless proceeds with the motions of penetration and sexual interaction. It is as if he had been led by a burning desire for a glass of water to cross a desert and then, upon at last holding the glass in his hands, was to pour out the water and go through the drinking motions with the empty glass. Such dealings are the actions of despair, for they pursue the fulfillment of a desire while at the same time refusing to allow its fulfillment to take place.
In this moment [of sexual interaction] I surrender myself to the formation of the Gestalt that arises before me, allowing myself to be swept up into its nearly unfathomable complexity. Here our genders seem to wrest themselves free as they pour into and diffuse throughout each other, transforming themselves into something beyond their mere individual expressions. For here my gender provides the basis that enables me to infiltrate and partake of hers, while her gender provides the basis that enables her to infiltrate and partake of mine. It is in this transformation that we have won each other. And it is in such a winning that sexual desire is at last fulfilled.
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