The pagentry of the French Rococo and subsequent responses to it, therefore, have played an essential role in the formation of modern and contemporary constructions of the Homosexual/Gay/Queer/Male. Textiles and sexuality are both informed by the conditions of habituated practice, wherein cultural artifacts and social interaction facilitate a meaningful history of use, through sensory experience located in the body rather than through visual perception alone. The inability of popular theories to account for the importance and influence shared by textile and sexuality-related technologies is, in part, due to the absence in these discourses of discussions that identify the complex of the tactile and its pre-visual location in the development of the human psyche. Because the driving force behind the industrialization of textile production rests with its ability to infinitely be mechanically reproduced, thus eliminating the role of "hand-work," textiles must be evaluated in the same history of development and cultural use that is attributed to related technologies.
The invisibility conferred by heterosexual orthodoxy, constructed as the coalescence of religious, judicial, social and economic sanctions, further problematizes these absences and incidents of erasure. Beliefs that once prohibited the development of what is now the unconditional Queer social demand for legal recognition and public acceptance have begun to deteriorate. That the homosexual in society is feared as an aberration of the social order, a perversion of humanity, an undeserving recipient of human rights, or an unnatural species in Nature, betrays an inherent resistance to reconciling an appreciation for what may be unconventional with the impulse to approach new technologies without succumbing to destructive ends. The pending approval of legislation that will regulate sexuality-specific human rights in many regions suggests a tremendous promise toward the reconstruction of certain histories, allowing new and changing expressions of sexuality to continue to emerge.
