Sexuality and Society

An Introduction

Gargi Bhattacharyya

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415229036
• eBook ISBN: 9781134584390
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this broad-ranging introduction to the study of sexuality, Gargi Bhattacharyya guides students through the key theoretical debates in the area from the early history of sexology, through Foucault's technologies of self to Judith Butler on the performance of identity. Bhattacharyya shows how these theoretical positions apply to sexuality as it is experienced in contemporary society, and covers key topics such as: * the ideology of heterosexuality
* sex and the state
* sex, race and 'the exotic'
* age and sexuality
* sex education and pornography.The book argues that the study of sexuality is an essential part of broader debates on gender, race, citizenship and community. Topical and original, it provides a systematic overview of theory combined with up-to-the minute discussion of social and race issues. It gives students a lucid map of the terrain, and an exciting starting point for their own investigations.

1 Heterosexuality

Position of the chapter – normativity

Position one is the coupling that seeks acceptance more than pleasure. Made legitimate through recourse to such forces as biological imperatives, the need to propagate the species, the sanction of religion, the stability of society and the growth of the economy, this position appears to offer lovers no personal pleasures at all. Instead, sexuality is handed over to the higher pursuits of social ordering and lovers are rewarded by the affirmation that they are good citizens. The over-riding wish to conform to a norm, albeit one that is rarely specified, leaves lovers afraid of unexpected sexual pleasure. If some activity yields a surprise frisson, there is always the danger that it casts lovers outside the protected circle of the norm. If normative coupling becomes too enthusiastic or adventurous, perhaps it stretches the limits of respectable normativity too far?

This chapter examines the history and formation of that most invisible of sexual identities and practices, heterosexuality. Here it is argued that heterosexuality is subject to the same shifts and changes as other social phenomena. Despite our deep cultural investment in the idea that this expression of sexuality is natural, an inevitable outcome of biological imperatives to reproduce, I seek to reveal the variable and ultimately unknowable character of the so-called heterosexual norm. The chapter reviews debates about the uneven benefits of heterosexual living for men and women and ends with the suggestion that a new heterosexuality may be emerging from the social upheavals of our time (for more on the study of heterosexuality, see Rich 1980; Wittig 1992; Segal 1994; Richardson 1996; Jackson 1999).

The Kama Sutra limits its attention to the coupling of men and women, or men and eunuchs, or groups of men with one woman, or groups of women with one man. Although the focus is upon pleasure, not reproduction, the logic of heterosexuality bubbles up through every crevice of the text. This is the heterosexuality that assumes male sexual pleasure as its centre – it is the education of the citizen, coded male, that orders this work. This central role is determined by social power, as always – so other less powerful men can appear as side characters, another option among the sexual servicers of citizens.

In fact, there is an account of other practices, including practices between women that have no anchor of male citizenship (see Danielou 1994: 168–96). But overall the sexual theatre of the Kama Sutra assumes that sexual interactions are characterised by an imbalance of power – the interaction between male citizens and women of various orders is never between equals. Each party has its own role and capacities. It is this depiction of sex centring on a relatively privileged male subject, with little mobility in sexual roles, that allows the work to become translated as a celebration of heterosexual primacy, albeit through the illicit pleasures of experimentation. Despite this, I want to use the work to begin with a critique of heterosexuality as a hegemonic structure – not least because hegemony steals away the best pleasures of sex. I am using the idea of hegemony here as a way of describing a structure of cultural domination that seeps into everyday life and somehow gains the participation of those who are constrained and dominated.

The Kama Sutra presents sexual pleasure as a project requiring diligence and study. Although social roles appear static within the work, sex itself is never given or natural. There is no suggestion that the citizen can relax and let nature take its course, because sexual pleasure must be learned as one component in a total education. Therefore, while, on the one hand, there is an assumption of unchangeable hierarchy, on the other, there is no sexual role that is not the product of intensive cultural work.

What is heterosexuality?

Before we go any further, let us return to the question of what heterosexuality is. Let us begin with the kind of sex that parades itself as natural, inevitable and the fallback for all other sexual experience. Heterosexuality occupies the role of unmarked norm in much contemporary sexual culture – this is the sex that just is, that needs no explanation, that everyone knows about, has access to and can do without learning. This is the primal scene of sex – with one man and one woman, drawn together by their instinctual need to reproduce, unhampered by the confusions of culture or social expectation because the penis finds the vagina of its own accord, as its biological destiny. Perhaps even more than other cultures of dominance, heterosexuality can appear to be beyond critique – after all, are not all human cultures heterosexual? Is there not a point at which biological imperatives constrain cultural diversity and innovation? Heterosexuality seems to be buoyed up by nature and the absolute bottom-line need to reproduce – because without reproduction we will die out. Sex for pleasure, of any variety, can hardly compete with this instrumental requirement. Even liberal and tolerant accounts tend to posit heterosexuality as the unavoidable norm against which all else is judged.

Against this, I want to argue that heterosexuality itself is a term with a history. Although human reproduction has taken place across all eras of human history – which is not the same as saying that everyone has taken part in these processes of reproduction – the particular entity ‘heterosexuality’ is a historically discrete affair. Despite the extreme pressures to regard heterosexuality as normative, beyond history, in fact, heterosexual activity has been as historically variable as other forms of sexual connection (see Stone 1990; White 1993; Adams 1997).

The great difference between past heterosexualities and past homosexualities is that, more often than not, heterosexual relationships were both statistically and culturally normative. One of the problems with normativity is that it may seem to be unproblematic, unconstructed and, indeed, ‘natural’. One does not have to enquire very far, however, to discover an enormous variety of heterosexual identities and heterosexual ‘normativities’ in the past. Here are three examples:

1. Within living memory the socially expected age of marriage has risen by about five years in the US (from 19–21 for women in the early 1950s to 25–27 in the 1990s). What was normal in 1950 would now be scandalous.
2. In numerous societies polygamy is a social norm, even if not statistically frequent (e.g. Old Testament Israelite society, various Islamic societies, traditional Chinese societies, some African societies). In others monogamy is given a unique moral validation.
3. In many pre-industrial societies the age of commencement of sexual activity was close to the age of sexual maturity. Industrial societies, while continuing to endorse a mythology of the ‘normal’, have tended to delay the onset of permitted sexual activity (Halsall 2001).
   
   

These suggestions come from a proposal to teach the history of heterosexuality – as an antidote to the forgetfulness of celebrations of heterosexual life as the one, true, constant choice for the righteous. The course proposal acknowledges that heterosexual liaisons have been more public and (probably) more numerous throughout recorded history. There is no suggestion here that same-sex liaisons occupied an interchangeable role with heterosexual ones at any point, so the point is not to remember the lost idyll of homosexual normativity. Instead, the proposal seeks to uncover the significant variation in even explicitly normative heterosexual cultures across time – because even such cornerstones of respectable straight culture as monogamy and the absolute boundary between childhood and married adulthood are not universal (Aries 1962; Smith and Smith 1974; Walvin 1982).

The wider suggestion that heterosexuals are, like everyone else, a people with a history places heterosexuality in more general debates about the history of sexuality. Central to this assertion is the idea that an act or series of acts is reified into this entity, sexuality, only at a certain moment. In part, this is an argument that says that sexuality can only function as a naming term within a historical context. If, after Foucault, everyone believes that the homosexual came into existence in 1892 – shifting a series of acts and crimes and sins into a named persona for vilification – then a similar pattern of identification must occur for the more privileged identity of heterosexual:

[I]f homosexuality didn’t exist before 1892, heterosexuality couldn’t have existed either (it came into being, in fact, like Eve from Adam’s rib, eight years later), and without heterosexuality, where would all of us be right now?

(Halperin 1990: 17)

This naming is strictly relational – hetero makes sense only in relation to its other, homo. Unlike other forms of sexual naming – size queen, romance addict – hetero and homo encompass the range of human behaviour. Bisexuality proves the adaptability of human beings, but does not upset the logic of sex being either this or that, opposite or same. Definitions take place between these two poles:

How is it possible that until the year 1900 there was not a precise, value-free, scientific term available to speakers of the English language for designating what we would now regard, in retrospect, as the mode of behaviour favored by the vast majority of people in our culture?

(Halperin 1990: 18)

If heterosexuality is so normal that it is inevitable, how can it have remained unnamed until the twentieth century? Hidden in Halperin’s question is the suggestion that, whatever permutations of male and female sexual interaction took place before this naming, it was not heterosexuality as we understand it. The names homosexual and heterosexual signal the advent of a certain consciousness of sexual choice as identity. Now acts can become identities – but also, sexual habits become socially meaningful in a different way. What you do with your body and in relation to other bodies comes to mean something far more about you, something that could seep into other arenas of your life. The larger point is that sexuality is itself a historical entity, not an inevitable aspect of self in all times, but a historically specific articulation of self that emerges at a certain moment. Heterosexuality appears as the organising term against which pathologised sexual choices can be measured.

What determines the emergence of (hetero)sexuality?

If heterosexuality comes into being only at a particular historical conjuncture, then the moment of emergence may offer some clues as to what is significant and socially necessary about naming sexuality. Sexuality can only become a conspicuous domain apart in relation to other arenas of living. The appearance of sexuality is an indication of a wider reworking of spheres of human activity and their respective power and meaning. Although human bodies evoke sensations of pleasure and discomfort in relation to physical stimuli, the particular organisation of getting sexualised pleasure alters across historical moments and societies. Perhaps even our interpretation of physical pleasure alters through social factors – so that I learn to enjoy the intrusion of kissing because it indicates affection and a promise of impending intimacy. These gestures assume meaning within the larger context of social meanings and relations – in part intimacy is recognisable because it is distinct from other more formal interactions. When searching for the place and meaning of sexuality, there must be an understanding of the interdependence of different spheres of being, one nodal point in a network, rather than a discrete object of scrutiny. Once we place sexual relations in a bundle with other social relations and argue that there is a connection between these disparate areas of human existence, perhaps even a connection in which one set of relations determines another, sexuality comes into the arena of the economic.

Of course, in some ways this is the most familiar account of heterosexuality in the book. When Friedrich Engels wrote The Origin of the Family as part of the larger project of understanding the workings of private property and class formation, his attempts to explain the role of the family and patriarchy in the formation of capitalist relations are describing the instrumentality of a certain model of sexual relations. Engels describes family relations that grow around the need to protect and maintain household property, with the unequal relations between men and women giving shape to the class tensions that characterise societies based on private property. This is heterosexuality motored by power, control and the wish for free labour, not romance, desire or physical longing. It is still, however, an account of heterosexual living.

In the end, this account of the instrumental outcomes of heteronormativity excises desire altogether. By heteronormativity I mean the extensive and far-reaching ideological system that seeks to impose a public contract of heterosexual compliance as the only way of living and being – precisely the culture of dominance that forgets sex in favour of social privilege. Despite all the privilege, the implication that heterosexual relations perform a function for wider society and wealth production before performing any more immediate purpose for participants seems to empty sex out of the equation. Later chapters will consider the puzzling relation between sexuality and the more pragmatic goals of social organisation, including economic wealth. For now, our focus is on the variation in heterosexual living across time. If the detail of heterosexual living is made by the imperatives and habits of particular moments, we already accept that even the unassailable naturalness of heterosexual relations must alter over time. It is only a small leap to admit that the heterosexuality that is made unthinkingly and inevitably by the imperatives of biology is, in fact, not one thing at all. Instead, there are all too many different ways that girls can be with boys – and most of the time reproduction plays only a side role in these manoeuvres.

The trick of appearing natural relies heavily on the comparative lack of documentation about the detail of sexual contact – for anyone, but perhaps most of all for straights. Whatever the strategic silences and erosions of the history-writing of the dominant, the various sexual practices of the demonised, vilified and persecuted have tended to be identified for scrutiny and punishment (see Moran 1996). This process has often led to record-keeping of prurient detail – and although there must be large elements of titillated fantasy, there is also some recognition of the variety of human possibility. The everyday practices of the most normalised and mundane forms of living, on the other hand, leave few historical traces. Although every document of power reveals the hegemony of the norm, the lived texture of improvisation and surprise that must characterise any intimate life is rarely part of the document. Without this detail of everyday variation, heterosexual life is reduced to the core components of normative myth – formalised romance as a route to marriage, procreation as a socially necessary outcome, lifetime monogamy as the domestic building block of social stability. So little is said about the sex itself – in terms of acts, feelings, meanings or anything – a reader could be forgiven for believing that, until very recently, the life of a respectable heterosexual contained no sex at all.

This is a central paradox of heteronormativity – that the presentation of the most natural, desirable and inevitable of sexual choices is characterised by a conspicuous desexualisation. While the vilification of minority sexual choices focuses on sexual practice, so that these monstrous people are depicted as dirty, sleazy, excessive and very very sexual, straights are just straight. For all the public celebration of heterosexual living that characterises Western societies, the excessive publicity given to heterosexual life-choices empties them of sex itself. We see the battles and negotiations between men and women, but so little of desire and pleasurable practice. As a lifestyle choice, heterosexuality appears to offer few pleasures, only the security of social privilege (for more on the benefits of heterosexual recognition, see http://www.stonewall.org.uk).

The key question remains – when does reproductive sex become an identity or lifestyle? Although the account of the historicity of heterosexuality describes the emergence of sexual names as identities, the parallel account of how individuals assume these names is missing. Lesbian and gay history has used the suggestion of discursive emergence in order to analyse the growing self-consciousness of this new breed, the homosexual. The category name may appear as a result of the discursive machinery of power, but the name itself offers new possibilities to men who have sex with men – there is undoubted persecution, but there is also an increasing awareness of the identity of this name. There is no comparative document of the increasing self-awareness of heterosexuals – and, therefore, no account of the sense that heterosexuality may become an active choice, a lifetime’s quest, a tormenting secret or the driving motor behind the narrative of living. In part, these questions may be answered by considering the role of sex before sexuality – why does activity start to matter to wider social relations? What are the cultural habits that make up the lived identity of heterosexuals?

There is an assumption that as the norm, heterosexuality is completely familiar and knowable – without mystery or glamour. Yet het life remains as uncharted as other sexual existence, staged as family romance but not known as sexual diversity or sexual anything. This is one of the core ironies of heterosexual...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Heterosexuality
• 2. History
• 3. State and Economy
• 4. Fragments of Identities
• 5. The Exotic
• 6. Representing Sexuality
• 7. Spaces of Sexuality
• 8. All Sexed Out: The Last Lesson
• Bibliography