Starting with experience

pp. 13-30

in: William Wilkerson, Ambiguity and sexuality, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007

Abstract

My account of sexual identity as emerging fusion begins with experience. Experience is both a very important and a very general term in philosophy that names our subjective living through of some event. Many think that all or most of our knowledge of the world originates in experience. This might seem so obvious as to require no proof; if it is raining outside I know this because I can go outside and get wet. I do not learn such a fact from any source more spectacular than my own living through an experience of rain. Similarly, if I am homosexual, it will be thought that I know this because I can experience my own same-sex desire.