The Science/Fiction of Sex

Feminist Deconstruction and the Vocabularies of Heterosex

Annie Potts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317724452
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

What can we learn from exploring the differences in male and female orgasmic experience? Is the penis an entity with a mind of its own? These issues and others, such as the popular portrayals of male sexuality as active and outwardly focused and female sexuality as passive and internally located, are discussed in The Science/Fiction of Sex. Contemporary feminist and poststructuralist theories of sex and gender are explored alongside an investigation of how people make sense of such concepts as heterosexuality, orgasm, sexual dysfunction, femininity and masculinity, and safer sex practice.
Potts asks men and women about their actual experiences of heterosex. This interview material, combined with excerpts from sexological and medical texts and features from film and television, draws attention to the ways in which western cultural constructs influence our ideas and experiences of the body, sex, and gender. Potts also uses deconstructive theory as a textual tool, concentrating on how binary oppositions such as inside/outside and mind/body impact on our understandings of heterosex, and affect the power relations between women and men. She also examines how the radical postmodern theories of the body and sexuality proposed by Irigaray, Lyotard, and Deleuze and Guattari disrupt such dualistic modes of understanding and experiencing sexualized bodies. The Science/Fiction of Sex will be of interest to those studying women and psychology as well as gender studies, cultural studies, feminist studies, sociology, philosophy, public health and education.

Part 1

THE SCIENCE/FICTION OF SEX

1

SEXUAL SCIENCE FICTION

Nowhere, perhaps, do the interests of fiction and those of science meet and mingle more intimately than in that body of knowledge we have come to call ‘sexuality’. As a central preoccupation of contemporary ‘western’ societies, sexuality produces and is produced by a multitude of vocabularies — from those of popular romance to those of medicine — with sometimes competing, and sometimes complicit, claims to authority and truth.

This book begins by tracing the emergence of one particular discursive field which aims to uncover the ‘facts’ about human sexual behaviour: sexology. As a profession, sexology has several sub-disciplines or branches: one, for example, is orthodox scientific sexology, which claims to conduct sex research with the ‘detached neutrality’ befitting an empiricist discipline; another branch is humanistic sexology which emerged during the 1960s, and places emphasis on the achievement of sexual liberation and self-actualization (Irvine, 1990). The more radical inflections of sexology, influenced by lesbian, gay, queer, postmodern, and feminist perspectives also exist. At times, these various sub-disciplines oppose each other, and at times their views overlap. In this chapter I concentrate on more orthodox scientific sexology, as a particularly powerful branch of sexology, which, through its affiliation with science and biomedical understandings of the body and sexuality, has perhaps the most authority or influence over what counts — what gets recognized and legitimized — as ‘healthy’ and ‘normal’ sex (and unless indicating otherwise, this will be the branch of sexology primarily referred to throughout the book). Through its explicit links to a strictly scientific or biomedical paradigm, this branch of sexology claims to know the origins of normal and abnormal, healthy and unhealthy sexuality, and develop appropriate treatments or ‘cures’ for those who may stray from the norm.

In this first chapter, I investigate the emergence of sexology as a scientific discipline, and its concurrent medicalization, arguing that the objectivity espoused by scientific sexology cannot be taken for granted. Foucauldian theory is employed to examine the key vocabularies produced by sexologists to account for human sexuality. I focus on the ways in which sexological discourse genders sexual desire and behaviours, forms individuals’ ‘sexualities’, and institutes categories of normal/abnormal, functional/dysfunctional, natural/unnatural, and healthy/unhealthy practices. This chapter also traces the influence established and maintained by sexology, as a highly privileged discursive mode, over current representations of ‘safer sex’.¹ In particular, I am interested in exploring the gendered politics of this relation, and evaluating the dangers it poses for women.

THE DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF SEX

Foucault and ‘sexual constructionism’

For French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1978) sexuality is constructed in discourse. And ‘discourse’, in Foucauldian theory, involves a relationship between knowledge — expressed as a certain type of language — and power (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982). ‘Discourses’ are “ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations which inhere in such knowledges and the relations between them” (Weedon, 1987: 108). Foucauldian analysis will therefore often examine how a given discourse emerges from, and functions within, a particular institution: the clinic, the prison, the family, the state. In each of these contexts, the discourse constitutes a series of rules about what can or cannot be said, regulating the use of language according to the accepted norms of that field (Foucault, 1978).

Within a particular discursive field (for example: law, family, sexuality) there may be numerous competing ways of “giving meaning to the world” (Gavey, 1989: 464); these multiple discourses cohere or contradict as they constitute meaning. Dominant discourses are those which are more powerful within a society; they have firm institutional bases, and are so ubiquitous that they appear to be natural, universal, inevitable: simply ‘common sense’ (Belsey, 1980; Weedon, 1987). For example, biomedical or scientific discourse enjoys a highly privileged status in contemporary western society (Oudshoorn, 1994); by producing knowledge as empirically proven ‘fact’, it constitutes one of the pre-eminent means by which people come to make sense of themselves and the world.

However, poststructuralist theory attacks the essentialist tenets of the scientific paradigm, disputing the notion of any pre-social truth waiting to be uncovered through rigorous scientific method. For Foucault, language is not transparent, reflecting any actual reality. It is not possible to gain ‘pure insight’ into a given field of knowledge — for instance, ‘sexuality’ — because any “perception is always structured by existing discursive arguments” (Crowley and Himmelweit, 1992: 237). If “sex has no essential nature” (Weedon, 1987: 119), then sexual ‘meanings’ cannot be thought of as neutral or objective; rather they harbour important relations of power (Weeks, 1985). Discourses of the sexual can thus be seen as playing a crucial role in the social control and regulation of populations (Pringle, 1992).

In regulating our perceptions of the world, discourses also construct our perception of our ‘selves’: our bodies and our ‘subjectivities’. Different discourses thus offer competing possibilities for forming personal identity. And according to Foucault, there cannot be any access to a ‘natural’ body, to a fundamentally stable, essential physical being, which exists prior to or apart from cultural and social practices (Bordo, 1988). Subjects, then, are governed through the deployment of the body within sexual discourses, which “constitute the ‘nature’ of the body, unconscious and conscious mind and emotional life of the subjects they seek to govern” (Weedon, 1987: 108).

Foucault elucidates the process whereby contemporary sexuality has come to represent the key to self-awareness and human liberation. His main concern is therefore with “the very processes of subjectification by which we today can claim to know ourselves by knowing our sex” (Weeks, 1985: 176). Critical theorist Stephen Heath (1982) writes:

Sexology gives itself as its object and proclaims itself as the very basis of human being, of who we really are. It is our duty to open up and be a sexual story, to confess and overcome … showing our true humanity and entering thereby the sexological kingdom of heaven, the happy family of confirmed individuals.

(Heath, 1982: 77–78)

Indeed, the notion of ‘sexuality’ as a personal, innate characteristic of an individual, rather than a group of “acts or eroticized bodies” is a recent phenomenon; the word ‘sexuality’ first appeared in the Oxford Dictionary in 1800 (Vicinus, 1982: 135). Havelock Ellis (1934: 3) epitomized this emergent emphasis when he suggested: “Sex penetrates the whole person; a man's [sic] sexual constitution is a part of his general constitution. There is considerable truth in the dictum: ‘A man is what his sex is’.”

This biological essentialist conceptualization of sex can be contrasted with Foucault's (1978: 155) version: “On the contrary, sex is the most speculative, most ideal, and most internal element in a deployment of sexuality organized by power in its grip on bodies and their materiality, their forces, energies, sensations, and pleasures” (see also Weeks, 1985).

Technologies of sex(uality)

Foucault (1978) also suggests that the so-called ‘sexual revolution’ of the mid to late twentieth century has produced a ‘confessional’ mode governing the representation of sex, according to which the subject is now able to express her or his ‘true’ self through talking about sex; this ‘revolution’ relies upon the assumption of a prior repression of sexuality, from which subjects must now be liberated. Foucault, however, refutes what he terms the traditional ‘repressive hypothesis’: the notion that sex and sexual matters were restricted during the nineteenth century, and subsequently liberated in the late twentieth century. He contends that power, rather than denying sexual expression, has on the contrary, operated by producing and proliferating the various forms that modern sexuality takes (Sawicki, 1988); that is, our ways of understanding and taking up sexual practices.

For Foucault, power is conceptualized as an unstable and dispersed phenomenon, rather than a “unitary force” centrally located in one place and operating through repression and denial (Gavey, 1992: 327). He draws attention to the move away from traditional ‘sovereign’ forms of power — asserting that there is no “binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and the ruled at the root of power relations” — towards what he terms ‘disciplinary power’ (Foucault, 1978: 94). Disciplinary power is regulative. It is “productive and constitutive — it produces meanings, desires, behaviours, practices [and] is exercised through its invisibility” (Gavey, 1992: 327, italics in original). Foucault (1978) also argues that power relies on the operation of ‘resistance’, or rather a plurality of resistances. In this sense, resistance derives from those inconsistencies or spaces occurring within discourses; such “gaps and silences … function as areas of tolerance” (Scott Melton, 1992: 83), and are the sites of potential challenge or disruption to the status quo.

Foucault's history of sexuality offers a way of understanding not only how our ‘truths’ regarding sex are produced in discourse, but how these truths are intimately connected with manifestations of power. Following Foucault, Gavey (1992: 329) uses the term ‘social technologies’ to describe the various knowledges and practices that develop, construct, and reproduce “experiences and meanings of our personal and social worlds”. How we make sense of ‘sexuality’ is therefore contingent on those discourses available to us through these ‘technologies of sexuality’ (Bijlmer, 1993): the media and advertising, popular novels and magazines, television talk shows, sex manuals and sex therapy, pornography, and feminism (see also Gamson, 1998). An individual's sexual subjectivity is dependent on her or his position within one, or a number, of the discursive fields of sexuality.

The importance of sexology as a particularly influential ‘technology of sexuality’ derives from its connection with the dominant discourses of science and medicine; the privileging of these disciplinary modes within western culture in general enhances the likelihood that the majority of people will be constructed as ‘sexual’ subjects within sexological and sexologically related discourses. In addition, the assumptions of sexology — that sex is a ‘natural’ act, for example — permeate other media such as magazines, novels, and movies, ensuring that the majority of women and men come to understand ‘their’ sexuality according to this discursive paradigm.

Questions of how, and to what extent, such discourses of the sexual mould the representation of gender, sexuality, and subjectivity itself gained a new urgency since the 1980s, with the emergence of HIV. In particular, recent surveys showing the increasing rates of HIV and sexually transmitted infections among women in western cultures suggest the need for a more thorough examination of the discursive means by which both female and male (hetero)sexuality continue to be produced and regulated (see, for example, Dickson and Paul, 1996; Gavey and McPhillips, 1997; Vernazza et al., 1999).

In this connection, it is possible to identify a number of discursive paradigms that have characterized sexology since its inception, and that continue to influence sexual subjectivities and behaviours in spite of — or sometimes in conjunction with — the attempts by safer sex campaigns to reform sexual practices. The following section presents a review of the historical emergence of the more influential sexological vocabularies, and their impact on the (re)production of gendered bodies and ‘sexual meanings’.

THE GENESIS OF SEXOLOGY

The ancient sexologists

Western knowledge about human sexuality prior to the nineteenth century has been attributed largely to the ancient Greeks. Bullough (1994) identifies the fourth-century BC philosopher Aristotle as the founder of sexology. Inspired by the androcentric cosmology of Plato (Tuana, 1993), Aristotle attempted to explain human reproduction arguing different roles for males and females — the male being more significant (“effective and active”) and the female being ‘passive’ — thus promoting, Bullough (1994: 12) argues, a “political connotation to ideas about sex and reproduction from which we have not yet fully escaped”. For Aristotle, the amount of heat generated by the body was the measure of a creature's “degree of perfection” (Tuana, 1993: 18). Women were perceived as being cooler than men, and therefore less perfect. Moreover, this ‘defective’ heat of women was associated with their ability to bear children (Tuana, 1993).

Other classical scholars reinforced the notion that a woman's overall state of health was inseparable from the condition of her reproductive organs. Plato popularized the belief of a ‘wandering (inactive) uterus’ that caused female hysteria in post-pubescent women who did not bear children (Bullough, 1994). Remedial advice for ‘hysteria’ included intercourse — male seminal fluids provided the necessary moisture for the dry uterus — and pregnancy (Tuana, 1993). Second-century physicians Galen and Soranus of Ephesus disputed the theory of a ‘wandering uterus’, but continued to endorse intercourse and pregnancy as the most effective solutions for physical and mental ailments in women (Tuana, 1993; Bullough, 1994).

Galen also alleged that women were physiologically inverted — and hence “less perfect” — men (Laqueur, 1990: 26). The reproductive organs of women were conceived by Galen as cascading “vertiginously back inside themselves, the vagina an eternally, precariously, unborn penis, the womb a stunted scrotum” (Laqueur, 1990: 28). Galen's representation of woman as an inverted man proved influential in the Renaissance as well, as did the notion that sexual acts primarily fulfilled a generative purpose in humans (Laqueur, 1990). In the sixteenth century, Vesalius, studying the reproductive anatomy of males and females, finally discredited the notion of a ‘wandering uterus’ (Bullough, 1994), while his contemporary Falloppio provided some of the first ‘details’ of the clitoris and the Fallopian tubes (Bullough, 1994). Nevertheless, anatomical depictions of female sexual organs continued to mirror, in reverse, those of men.

The quest to identify, and to determine the functions of, the various organs involved in human sexual reproduction may be viewed as the first representations of human sexuality within a ‘biomedical’ discourse (Oudshoorn, 1994). Unlike much of contemporary medical knowledge, however, which stresses the significance of essential biological (primarily ‘hormonal’) differences between women and men, biomedical discourse up until the mid-eighteenth century tended to perceive women's bodies as ‘fundamentally’ similar to men's — “not a different sex, but a lesser version of the male body” (Oudshoorn, 1994: 6).

Laqueur (1990) posits that the shift from what he terms the ‘one-sex’ model of human sexuality, to the ‘two-sex’ model, coincided with the growing socio-political unrest precipitating the French Revolution, a period in European history during which women and their supporters were championing for equality (Chalker, 1994), and there was a “loss of certainty that the social order could be grounded in the natural order” (E. Martin, 1992: 32). In an attempt to maintain the status quo, scientists of the time asserted that the disparate social roles of men and women were, in fact, justified according to the ‘natural’ bodily differences between the sexes (E. Martin, 1992). The premise that these categorical physical distinctions dictated the appropriate positions in society for men and women, succeeded the previous long-held hierarchical theory related to body heat (Moore and Clarke, 1995). As Laqueur (1990...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART ONE: THE SCIENCE/FICTION OF SEX
• 1 Sexual science fiction
• 2 War of the worlds
• PART TWO: THE VOCABULARIES OF HETEROSEX
• 3 The day the earth stood still
• 4 The man with two brains
• 5 The incredible shrinking man
• 6 Innerspace
• 7 The final frontier
• 8 Brave new worlds
• Parting comments, future sexes
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• References
• Index