1.2: The Constructionist Turn in Sexuality and Gender Studies

Lesbian and Gay Studies

Queer theorists take a very different approach to understanding identity, which can be understood as constructionist. Constructionists see identity as a sociocultural construct that changes. To assert that identities are sociocultural constructs assumes that in different times and places different meanings and values dominate and influence identity. These meanings and values are transmitted through cultural texts like television, music, or film and are produced within social institutions like schools, museums, and families. As a result, meanings and values change across space and time.

Michel Foucault

In the mid-1970s, the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault published The History of Sexuality, which describes the origin of modern homosexual identity. In this sweeping history of sexuality, Foucault creates an influential theory of sexual-identity formation. For Foucault, “Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct.”^[8] By rejecting the idea that something called sexuality exists in all of us, waiting to be liberated, Foucault’s work challenged not only how sexuality was understood in popular and scholarly discourses but also how power was understood. For Foucault, power does not repress a preexisting sexual identity; it provides the conditions needed for sexual identities to multiply. Here it is important to distinguish between sexual identities and sexual practices. Sexual practices have existed in multiple forms across time and space, but only in particular moments do practices congeal into identities that can be named and managed.

According to Foucault, power is everywhere, although it is not evenly dispersed. He argues that medical discourse, particularly the field of sexology, which applies scientific principles to the study of sexuality, intersected with legal discourse to simultaneously create the need and the means to identify and produce knowledge about sexual identity, particularly “the homosexual.” Power in this instance belonged to medical and legal authorities. However, naming the homosexual had unforeseen consequences. Those identified as homosexual in medical discourse appropriated the discourse to revise what the category might mean, identify one another, build a community, and make political demands. This can be seen in the early homophile movement, which refers to late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century homosexual rights activism that emerged in tandem and entwined with sexology and anti-sodomy laws.

Philosophy - Michel Foucault

A video from the School of Life series discusses Michel Foucault, a philosopher of history who explored different institutions—medicine, crime and punishment, and homosexuality—with the goal of radically disrupting our understanding of them (https://youtu.be/BBJTeNTZtGU).

• What was Foucault’s personal background, and how do you imagine it might have influenced his academic career?
• Do you see progress or instead a lack of spontaneity and imagination in the way the West has treated people with mental health issues, criminals, and homosexuals?
• Did Foucault want us to become nostalgic, or did he want us to learn from the past about better ways of doing things now?

Foucault’s work influenced a new wave of historians committed to studying the construction of modern homosexuality. David Halperin, a historian of classical Greek culture, provided volumes’ worth of historical evidence to support Foucault’s more theoretical claims.^[9] Halperin argues that using modern identity frameworks to understand culturally and historically specific expressions of desire is poor scholarship. He interprets sexual histories through a queer lens that does not assume that identities and experiences are universal. John D’Emilio, another queer historian, connects the development of modern gay identity to nineteenth-century urbanization and industrialization.^[10] Jonathan Ned Katz, also a historian, focuses a critically queer lens on heterosexuality, arguing that it is also a social construct.^[11] By demonstrating that heterosexuality, like homosexuality, is a modern invention, Katz seeks to strip the category of its normalizing power.

Foucault, Halperin, D’Emilio, and Katz contribute to a critical understanding of the social construction of homosexuality and heterosexuality. This does important political and intellectual work in troubling the idea of heterosexuality as normal and natural, a claim that has been used to marginalize homosexuals.

Eve Sedgwick

Eve Sedgwick, a literary theorist, continues the project of troubling both homosexuality and heterosexuality in her 1990 publication Epistemology of the Closet, which is widely recognized as a foundational queer theory text (Figure 1.2). Sedgwick argues that by the twentieth century, in Western culture, every person was assigned a sexual identity.^[12] For Sedgwick, the history of homosexuality is not a minority history—it is the history of modern Western culture. According to Sedgwick, homosexual and heterosexual definition is central to the construction of the modern nation-state, because it informs modern modes of population management. She introduces the terms minoritizing and universalizing to describe competing and coexisting understandings of homosexuality that shape how we imagine sexuality.

Figure 1.2. Eve Sedgwick. (From Queer: A Graphic History by Meg-John Barker and Jules Scheele, provided courtesy of Icon Books. Copyright Icon Books, reprinted with permission.)

The minoritizing view sees homosexuality as relevant only to homosexuals. This view sees homosexuals as a specific group of people, a minority, within a largely heterosexual world. This can have its uses—for instance, in creating a discernible community able to make demands of the state, as seen in the homophile movement as well as in current gay (and lesbian) rights activism. The universalizing view, in contrast, sees sexuality and sexual definition as important to everyone. This is the position Sedgwick takes in her book when she claims that sexual definition is central to social organization and identity formation.

Gayle Rubin

Social constructionism also influenced understandings of gender. For instance, the cultural anthropologist Gayle Rubin’s essay “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” sought to identify the origin of women’s oppression across cultures.^[13] It is a constructivist account of gender identity that connects the binary construction of gender (man or woman) to heterosexual kinship and by extension to women’s oppression within heterosexual patriarchal cultures (figure 1.3).

Rubin uses the phrase sex-gender system to describe the process by which social relations produce women as oppressed beings. According to Rubin, “One begins to have a sense of a systematic social apparatus which takes up females as raw material and fashions domesticated women as products.”^[14] Rubin writes, “As a preliminary definition, a ‘ sex-gender system’ is the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied.”^[15]

Although Rubin’s work is very influential in feminist and queer theory, one of her basic assumptions, that sex is raw material and thus lacks the influence of social norms, has been challenged by other queer theorists.

Anne Fausto-Sterling

The queer feminist science scholar Anne Fausto-Sterling’s early 1990s work on intersex categories contends that although social institutions are invested in maintaining a dyadic sex system, this system does not map onto nature (figure 1.4). She argues that sex exists as a spectrum between female and male with a minimum of five distinct categories. Fausto-Sterling introduces the terms “herms,” “ferms,” and “merms” to categorize anatomical, hormonal, and chromosomal differences that fall outside a male-female sex dyad.^[16] Like Rubin, Fausto-Sterling’s early provocation about sex categories sees sex as biological, natural, and unchangeable; it is raw material that culture transforms into gender. Both Rubin’s work and Fausto-Sterling’s early work leave a nature-nurture binary in place and suggest that sex correlates with nature and gender correlates with nurture.

Fausto-Sterling’s work was soon challenged for focusing too much attention on genitals. For instance, the social psychologist Suzanne Kessler was critical of Fausto-Sterling’s attachment to reading genitals for the truth of sex, insisting that the performance of gender on the body rather than on genitalia was more often used to gender bodies.^[17] Fausto-Sterling has since conceded Kessler’s point.^[18] Most queer theoretical engagements with gender deprivilege the body, particularly genitals, as a site of truth by suggesting that the appearance of binary sexed bodies is actually an effect of binary gender discourse and, as discussed in the next section, binary performances of gender. In other words, a binary sex-gender system that assumes a correlation between sex and gender is an effect of power, not nature.

In Conclusion

Contributed by Has Arakelyan, Rio Hondo College

Research conducted globally has consistently demonstrated that sex, sexuality, gender, gender identity and gender expression exist on a continuum rather than as binary or fixed categories. This understanding has significant implications for how we conceptualize and discuss these aspects of human experience.

The spectrum perspective challenges traditional binary notions of sexuality, gender, and gender identity, which have historically categorized individuals as either heterosexual or homosexual, male or female, and cisgender or transgender. Instead, the continuum model acknowledges the complexity and fluidity of these elements, recognizing that individuals may experience and express their sexuality, gender, and gender identity in a variety of ways.

By embracing a continuum approach, we can better appreciate and celebrate the diverse range of human experiences and this understanding fosters inclusivity and acceptance, allowing individuals to embrace their unique identities without the pressure to conform to rigid societal expectations.

Figure 1.3 The Gender Bread Person by Sam Killerman. Demonstrating the complexity and continuum of sex, sexuality, gender, gender identity, and expression. ( "Uncopyrighted", Sam Killerman.)