Gender and Sexuality

Sociological Approaches

Momin Rahman,Stevi Jackson

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781509555253
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This new introduction to the sociology of gender and sexuality offers a fresh take on the importance of these concepts in modern society. It provides an insight into our rapidly changing attitudes towards sex and our understanding of masculine and feminine identities, relating the study of gender and sexuality to wider social concerns throughout the world and presenting a comprehensive yet readable summary of recent research and theory.

In an accessible and engaging style, the book demonstrates how thinking about gender and sexuality can illuminate and enliven other contemporary sociological debates about social structure, social change, and culture and identity politics. Emphasis is placed on the diversity of gendered and sexual lives in different parts of the world. The book offers detailed coverage of wide-ranging topics, from international sex-tourism to celebrity culture, from gender in the work-place to new sexual lifestyles, drawing examples from everyday life. By demonstrating the links between gender and sexuality this book makes a clear case for thinking sociologically about these important and controversial aspects of human identity and behaviour. The book will be of great value to students in any discipline looking to understand the roles gender and sexuality play in our lives.

Part I
The Development of Sociological Thought on Gender and Sexuality

The aim of this first part of the book is to introduce sociological approaches to sexuality and gender and to place them in historical context. Sexuality and gender are commonly thought of as natural and eternal qualities of human individuals – what we call naturalist or essentialist thinking. In Chapter 1, we discuss the main features of ‘essentialism’ and we show how these ideas became the focus of sociological critique. In Chapter 2, we move on to discussing how feminists and lesbian and gay theorists have contested essentialist thinking and developed analyses of gender as a social division and of sexuality as central to this division. We conclude with a brief overview of some challenges to concepts and theories of gender and sexuality raised by issues of race and nation, masculinity and the question of how we think about bodies.

Introduction: The Unfortunate President

Lawrence H. Summers resigned yesterday as president of Harvard University after a relatively brief and turbulent tenure of five years, nudged by Harvard’s governing corporation and facing a vote of no confidence from the influential Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

(The New York Times, 22 February 2006, Section A: 1)

In early 2005, President Summers delivered a conference speech in which he raised the question of whether inherent genetic or other biological traits were the reason that so few women made it to the top of the maths and science professions. The ensuing public arguments between Summers and his academic faculty made news across the world but particularly in the USA, where Harvard is the most verdant of the Ivy League universities, which make up the oldest and richest institutions in the American higher education system. It is instructive to consider this incident as a micro- example of the impact on contemporary societies of sociological thinking on gender and sexuality. That is not to say that the Harvard President eventually resigned only because of his stance on gender, since further reports during 2005 demonstrated that there were many aspects of his management style that were causing unrest amongst the staff. However, the remarks on gender did signal the beginning of making these issues public and, therefore, illustrate the importance of gender politics in contemporary culture. Summers made news precisely because he raised questions about the status of women and in particular their biological difference from men. In the early twenty- first century, such a position is newsworthy because it is controversial. Why is this the case?

In part the answer is because we live in societies in the West in which equality between the sexes is now a taken- for- granted aspect of how we should conduct our public life. We have social policies and laws that both protect individuals from discrimination and grant access to resources in terms of citizenship, rights and democracy. Women can now enter the same educational and employment sectors as men, and discrimination on the basis of sex – and increasingly on the basis of sexual identity – is regarded as unacceptable. We had a woman running for the Democratic Party’s nomination for Presidency of the United States in 2008 and for most of the primary season Hillary Clinton was the frontrunner. We already have women in positions of political and public office around the world [1], as well as significant advances in lesbian and gay rights such as partnership, marriage, parenting and anti- discrimination rights. Popular culture has reflected a shift in understandings of women’s status, and that of lesbians and gays, with successful television programmes such as Sex and the City, Will and Grace, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, numerous films which attest to women’s independence and, of course, successful women in both sport and entertainment (see Introduction to Part III). Indeed, if anything, the last few years has seen increasing concern about the problems of boys and men, often referred to as the crisis of masculinity in a post- feminist world [2].

Over the last thirty years or so, sociological analyses of gender have had a significant impact upon our political and popular culture, resulting in a shift in the understanding of the reasons for the differences and inequalities between men and women. Indeed, this point was made by many of the Harvard faculty who signed a letter of protest at their President’s comments, drawing attention to the extensive academic research establishing that the status of women is social rather than biological or natural. We begin an introduction to these analyses in the following chapters, concentrating on the ways in which essentialist or naturalist explanations of gender inequalities and related issues of sexual behaviour and identity have been challenged. It is this particular issue of naturalism that the unfortunate Harvard President fell foul of (although his subsequent career did not suffer given that he went on to become a senior economic adviser to President Obama). While he actually discussed a range of reasons for women’s limited progress within maths and science, including the lack of proper childcare facilities and the role of discrimination, he also invoked the notion of a biological basis to women’s lack of ambition and success, provoking a substantial number of his faculty to criticize him on the grounds that he was ignorant of – or had wilfully ignored – decades of research on the social reasons for gender inequalities [3].

The chapters in Part I cover the main points of these sociological analyses, providing both a chronological introduction and a conceptual one. We thus demonstrate how gender and sexuality emerged as topics of sociological investigation and the historical importance of feminist/lesbian/gay movements in this development. We explain and illustrate the meaning of essentialism throughout and show how this naturalist explanation of differences has been subject to sociological critiques. Our focus is mainly on Anglo- American societies, and this is driven by the historical emergence of women’s and sexual diversity movements, together with academic work, from within these societies. However, it is important to remember that gender and sexual inequalities are global phenomena, and are also structured by racial divisions both globally and within specific societies. We point out, however, that the significance of racial, ethnic and national differences for gender and sexuality has often been neglected and begin to explain how and why. Taken together with the overall Introduction to the book, Part I provides a basic- level introduction to the sociology of gender and sexuality.

1
The Trouble with ‘Nature’

1.1 ‘One is Not Born But Becomes a Woman’: Identifying ‘Essentialism’

This is one of the most famous statements in feminist theory, made by the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1972 [1949]). Beauvoir was a writer and philosopher and her early ideas about the reasons for inequalities between women and men influenced what came to be known as the second wave feminist movement that developed in the 1970s. Beauvoir made the crucial argument that it was culture – in the form of western civilization – that delimited what women could become, and that this culture dictated the subordination of women to men through their exclusion from power, education, work and public life in general. Although Beauvoir was not a sociologist, her assertion that women are not ‘born’ resonates with sociological analyses of gender precisely because it summarizes the fundamental rejection of biological definitions. Moreover, this rejection of biological explanations by second wave feminist thinkers was based on the development of alternative, largely sociological, explanations for gender inequalities in western societies. Before we discuss those ideas in detail, it is worth reflecting on the radical implications of such a statement on women.

Cultural values and beliefs around men and women were still dominated by biological explanations not only when Beauvoir was writing in the 1940s, but also during the 1970s when the second wave of widespread feminist activism developed. Differences relating to genitalia, child- bearing, physical strength and mental and emotional capacities were all variously used to justify the social position of women as inferior to men in general, and subordinate to male counterparts in workplaces, education, politics and cultural life, and within the home as wives, mothers and daughters. Attitudes to and the regulation of homosexuality were even more oppressive, with homosexual acts illegal in Britain until 1967, and remaining so in many states of the USA, Canada (until 1969) and globally. Homosexuality was regarded as morally and psychologically deviant and above all as ‘unnatural’. These values and beliefs were apparent in individual attitudes and were also reflected in laws, in social policies such as those on education, health and welfare, in politics and in everyday life. In short, the whole realm of the social, from social structures and culture to identities and everyday activities, was dominated by biological explanation of the differences and inequalities between men and women, homosexuals and heterosexuals. Indeed, the term ‘gender’ did not even exist as common cultural currency, with the biological term ‘sex’ used to contain and signify men and women (hence Beauvoir’s characterization of women as the second ‘sex’).

This understanding of both the ‘natural’ division between men and women and the ‘unnatural’ deviance of homosexuals had become culturally dominant across the western world during the era of industrialization and urbanization, from around the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. For example, take this best- selling marriage manual advising men about sex with their wives:

Woman is a harp who only yields her secrets of melody to the master who knows how to handle her … what both man and woman, driven by obscure primitive urges, wish to feel in the sexual act, is the essential force of maleness, which expresses itself in a sort of violent and absolute possession of the woman. And so both of them can and do exult in a certain degree male aggression and dominance – whether actual or apparent – which proclaims this essential force. (T.H. Van de Velde, Ideal Marriage, 1930, quoted in Jackson, 1989: 62)

It is clear that the woman is regarded as completely passive when it comes to sex, and that she is seen as ‘naturally’ unknowing until stimulated by ‘the essential force of maleness’, which enables her to re- connect to her own ‘primitive’ biological urges. Using this example, we can begin to define two key terms in sexuality and gender studies: those of essentialism and gender. These concepts will be developed later in the book but for now we offer working definitions. Essentialism literally means any form of thinking that characterizes or explains aspects of human behaviour and identity as part of human ‘essence’: a biologically and/ or psychologically irreducible quality of the individual that is immutable and pre- social, as demonstrated above when sexual urges are identified as ‘essential’ to ‘maleness’. Woman’s sexuality is seen as naturally passive, but also buried deep in her essential biological being, awaiting arousal by a man. Biological explanations are thus essentialist as they rely on reducing behaviour and identity to a biological basis, whether genetic, hormonal or physiological. These explanations are often referred to as ‘naturalist’ and/or ‘nativist’, since biology is equated with ‘nature’.

The idea of ‘natural development’ indicates that human conduct and attributes follow evolutionary and/or genetically programmed patterns, which are impermeable to social influence and are thus what we are born with – the literal meaning of ‘native’. Human ‘nature’ is common cultural shorthand for the biological aspects of our character. In such naturalist explanations, it is perfectly reasonable to state that women are ‘naturally’ maternal, and that homosexuality is against ‘nature’ since it is not reproductive, that (heterosexual) men are naturally sexually aggressive and, ultimately, that heterosexuality is the only ‘natural’ sexual behaviour. Essentialism can be understood in terms of a determinist equation: biological sex equals male or female equals sexual desire directed towards the opposite sex. Anatomy is most definitely destiny in this equation, so child- bearing is taken to define the natural role of women, and non- reproductive sex does not fit within the equation’s parameters.

Biology, however, is not the only basis of essentialism; spiritual or psychological essentialism has also been a significant feature of western thought. In this form of essentialism, gender and sexuality are often concep...