The Mythology of Transgression: Homosexuality as Metaphor

By Jamake Highwater

Book Overview

Jamake Highwater is a master storyteller and one of our most visionary writers, hailed as "an eloquent bard, whose words are fire and glory" (Studs Terkel) and "a writer of exceptional vision and power" (Ana s Nin). Author of more than thirty volumes of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, Highwater--considered by many to be the intellectual heir of Joseph Campbell--has long been intrigued by how our mythological legacies have served as a foundation of modern civilization. Now, in The Mythology of Transgression, he uses his remarkable narrative powers to offer a personal and extraordinarily far-ranging examination of how people who stand outside of society--by dint of their sexual orientation, physical appearance, ideas, artistic inclinations, or ethnic heritage--often achieve lasting, even profound influence upon the culture at large.
Drawing from a stunningly rich variety of sources ranging from the arts and literature to biology, physics, psychology, and anthropology, Highwater looks at his own outsider status--as a gay man, an artist, and an orphaned Native American--in an attempt to explore how mythologies from ancient times to the present have shaped the ways we think about social "abnormality" and alienation. Throughout, he points to a paradox at the center of Western values--the competing notions that the outsider is at once sinful and wise, that in everyday life the transgressor is ostracized, while in our most durable folklore and religious legends, heroes must break the rules to achieve greatness. Focusing in particular on homosexuality as a modern metaphor of transgression, Highwater brilliantly mixes personal anecdotes with wide ranging research, leading us on a tour through the history of social conformity and rejection, citing examples that span from Judeo-Christian-Islamic doctrines of good and evil, to the Navajo Nation's ambivalence toward the nature of sexuality, to Carson McCullers's treatment of physical deformity in the novella Member of the Wedding, to Descartes's theories of dualism. He also pays special attention to the debates currently raging in science regarding the biology of homosexuality and provides an engaging discussion of why we are motivated to seek a genetic basis of sexual orientation in the first place.
Jamake Highwater has long been celebrated as a writer uniquely suited to give voice to the social outsider. Often provocative, always fascinating, The Mythology of Transgression is a tour de force of eloquent scholarship, a book that will prompt discussion and debate on the subject for years to come.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195101804
• ISBN13: 9780195101805
• Release Date: January 1997
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

A BOOK THAT SPEAKS TO EVERYONE

Mr. Highwater's encyclopedia knowledge, his original and completely convincing analogies, and his fleet, transparent musical prose make a book that both creates an extraordinary world of its own and also - brilliantly, unforgettably - illuminates the world in which we live. The book speaks to everyone - gay, straight, other - looking for a new way to synthesize the religious, political, aesthetic, and physcological legacies that make up who we are.

AMAZON.COM'S CRITIC GOT IT RIGHT: A REMARKABLE BOOK

There are so many biased books for and against outsiders in general and homosexuals in particular that it is extremely agreeable to find a book that has both scope, poetry, and a remarkable vision of the worldwide community, past and present. Highwater takes on homosexuality as the most vivid metaphor of the outsider and in the process provides a rather spectacular view of the Western world from THE OUTSIDE!! The scholarship is remarkable. The language is as fluent as a novel. The ideas stimulating and eye-opening. Altogether, a most intriguing, not-to-be-missed book.