Introduction
to Sociology: Sexuality
We shall examine two approaches to understanding sexuality, and suggest
how sexuality and homosexuality are socially constructed and regulated.
Why study sexuality?
Sexuality is a significant political and public issue as well as a
private concern; e.g., gay marriages and gay bishops. Furthermore, sexuality
provides certain groups with political authority and social legitimacy; e.g.,
Talibans, the New Conservative Right and the Catholic Church.
‘Sex’ refers to biological differences between being male and being
female – genetic and physiological make-up. ‘Sexuality’ refers to one’s sexual
desires and participation in sex acts. This is understood as a cultural
process.
There are two key approaches to sexuality.
a) Social Constructionism
- Jeffrey Weeks
Sexuality is socially constructed: sexuality (i.e., promiscuity,
homosexuality, flirting, polygamy, sexual attractiveness and sexual
explicitness in the media) is expressed and organised in a variety of ways
across different societies, classes, gender and ethnicities.
Social constructionists ask the following questions:
- why and how does our culture privilege one form of sexuality (say
heterosexuality) and marginalise others?
- why does our culture attach such importance to sexuality and how has
this come about?
The issue is not solely about how individuals acquire particular sexual
meanings, or about what causes heterosexuality/homosexuality in individuals.
Instead, social constructionists recognise that social context (culture and
history) affects how we express and organise sexuality.
b) Essentialism
This viewpoint explains basic elements of sexuality by references to
biology or natural instinct. There is supposedly an inner truth or essence.
Sexuality is explained by psychic drive and impulse. It is fixed and
unchanging.
Essentialists suggest that there is normal sexuality and deviant sexes.
Because
sexuality is expressed in diverse ways, it is seen as something that is
socially constructed; i.e., society organises and regulates sexuality in a
variety of ways.
There are
several important ways in which individuals become ‘sexualised’:
a)
kinship/family system
- social
rules about marriage and incest;
e.g.,
incest taboos and marriages between cousins in Middle Eastern countries and
during the Medieval times in Western Europe.
b)
economic and social changes
-
industrialisation and urbanisation affect sexual behaviour and attitudes;
e.g.,
courting in cities has a different pattern than in rural communities; household
formation and patterns changed during the economic growth of industrialised
societies; and blind dates and marriage agencies in contemporary period.
c) social
regulation
- control,
surveillance and policing shifted from the Church to medical and social
workers, psychiatrists and the welfare state;
e.g.,
medical warnings about risk of AIDS/STDs of uncontrolled sex; drugs to
‘normalise’ sexual behaviour; film and advertisement censorship; and Child
Support Agency and child benefits.
d)
political interventions
-
interventions in sexual life reflect current balance of social and political
forces;
e.g.,
1960s – liberalism and sexual permissiveness
1980s – the New Right, sexual
conservatism and moral decline
e)
identities and cultures of resistance
- a
history of opposition and resistance to moral codes; i.e., social struggle and
activism, not imposed sexual identities upon minority groups;
e.g., male
homosexual sub-cultures during the Medieval period, gay rights movements such
as Stonewall (campaigned to repeal Clause 28 Local Government Act 1988 and to
change the age of consent from 21 to 18).
- minority
cultures resist attempts to suppress their sexual behaviour, and try to assert
their separate identities as a source of pride, accompanied by a claim to be
treated as ‘different but equal’;
e.g., gay
bars, gay villages, modes of clothes, gay parades and norms of behaviour.
In modern
society there is ‘compulsory heterosexuality’; a variety of ways in which
society sanctions heterosexuality and discriminates against homosexuality
(heterosexism) through sexual harassment, gossips, jokes and media
representations. This manufactures ‘homophobia’, a fear of homosexuals.
Foucault
argues that during the C18th government introduced new ways of classifying
sexual behaviour as it sought to regulate sexual behaviour in urban centres and
to control population growth.
The
emergence of homosexuality as a deviant identity owes much to its emergence as
a label used by doctors and psychiatrists to classify what was regarded as a
deviant form of sexuality. However to see homosexual identities as simply as a
label imposed by others ignores the extent to which homosexuals themselves
react to this kind of labelling by asserting their separate identity as a
source of pride, accompanied by a claim to be treated as ‘different but equal’.
Homosexuals create subcultures to resist attempts to suppress their sexual
behaviour through gay bars and clubs, gay villages, modes of clothes and norms
of behaviour and gay parades.