Introducing the New Sexuality Studies

Original Essays

Nancy L. Fischer, Laurel Westbrook, Steven Seidman, Nancy L. Fischer, Laurel Westbrook, Steven Seidman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000579185
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Genderforschung

Introducing the New Sexuality Studies: Original Essays is an innovative, reader-friendly collection of essays that introduces the field of sexuality studies to undergraduate students. Examining the social, cultural, and historical dimensions of sexuality, this collection is designed to serve as a comprehensive yet accessible textbook for sexuality courses at the undergraduate level. The fourth edition adds 51 new essays whilst retaining 33 of the most popular essays from previous editions.

It features perspectives that are intersectional, transnational, sex positive, and attentive to historically marginalized groups along multiple axes of inequality, including gender, race, class, ability, body size, religious identity, age, and, of course, sexuality. Essays explore how a wide variety of social institutions, including medicine, religion, the state, and education, shape sexual desires, behaviors, and identities. Sources of, and empirical research on, oppression are discussed, along with modes of resistance, activism, and policy change.

The fourth edition also adds new user-friendly features for students and instructors. Keywords are italicized and defined, and each chapter concludes with review questions to help students ascertain their comprehension of key points. There is also an online annotated table of contents to help readers identify key ideas and concepts at a glance for each chapter.

Part 1 Laying the foundations

1 Welcome to the new sexuality studies

Steven Seidman

DOI: 10.4324/9781003163329-2

In the last decades of the twentieth century, a revolution emerged in the study of sexuality. Sex is today understood as fundamentally social. The aspects of sex that scholars – and ordinary folks – are most interested in, such as issues of desire, pleasure, identity, norms of sexual behavior, and intimate arrangements, are today recognized by the leading scholars in the field as social phenomena. This deep sociology of sexualities is what we call the new sexuality studies.

It was not too long ago that most Americans and Europeans viewed sexuality as natural. In the United States and Europe, sexologists, psychologists, demographers, and medical researchers believed that human sexuality was biological, built into the body through genetics and hormones. Humans were, it was assumed, born sexual. Just as nature programs humans to eat and sleep, humans were wired for sex. Humans were thought to be driven by a sexual instinct, a procreative gene, or a maternal drive to reproduce and rear children. Although many people still believe this to be true, the new social studies of sexuality have challenged the idea of sex as natural.

Initially, this new social perspective on sexuality was advanced by activists. Feminists challenged a conventional wisdom that assumed a natural division between men and women that extended into their sexualities. It was widely assumed that men’s sexuality is naturally genital-centered, pleasure oriented, and aggressive in ways that express an innate masculine gender identity. By contrast, women’s sexuality was said to be oriented to intimacy and relationship building, diffusely erotic, and passive or other-directed in a way that reflected their “natural” feminine gender identity.

Against this conventional viewpoint, feminists argued that society, not nature, creates gender and sexual differences. In particular, feminists argued that women’s sexuality is socially shaped in ways that sustain men’s social and political dominance. For example, the view of women’s sexuality as oriented to pleasing men or driven by a maternal instinct reinforces the idea that women’s appropriate social role should be that of wife and mother. The fight for gender justice challenges these norms and, as women have gained social and economic independence in the decades after the 1960s, they have claimed control over their own bodies and sexualities. Some women may still approach sexuality as a means to reproduction or as a way to gain intimacy, but other women look to sex for sensual pleasure or intimacy without marriage or children. In short, women’s sexuality, like men’s, is not fixed by nature but shaped by social forces such as economic independence, social values, peers, or family culture.

Alongside the women’s movement, there developed a lesbian and gay movement. Lesbian and gay activists challenged a society that declared heterosexuality and heterosexuals to be natural and normal while homosexuality and homosexuals were stigmatized as unnatural and abnormal. This belief has had powerful social consequences. It contributed to making heterosexuality into a social norm and ideal, while often criminalizing and stigmatizing homosexuality. Individuals who were labeled homosexual were subject to discrimination, harassment, and sometimes violence and imprisonment.

Gay and lesbian activists not only protested laws and practices of discrimination, but challenged the idea that nature produces two distinct human types or social identities: heterosexuals and homosexuals. Some activists argued that it is society that creates the idea of sexual identities or roles. How? By stigmatizing and criminalizing homosexuality, heterosexuality is made into the only right way to be sexual and to organize families. Furthermore, some activists argued that the norm of heterosexuality – now called heteronormativity – reinforces a gender order that not only emphasizes gender difference but privileges men.

Historians and other scholars have since documented that although there has always been heterosexual and homosexual behavior, there has not always been “heterosexual” and “homosexual” as sexual identities. For example, in nineteenth-century America, homosexuality was viewed as a behavior, typically a criminal behavior punishable as an act of “sodomy.” However, the category of sodomy included not only homosexual acts but a wide range of non-procreative, non-marital sexual acts such as fornication and oral-genital sex. Moreover, at the time it was believed that anyone could be tempted into the “sin” of sodomy and same-sex behavior. It was only in twentieth-century America that homosexuality was understood as indicating a social and sexual identity. Whereas before it was seen as a behavior anyone could engage in, now homosexuality was seen as marking a particular type of person. It was, of course, initially constructed as a dangerous and abnormal identity, in contrast to a “normal” heterosexual identity. The point I want to underscore is this: it was only in the early decades of the twentieth century in America that sexuality became the basis of a social identity. This fact underscores the historical and social character of sexuality.

Feminists and gay and lesbian activists developed the beginnings of a social view of sexuality as part of their politics, and this perspective was soon taken up by scholars. By the 1970s, sociologists began to view sex as social. Sociological researchers started studying the social patterns of heterosexuality, marriage, reproduction, and dating. Their findings revealed the role of social forces such as gender, religion, occupation, and the role of peers in shaping sexual behavior.

However, both activists and sociologists of the 1960s and 1970s had a limited view of the social character of sexuality. Although they highlighted the role of social forces in shaping norms and patterns of sexual behavior, their sociological analysis did not extend into the social making of sexual bodies, desires, acts, pleasures, and identities. These social researchers assumed an already sexualized body and a natural landscape of sexual acts and pleasures.

The paradigm of new sexuality studies raises questions that were not addressed, or even posed, earlier. For example, how is it that certain body parts become sexualized? What social forces explain why the clitoris was not viewed as a sexual organ until the 1960s, at least in the United States and in many European societies? What social changes help to explain the recent emergence of “anal sex” as a legitimate erotic pleasure? The new sexuality studies understands sexual behaviors as shaped by cultural contexts and sexual identities as historically emergent and unstable, displaying an immense variation, and changing. Homosexuality, as we have seen, was not always a sexual identity, and, even in societies where it serves as an identity, its meaning can vary and change. For example, “lesbian” may indicate a sexual orientation or identity, or a political standpoint against men’s dominance. Today, in the United States and in the United Kingdom, “gay” may signal a master identity or a secondary identity or, as in many European cultures, a behavior but not an identity. And, new sexual identities may emerge, such as a bisexual, asexual, or polyamorous.

The new sexuality studies perspective does not deny the biological aspects of erotic life. There would be no sexuality without bodies. However, it is social forces that determine which organs and orifices become “sexual,” how such organs and orifices may be used or expressed, their social and moral meaning, which desires and acts become the basis of identities, and what social norms regulate behavior and intimacies. This deep view of sex as social is the new sexuality studies that is explored in the chapters of this edited volume.

Chapter review questions

1. What does the author mean by new sexuality studies? New in comparison to what other ways of understanding sex and sexuality?
2. How have activists, including feminists and gay and lesbian activists, influenced how sexualities are conceptualized?

Author biography

Steven Seidman is an emeritus professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Albany, USA. He is a world-renowned expert in the field of sexuality studies. He has authored many books, including Romantic Longings: Love in America, 1830–1980 (Routledge, 1991); Embattled Eros: Sexual Politics and Ethics in Contemporary America (Routledge, 1992); Beyond the Closet: The Transformation of Gay and Lesbian Life (Routledge, 2002); and The Social Construction of Sexuality (W. W. Norton, Third Edition, 2014). He is also co-editor of Intimacies: A New World of Relational Life (Routledge, 2013).

2 Construction as a social process

Lars D. Christiansen and Nancy L. Fischer

DOI: 10.4324/9781003163329-3

Picture an apartment building construction site in its early stages. There are many workers in hard hats operating cranes to hoist steel beams, and pile drivers pounding large steel pillars into the ground to support the building. Once the foundation is laid, concrete walls are poured, hiding the pillars. Carpenters frame the interior rooms with wood and sheetrock. Masons add brick to the exterior walls. Plumbing and electrical wiring are completed, and interior walls painted. After all this collective effort, the construction workers (heavy equipment operators, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, etc.) leave the site. Residents move into the building. They may not think about it, yet their lives are shaped by the building’s structure – where bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms are placed, how many elevators versus stairwells are allotted to a floor, whether there is a gym – all these aspects of the building’s original design and construction impact residents’ daily habits and routines, the people they are likely to run into, and even how often they go outside the building. The original design and construction process is now taken for granted, and people simply adapt to the built structure in which they live.

Now picture a laboratory in a research university where a team of scientists are searching for more effective means of birth control. There are many workers who contribute to the laboratory – student research assistants, custodial staff following protocols of cleaning in areas with potential biohazards, contractors who service the equipment, and potential donors who help financially support the research. Wearing white lab coats and goggles, scientists peer through microscopes into petri dishes, carefully observing the process of egg fertilization by sperm, and how potential chemical interventions can alter the process. They conduct experiments, and carefully record the steps of their research and results based on their observations. They publish their findings in peer-reviewed research journals, where other scientists read their work. Eventually, millions of people take birth control pills based on their findings.

What do these two workplaces have in common with one another?

They are both construction sites.

Construction, literally

The word “construction,” taken in isolation, might conjure images of people wearing hard hats, driving nails, carrying sheetrock, using cranes to hoist steel beams, and erecting a building using countless other materials and tools. But sexual concepts, beliefs, categories, and theories also undergo a construction process. Concepts (like heteronormativity), beliefs (like men are “inherently more sexual”), categories (like gay, straight, bisexual, and pansexual), and theories (like queer theory and feminism) are all social constructs. For u...