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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
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.
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Seitenzahl: 475
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
What Do You Think About Same-Sex Marriage?
Gender, Sexuality and Sociology
Essentialism in Classical Sociological Thinking
The Structure of the Text
Notes and Resources for Further Study
Part I The Development of Sociological Thought on Gender and Sexuality
Introduction: The Unfortunate President
1 The Trouble with ‘Nature’
1.1 ‘One is Not Born But Becomes a Woman’: Identifying ‘Essentialism’
1.2 Identifying Gender: First Wave Feminism
1.3 Consequences of Sex–Gender Beliefs: The ‘Deviant’ Homosexual
1.4 Defining Gender: The Second Wave
2 Sociological Challenges to Essentialism
2.1 The Feminine Mystique and Liberal Feminism
2.2 Radical Feminism and the Concept of ‘Patriarchy’
2.3 Radical Feminist Approaches to Sexuality
2.4 Sexuality and Social Structure: ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality’ and the Politics of Lesbianism
2.5 Gay Liberation and the Beginnings of Sociology of Homosexuality: Challenging ‘Deviance’
2.6 Marxist Feminism, Capitalism and Patriarchy
2.7 Gay Identity and Capitalism
2.8 Women’s ‘Difference’
2.9 Sexuality, Knowledge and Power: The Impact of Foucault
2.10 Significant Absences in Second Wave Feminism and Gay Liberation
Learning Outcomes
Notes and Resources for Further Study
Part II Inequalities and Social Structure
Introduction: Local and Global Structuring of Gender and Sexual Inequalities
3 Gender, Sexuality and Structural Inequality
3.1 Approaches to Social Structure
3.2 The Gendered and Sexual Landscape of Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth- Century Western Societies
3.3 Structural Sociology and the Neglect of Women
3.4 Early Critical Approaches
3.5 From ‘Sex Roles’ to ‘Sexual Divisions’
4 The Idea of Patriarchy
4.1 Women’s Subordination and Sexual Exclusion in the Early 1970s
4.2 The Influence of Marxism: Capitalism, Patriarchy and Sexual Politics
4.3 Relations of Production: Theorizing Women’s Paid and Unpaid Work
4.4 Relations of Reproduction: Marxism, Feminism and Motherhood
4.5 Sexuality, Sexual Exploitation and Institutionalized Heterosexuality
4.6 Ideology, Discourse and Culture
4.7 Challenging White Feminism
5 Rethinking Gendered and Sexual Inequalities
5.1 The Persistence of Material Inequalities into the Twenty- First Century
5.2 New Materialisms
5.3 The Structural Dimensions of Gender and Sexuality
5.4 The Idea of Intersectionality
5.5 Global Modernity, Global Inequality and the Ordering of Gender and Sexuality
Learning Outcomes
Notes and Resources for Further Study
Part III Culture, Ideology and Discourse
Introduction: The End of a ‘Queer’ Era?
6 Gender and Sexuality as Cultural Constructs
6.1 Identifying Patriarchal Culture
6.2 Religion, Culture and the Sexual
6.3 The Advent of Scientific Essentialism
6.4 Essentialism and Bourgeois Victorian Culture
6.5 From Sexology to Psychology: Freud and Psychoanalysis in the Twentieth Century
6.6 The Persistence of Scientific Essentialism into the Twenty- First Century
7 Critical Perspectives on Knowledge
7.1 ‘Biology as Ideology’: The Problem with ‘Natural’ Science
7.2 Science as One of Many ‘Knowledges’: From Ideology to Discourse
7.3 The Challenge of the ‘Cultural Turn’ in Social Theory
7.4 Queer Theory: Deconstructing Identity
7.5 Embodied Sociology
7.6 Differences of Race: Intersectionality Theory and the Critique of White Feminist Knowledge
8 The Complexity of Contemporary Culture
8.1 Everyday Culture: Language and Meaning
8.2 Sexual Objectification in Popular Culture
8.3 Racialized Gender and Sexualized Race
8.4 Lesbian and Gay Stereotypes
8.5 Masculinities in Crisis?
8.6 Postmodern or Late Modern Culture?
Learning Outcomes
Notes and Resources for Further Study
Part IV Self, Identity and Agency
Introduction: Living with Multiple Identities
9 The Socialization Paradigm and Its Critics
9.1 Socialized Selves
9.2 Ethnomethodology: ‘Doing’ Gender and Sexuality
9.3 Doing, Being and the Reflexive Self
9.4 Sexual Selves and Sexual Scripts
10 Becoming Gendered and Sexual
10.1 From Gender Attribution to Gender Identity
10.2 From Gendered Selves to Sexual Selves
10.3 Negotiating Gendered and Sexual Identities
11 Sexual Selves in Global Late Modernity
11.1 Normative Heterosexuality and Alternative Sexualities
11.2 Modern Western Transformations of Self and Identity
11.3 Globalized Identities, Global Social Change
Learning Outcomes
Notes and Resources for Further Study
Part V Conclusion
Introduction
12 Power, Politics, Identities and Social Change
12.1 ’18 Million Cracks’: The Triumph of Liberal Feminism?
12.2 Sometimes, It’s (Still) Hard to be a Woman (and Really Hard to be Non-Heterosexual and/or Non-White): Structural Inequalities, Intersecting Oppressions and Hetero-Orthodoxy
12.3 The Persistence of (Reflexive) Essentialism
Notes and Resources for Further Study
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Table
Chapter 4
Table 4.1.
Varieties of feminism in the 1970s
Chapter 5
Table 5.1.
Contrasting sexual lives: the distribution of choice and constraint
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Begin Reading
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
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Gender and Sexuality
Sociological Approaches
Momin Rahman and Stevi Jackson
polity
Copyright © Momin Rahman and Stevi Jackson 2010
The right of Momin Rahman and Stevi Jackson to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2010 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5525-3
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com
Introduction
The aim of this brief introduction is to illustrate how the key sociological concepts of structure, culture, self and identity are important to understanding gender and sexuality and how they are dealt with in subsequent chapters. We also give guidance on the format of the chapters, which include exercises, learning outcomes and notes on further resources and reading. However, we begin with an example to demonstrate the importance of a sociological perspective in understanding gender and sexuality.
What Do You Think About Same- Sex Marriage?
In August 2010, a federal judge overruled California’s Proposition 8, which had been passed in November 2008 during the American Presidential election. Proposition 8 overrode previous court rulings that had, since May 2008, permitted same- sex marriages, but it did not overturn the right to domestic partnerships, which California had enacted in 1999. It is worth reviewing some of the protests and the arguments both for and against same- sex marriage (available online at many news channels). You will see the strength of passion on both sides of this debate and we ask you to consider why it is that the right to marriage is such a trigger for social protest against lesbians and gays. In April 2005, one of your authors – Momin Rahman – attended a demonstration in support of the recent passage of a gay rights bill through the state legislature of Maine, USA. Fifty or so gay rights supporters gathered on the balcony of the capitol building, whilst, below, four or five times the number demonstrated their rejection of the proposed bill. Most of those opposed were religious, and we were told that many of these Christian groups had been bussed in from other states to bolster this show of ‘traditional’ moral values. The clothing of choice for the traditionalists was a t- shirt depicting a male and female figure holding hands, with the slogan that marriage was meant to be between a man and woman.
In fact, the proposed legislation was not concerned with same- sex marriage but with equalization of treatment for lesbians and gays [1]. However, given the controversies surrounding lesbian and gay civil union legislation in the USA, and the salience of this issue in the Presidential election of November 2004, it is perhaps not surprising that the possibility of marriage rights in Maine became the focus for the Christian Right. Furthermore, legislation to recognize same- sex civil unions and/or marriage is a truly global issue, with laws passed or under discussion in many countries worldwide, and always in the context of intense public debate [2].
How can we understand and explain the strength of emotion that the recognition of lesbian and gay marriage provokes? Of course, it could be argued that this particular civil right is the latest in a gradual extension of rights to lesbian and gay minorities, beginning for many in Western Europe and North America in the late 1960s and accelerating in the 1990s with the increasing cultural visibility of diverse sexualities. This trend could be seen as part of wider changes in western society that have also resulted in the advance of rights for women and ethnic minorities. We may then account for the controversy over same- sex marriage as the inevitable but temporary battle between traditionalism and democratic social progress. But is this an accurate picture? We suggest not.
A full understanding of such controversies is not possible without a thoroughly sociological analysis of the social organization of sexuality and gender and their social meaning. What such a perspective entails is discussed in the next section.
TASK: Set up a debate about legalizing same- sex marriage (or banning it if you live in a country that has already passed such laws).
Make sure that you have one person that is noting down the arguments made both for and against the motion.
Read the following section to see if the arguments made in the debate relate to the points made below.
Gender, Sexuality and Sociology
Our aim in this text is to demonstrate that gender and sexuality can be understood through the following key issues and concepts in sociology:
social change;
social conflict, social cohesion and social order;
social hierarchies, divisions and inequalities;
social identities;
modernity/late modernity/postmodernity.
We discuss these key issues and concepts throughout the text, but we organize the discussion into parts that cover the central sociological concepts of structure, culture, self and identity. Let us stick with our introductory example to expand and explain. In the western world, the contemporary movements for women’s rights and those of sexual minorities have developed from a period of significant social change since the post-war, mid- twentieth- century decades, affecting women’s access to educational and financial resources, changes in cultural values, religious beliefs and decline in the deference to tradition. This period saw the rise of women’s and gay liberation movements that demanded new political and social rights. These demands challenged tradition, resulting in social conflict. Social conflict thus often arises from social change. This is one way of explaining the common resistance across many cultures to the progress of lesbian and gay rights. If the social position of men and women is thought to be determined by nature – as religious and moral traditionalists believe – then lesbians and gays would inevitably be seen as a challenge to this ‘natural’ order.
Groups that are identified with traditional views on the role of women and on sexual morality often argue that social change has progressed too quickly, leaving a lack of social cohesion and social order in its wake. However, social conflict is not just the result of progress versus tradition. After all, in the case of marriage, we are talking about a relationship that has historically been seen as the foundation of family, kinship and, ultimately, society. In a period when there are widespread concerns about the decline of marriage and the stability it brings, why would traditionalists deny the extension of the right to marry to a small minority of the population? The answer lies in understanding the social significance of that minority, and its relationship to the majority. In this case of same- sex marriage, lesbians and gays represent a challenge to dominant ideas of masculinity and femininity (what we term gender) and the social, legal and cultural privilege given to traditional heterosexuality.
Underpinning the significance of gender and sexuality is the traditional ‘naturalist’ understanding of masculinity and femininity, usually based on ideas about biological reproduction and natural differences deemed to arise from it. Thus women are seen as ‘naturally’ suited to child- rearing and domesticity, historically justifying, for example, their lesser access to education and paid employment. In such naturalist explanations, lesbians, gays, transgendered people, bisexuals, are all seen to be going against the designs of nature – our genital reproductive function – and are thus subject to moral and social disapproval and often legal sanctions. If you believe that men and women are naturally designed to ‘fit’ together sexually, and that the ultimate purpose of sex is to reproduce, then lesbians and gays would inevitably be seen as perverted and/or immoral – as a result of their ‘unnatural’ desires. Such attitudes occur in western and many other cultures and are often expressed by religious groups and by political groups in favour of ‘traditional values’.
In this traditional form of thinking – common to many cultures and religions – there is a hierarchy of gender, with men regarded as naturally superior to women, particularly in the sexual realm, and homosexuals at the bottom of the hierarchy since their existence is seen as a fundamental perversion of the gender order. Thus divisions and inequalities between men and women, and heterosexuals and homosexuals, are justified as natural and inevitable. The sociological literature describes such recourse to naturalism as ‘essentialist’ or ‘nativist’ thinking, and one major achievement of sociological work on gender and sexuality has been to illuminate how essentialist thinking pervades many aspects of society, often through religion, but also in laws and policies and throughout institutions such as education, medicine and science and, most frequently, in popular culture and commonsense thinking.
The pervasiveness of essentialism often leads us to assume that social categories such as men and women, heterosexuals and homosexuals, are simply a literal reflection of natural ‘types’. However, in opposition to essentialism, sociological work on gender and sexuality has shown the social origins of the categories into which individuals are placed, both through social classification over which they may have no direct control (your ‘sex’ has to be identified on most offi - cial forms, starting with birth certificates) and through their own identification (‘I am a woman’; ‘I am gay’). Sociological research and analysis has illuminated the development of these classification processes and their influence on the construction of our individual identities. In such academic work, biological ‘sex’ has been replaced with an emphasis on socially constructed gender and sexuality: how the categories of male and female become socially meaningful; how they are organized hierarchically; what consequences this has for life chances, sexual behaviour and identity; and which social groups are served by the social ordering of gender relations. Similarly, non- heterosexual identities are not seen simply as ‘natural’ types: homosexuality is meaningful or socially significant precisely because it forms the basis of an identity which is outside the conventional gender order and, as a result, is placed at the bottom of the gender/ sexual hierarchy. Any change in its status, as over the last thirty or so years, inevitably challenges traditional gender arrangements. Hence the current controversy over same- sex marriage can also be understood as a conflict over the social meaning and status of homosexuality in relation to heterosexuality. From a sociological perspective, then, gender and sexuality are intimately intertwined: the social construction and significance of one can rarely be understood without considering the other.
Gender and sexuality have relevance for all aspects of social life and thus sociological analysis: politics and power, cultural beliefs and values, social action, self and identity, and social structures. For example, the right of lesbians and gays to marry is seen not as a personal issue, or one simply of individual political rights, but rather as one for the scrutiny of the state. Claims for such rights are indicative of wider social changes that potentially threaten or undermine previously taken- for- granted essentialist beliefs and values and social structural arrangements associated with the traditional heterosexual gender order. Therefore, issues around sexuality and gender cannot be understood as merely personal and private since they raise key sociological questions about the connection between structure, culture, the self and identity – and the operation of power across all these aspects of social life.
Essentialism in Classical Sociological Thinking
Gender and sexuality received only scant attention within classical sociology and have only recently been established as ‘proper’ topics for sociological inquiry. Most introductory sociology courses and texts now cover gender and sexuality – but this is a relatively recent innovation, occurring over the last couple of decades of the twentieth century. It is useful to consider why it took so long for gender and sexuality to be included within what C. Wright Mills calls the ‘sociological imagination’ (Mills, 1959). Part of the reasons for this absence relates to the lack of ‘presence’ of both women and those of diverse sexualities in academia. A similar lack of ethnic and racial minority presence has often led to oversights on issues of racism, colonialism and post- colonialism. In both the UK and North America, these issues of race, gender and sexuality are more visible now in part because there is greater diversity in academia itself. It is important to note that much of the work around gender and sexuality has been driven by an attempt to understand personal experience in a sociological way. Indeed, both your authors have contributed to research on gender and sexuality largely because our personal identities and experiences have made us all too aware of various oppressions and how these have structured our lives in complex ways – Stevi as a heterosexual feminist from a working- class background and Momin as a gay, Asian man brought up in a Muslim family. For both of us and for many of those we discuss, work on gender and sexuality has presented a challenge to traditional assumptions of sociology as an objective, politically neutral science in terms of its topics, theories and methods of research.
Another important reason why gender and sexuality have been absent from much of sociology’s history is that the key concepts and ideas developed by classical sociologists were not applied to these issues in any consistent way. One could suggest that this was again an issue of ‘presence’: sociology is often described as having founding ‘fathers’, and that is an accurate description of those who have come to represent the classical sociological canon – from which women thinkers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman were excluded. The ‘holy trinity’ of classical theorists – Marx, Weber and Durkheim, with the inconsistent addition of Georg Simmel – were all male and all relatively privileged white Europeans. No doubt one can speculate as to their personal views on gender and sexuality, and there are many historical works that discuss their personal lives and experiences, and how these impacted on their theories and interests (see Pampel, 2000, for example). What is clear from the body of work produced by these theorists, however, is that they assumed that issues of differentiation and division between men and women (there is no reference to sexualities) were by and large derived from natural divisions based in biology. The founding fathers, on the whole, were essentialists [3].
The main achievement of sociological thought has been to challenge taken- for- granted ways of thinking about society, everyday social life, social change and social divisions and inequalities. The founding theorists were primarily interested in explaining the massive transformations brought about by the rise of modern capitalism: industrialization; urbanization; the advent of bureaucratic organization through the state; the reorganization of work and the new power of capital – in short, all that is ‘modern’ about our contemporary societies. The exclusion of gender and sexuality from this project, however, left us with only a partial understanding of modernity:
If our view of modernity derived exclusively from the sociological classics, we would not know that a central part of the great transformation consisted of efforts to organize bodies, pleasures, and desires as they relate to personal and public life, and that this entailed constructing sexual (and gender) identities. In short, the making of sexual selves and codes has been interlaced with the making of the cultural and institutional life of Western Societies. (Seidman 1996: 2–3)
Gender and sexuality are proper topics for sociology because they are socially organized and socially meaningful and because the ways in which they are ordered and made meaningful interconnect with other aspects of modern social life. We have structured our chapters using the key concepts and theories developed by sociology to account for the social conditions that are characteristic of modernity. Sociological work on gender and sexuality has resulted in reinterpretations of these established concepts and theories and has also added new ones, thus enhancing our understanding of the social. For example, while the concept of ‘patriarchy’ appears in the work of Weber, feminist theorists have transformed the way it is used within sociology. Gender was adopted as a sociological concept only in the recent past, with the increasing influence of feminist and lesbian/ gay theories, which also established sexuality as a legitimate field of sociological inquiry. Above all, the concept of essentialism – the fundamental starting point for the sociology of gender and sexuality – is a new concept and one that has now become established, enlarging the scope of the ‘sociological imagination’.
The Structure of the Text
We begin, in Part I, with the development of essentialist ideas around gender and sexuality during the rise of modernity in the West. We then consider the challenges to essentialism associated with advances in sociological explanations of gender and sexuality. Taken with this Introduction, this first part provides a basic overview of sociological ideas around gender and sexuality, placing them in the historical contexts in which they developed. It will introduce some of the key concepts and central themes that will be dealt with in more detail in the subsequent chapters, but Part I provides a self- contained and detailed introduction to the historical emergence of sociological thought on gender and sexuality.
The subsequent chapters offer more in- depth knowledge and work towards fuller understanding through a more detailed examination of key concepts and ideas. Part II is concerned with structural accounts of gender and sexual inequalities – their social patterning – and how they are interrelated with other social divisions and inequalities (such as class and race). In Part III we discuss cultural values, beliefs and ideologies around gender and sexuality, linking these to the structural explanations in Part II, and to how we make sense of our own individual and collective identities, which is the main focus of Part IV. In the Conclusion, we discuss the continued contemporary relevance of the issues raised throughout the book, focusing on power, politics, contemporary social identities and social change.
Learning outcomes will be provided at the end of each part of the book. Your knowledge and understanding of key concepts and theories should develop through each self- contained chapter, but also with a cumulative effect as you progress through the book. To help along the way, each chapter is cross- referenced with other relevant sections throughout the text. Notes marked in the text direct you to further readings and useful resources for further study, to be found at the end of each part, just after the learning outcomes. The notes will help you to find further relevant materials and examples that will aid your understanding and preparation for any written assessments you may have. However, we have included examples of research in the text that illustrate concepts and theories, as well as exercises for students throughout the text that will develop skills of understanding and evaluation of the concepts and theories presented. These exercises come in two forms: first, task-based exercises which can be used in small groups or seminars; and, second, brief exercises which simply ask you as an individual reader to stop and think about a particular question in Your World. Finally, a full bibliography of all the works cited in the chapters and notes will be found at the end of the book.
Notes and Resources for Further Study
1.
The law banned discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in employment, housing, education and public accommodation and was passed in April 2005. It did not mention civil partnerships or marriage. Accounts from newspapers in Maine are available on
www.shgresources.com/me/newspapers
, and this particular demonstration and counterprotest took place on 28 April 2005.
2.
Only a few countries give full marriage rights to lesbians and gays (Belgium, Canada, The Netherlands, South Africa, Spain). (The issue is unresolved in the USA, where the Supreme Court of Massachusetts has voted for full marriage rights, in conflict with most other states in the Union, provoking an on- going legal/constitutional battle.) However, a range of countries have legislation that recognizes some form of partnership – either ‘civil unions’ or ‘registered partnerships’, or will at least recognize partnerships for the purposes of immigration. Most of these are in Western Europe but also include Australia and New Zealand, Israel, Argentina and Brazil. For country- specific information, you can check out Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender rights organizations with information on current status of legislation and campaigns on a wide variety of issues, based in the USA and UK:
www.hrc.org
;
www.ilga.org
;
www.stonewall.org.uk
.These sites contain up- to- date campaign information on same- sex marriage, but for an excellent introduction to these issues in the USA, see the book by A. Sullivan,
Same- Sex Marriage, Pro and Con: A Reader
(2004).
3.
In his comprehensive introduction to sociological theory, Swingewood points out that Marx’s collaborator, Engels, did relate the subordination of women within the family to the development of capitalism in
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
, published in 1884, but that this approach used the usual concepts of sociology rather than thinking through gender as a distinct sociological concept (Swingewood, 2000: 237). It is interesting to note that in this third edition of the text, Swingewood still refers to feminist sociology and the sociology of sexuality as examples of new directions in sociological thought.
Part IThe 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.
1The 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 andpre-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 conceptualized in religious terms, as God- given (as in discussions of abortion and child- care during the 1960s and 1970s and homosexuality today), or in psychological terms, for example in ideas of love, romance and sex as central to personal fulfilment and emotional well- being. In both psychological and spiritual essentialism, social influences on gender and sexuality are either downplayed or ignored. In such explanations, sexually active women have been described as either spiritually ‘fallen’ or psychologically disturbed, and, of course, homosexuals have been similarly characterized as either sinful or perverted.
The simple statement that ‘one is not born a woman’ thus represents a considerable challenge to the essentialism that is deeply entrenched in western culture.
TASK: Identifying essentialism.
In a small discussion group, ask your classmates to list the different ways in which they can safely say that they know that they are either a man or a woman, heterosexual or homosexual. It is best to do this as anonymously as you can.
Gather the written answers together and try to identify any essentialism in the explanations that people provide.
Think about the essentialist equation discussed above, and the combination of the biological/spiritual/psychological.
1.2 Identifying Gender: First Wave Feminism
As noted above, Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex in 1949, well before the second wave feminist movement developed in the West in the USA, UK and France. Nonetheless, her work became one the most influential texts across all these countries during the emergence of the women’s movement and her statement that ‘one is not born but becomes a woman’ has come neatly to encapsulate feminists’ rejection of essentialism in favour of sociological understandings. Crucial in the development of such understandings has been the introduction of a term that Beauvoir did not use: ‘gender’. We have already used this term in the introduction and this first chapter, indicating that we can take for granted that, as students of sociology and as members of your specific culture, you will undoubtedly have a working understanding of what that term means, such has been the impact of feminist thinking on both sociology and everyday life. In non- academic contexts, however, ‘gender’ is now often used interchangeably with sex (most commonly on official forms which ask you to identify your ‘sex’ or ‘gender’ as male or female). Some clarification is therefore needed. In short, gender refers to the social division between men and women; masculinity and femininity are thus understood as social attributes rather than natural ones.
Historians of feminism in the West identify a first wave of feminist activism, located from around the 1840s to the 1920s, culminating in the achievement of women’s right to vote in many democracies in the 1920s (Banks, 1990). The first wave of feminists campaigned against social inequalities between women and men and the disadvantaged position of women in society, but they did not develop a specific sociological concept – gender – as an analytical device. However, in their focus on education, employment, equal rights and, above all, the status of women in relation to men, first wave feminism began to identify what we now understand as gender – a social division between women and men. Evangelical, equal rights and socialist feminisms, which developed from the 1840s, all shared an assumption that some form of public intervention could be used to achieve better conditions for women through changes in politics, laws or cultural values [4]. Let us sketch some brief examples, beginning with the equal rights tradition, which has perhaps remained the most durable strand of feminist activism.
In her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), a text that influenced both American and British first wave feminisms, Mary Wollstonecraft engaged with the emergent and urgent concern with rights brought about by the French and American revolutions. She deliberately echoes the classic statement of (male) human rights made by Thomas Paine in The Rights of Man (1792), arguing that women could equally fulfil the conditions of citizenship if given equal opportunity for education and employment. The implication of this is that access to employment and education affect the relative social positions of men and women and produce divisions between them, based not on biology, but on social exclusion and inequality. Such an analysis compels us to think of these groups as socially created rather than being defined solely or overwhelmingly by their biological or spiritual ‘essence’.
Wollstonecraft acknowledged the different impacts on women of their economic positions, although her concern is really for ‘idle’ upper-class women, arguing that:
With respect to virtue, to use the word in a comprehensive sense, I have seen the most in low life. Many poor women maintain their children by the sweat of their brow, and keep together families that the vices of the fathers would have scattered abroad; but gentlewomen are too indolent to be actively virtuous, and are softened rather than refined by civilisation. (1972 [1792]: 16)
Her critique challenged not only the economic dependence of ‘gentle women’, but also the emerging gender framework of the time for the middle classes, which separated men and women into the workplace and home, respectively, and which Catherine Hall (1992) subsequently named the ‘domestic ideology’.
Although located within the equal rights or liberal feminist tradition, Wollstonecraft touches upon the impacts of class position, an issue which came to dominate the development of socialist feminism in the latter part of the nineteenth century, particularly in Britain when the influence of Marxist analyses of capitalism gradually displaced earlier forms of socialism (Banks, 1990: Ch. 4). Socialist feminism focused on oppression within the domestic realm, necessitated by capitalism’s need for a social unit to reproduce and maintain a working- class labour force and for a system of marriage that protected the property and inheritance rights of the capitalist class [5]. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was also raising these issues of women’s economic position in marriage in the American context, publishing ‘Women and Economics’ in 1898, in which she argued that marriage obliged women to perform domestic labour for free, subordinating them economically and thus socially. Again, the emphasis is clearly on how women are made into women by virtue of their social class, their economic situation, and through religious and cultural beliefs around femininity.
The beginnings of the idea of gender are evident in these first wave ideas – not as a specific concept but rather as a gradual movement towards explanations for women’s position that do not rely on essentialist arguments. A caveat needs to be added here, however, not least because the issue re- emerges in second wave feminism (see Ch. 2.8): some aspects of equal rights/liberal, socialist and, above all, evangelical feminisms still either assumed or actively deployed the notion of an essential female difference from men, derived from biology and the maternal impulse, and/or an innate moral superiority, particularly in issues of sexuality. This is evident in the first wave feminist campaigns against prostitution in Britain and the USA.
Comprehensive regulation of prostitution began during the nineteenth century in Britain and the USA, provoked by increasing awareness of these activities in the newly urbanized towns created during industrialization. Crucially, regulation was the result of pressure from both religious and cultural moralists (including many women) and feminists who wanted to secure the protection of women, with these two groups often joining forces in political campaigns. The first of a series of Contagious Diseases Acts was introduced in 1864 in England to regulate sexually transmitted diseases among military personnel (who were all men in this era). However, both the framing and implementation of the law focused on women as the problem – allowing police to arrest any women suspected of being a prostitute and force them to undergo medical examination. Feminist campaigns against this law were led by Josephine Butler, who argued that women were being unfairly stigmatized by the ‘double standard’ of sexual morality, forcing them to bear the responsibility for, and consequences of, male sexual behaviours [6].
The ‘double standard’ referred to the common biologically essentialist understanding that men had compelling, natural sexual needs and could not be held responsible for trying to satisfy them by using prostitutes. Blame for transmitting disease, therefore, fell on the women who worked as prostitutes. They were seen as immoral for engaging in sex and thus going against the ideal of women as non- sexual and innocent of sexual desire (as illustrated in section 1.1 above). The consequence of enshrining such essentialist ideas into law is that the force of regulation becomes directed at women rather than men. While feminists argued vigorously against this injustice, many of the religious moralist and feminist campaigners also argued that women were naturally more moral and less sexual, only falling prey to such sin or immorality through financial circumstances or pressure put on them by men.
Victorian cultural ideals of asexual femininity arose in conjunction with the exclusion of women from many forms of paid employment and their relegation to unpaid domestic labour within marriage, all of which was a consequence of the reorganization of gender relations accompanying industrialization (Gilman, 2008 [1898]; Weeks, 1989; Hall, 1992). This new standard of femininity initially arose among the middle classes, since working- class women often had to work, either in domestic service or in industry. They were, nonetheless, subject to the same cultural ideology of femininity – working- class respectability in sexual morals and behaviour was based on the emerging middle-class ideology of femininity (Mort, 1987; Mason, 1994).
The movements that tried to challenge the ‘double standard’ of sexual conduct did, however, acknowledge that collective social regulation, in the form of laws, moral campaigns and providing alternative income through employment, could influence and change behaviours of both men and women. Thus, even in the essentialist aspects of first wave feminism, there are small inklings that masculinities and femininities are open to collective social influence through political reform campaigns and, more significantly, that cultural attitudes and men’s and women’s socio- economic locations also contributed to the formation of gendered conduct and identity.
Your World: Are there still ‘double standards’ when it comes to the sexual behaviours of men and women in your culture? Does this differ by age, ethnicity, class, sexual identity?
1.3 Consequences of Sex–Gender Beliefs: The ‘Deviant’ Homosexual
The Victorian reordering of gender relations was associated with a growing interest in documenting and categorizing sexual ‘perversions’: deviations from the expected norm of sexually passive women and heterosexually oriented men and women. This endeavour marked the beginning of the scientific study of sexuality – gathering statistical data on sexual behaviour and collecting legal, anthropological and proto- psychological case studies – which came to be known as sexology. Not all sexology was necessarily anti- homosexual. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ work in the late nineteenth century focused on the natural basis for what he called Uranians – men who loved men in the manner of the god Uranus – and argued consistently for the decriminalization of homosexuality on this basis. The culture of the time, however, did not bode well for the reception of such ideas [7]. Partly this was due to the new prudery around sex during this time, driven by religion, the new middle- class ideology of asexual femininity and the more generalized concern of the middle classes with maintaining moral purity in the context of masses of people living crammed together in the newly urbanized industrial cities. In the minds of the middle classes, overcrowded housing raised concerns about the consequences of physical proximity for working- class sexual activity (Mort, 1987). The mass urban concentrations of population also led to the creation of many spaces where people could be anonymous to those around them and escape official scrutiny, creating the potential for lustful encounters and opportunities for men to use prostitutes (both male and female) in areas other than where they lived and worked. Such anonymity had not been possible in traditional, preindustrial small towns or villages. The essentialist characterization of male sexual needs also raised a concern that men’s potentially uncontrollable lust might lead to sexual perversion. As Weeks says in his comprehensive history of Victorian sexuality in Britain: ‘In the debates before the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act was rushed through Parliament [which redefined and broadened the legal definition of homosexual acts as well as tightening the regulation of prostitution and raised the age of consent for girls to 16] male homosexual behaviour was quite clearly linked with the activities of those who corrupted young girls’ (1989: 106).
Many of the major sexological studies published in the late 1800s and early 1900s were regarded as obscene, but this moral climate also meant that the ‘science’ of sexology was used to justify the contemporary social understandings of gender and sexuality. This, above all, meant the classification of a new type of person: the ‘invert’ or ‘homosexual’ as the antithesis of normal, moral, pure, natural masculinity. Many of the most influential works of the time focused on homosexual acts and, together with increased legal regulation, served to confirm homosexuality as a ‘perversion’ of the ‘natural’ order. The modern capitalist reordering of class and gender relations associated with the new middle- class morality also created a climate in which homosexuality was increasingly seen as a social problem and individual pathology, precisely as the ‘inversion’ of respectable heterosexuality. Moreover, this was focused on male homosexuality, with a lack of regulation of and public discussion on lesbianism (Weeks, 1989).
1.4 Defining Gender: The Second Wave
As Banks (1990) points out, it is difficult accurately to pinpoint the beginnings of second wave feminism because it emerged through a combination of grass- roots activism, nationally based political campaigns around key issues such as abortion, and the circulation of new ideas and research on women’s status by academics and activists. Many feminists were also involved in and influenced by the battle for civil rights in the USA during the 1950s and 1960s, and later and elsewhere by the emergence of the New Left: a range of radical political movements, often associated with anti- war protests (particularly against the USA–Vietnam conflict), critiques of capitalism and student politics. Furthermore, many feminists have described how the impetus to develop independent political action for women was in part a response to the sexism encountered in these other movements [8]. In the following brief sketch we outline how the protosociological ideas of first wave feminism were transformed, as a result of second wave feminism and gay liberation, into specifically sociological concepts and theories. In doing so, we cover a time span that stretches across three decades, illustrating that the impact of feminist and lesbian and gay thought on academic sociology was a drawn- out process, with many key academic publications appearing some time after the activism and political writings that inspired them.
