Gender and Sexuality. Stevi Jackson

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Gender and Sexuality - Stevi Jackson


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by industrialization and modern rational capitalism were the context for the increasing cultural influence of sexology in categorizing ‘perversions’ of sexual behaviour into types of people (see Ch. 1.3). Strictly Marxist ideas that explain culture (or ideology) as determined by social structure have been found wanting in explaining gender and sexuality because of this more complex link between structure and culture (or ideology), but many theorists drew upon, borrowed from and remain influenced by the materialism at the heart of Marxist sociology, particularly because the material social conditions produced by capitalism shape our social world. A materialist perspective also, and importantly, helps guard against the pull of naturalist and essentialist accounts of gender and sexuality.

      One example is David Evans’ work on homosexual identities in the late twentieth century, after gay liberation and decriminalization had occurred across most western capitalist countries. Evans (1993) uses a materialist framework to argue that post- Liberation gay identities have developed through the wider processes of commodification in advanced capitalism – gay male communities and identities came to be associated with consumption; through bars and clubs, sexual services and products, and wider lifestyle consumption made possible by male incomes that do not support a family. He argues that the advances in rights for homosexuals evident from the 1990s have been partly made possible by governments that are attempting to encourage new consumer markets for the benefit of capitalism – thus developing a traditionally Marxist theme that the democratic state ultimately works in the service of capital.

      The campaigns for moral reform around prostitution exemplify this religious essentialist view of women, arguing as they did that women’s naturally refined and weak natures need to be protected from the corrupting influence of male sexuality, and sexual pleasure itself (see Ch. 1). This essentialism was based on (admittedly contradictory) ideas of women’s natural difference, whether that is characterized as their potential for moral superiority – being naturally more refined and less prey to sin – or their potential for susceptibility to moral weakness. These early ideas of women’s ‘difference’ were not only contradictory, but also based on assumptions about both psychological and biological ‘essences’. Given that these forms of essentialism are so problematic for women, it may be surprising to see them resurface during the period of second wave feminism, but in the sense that our culture remains focused on psychological and natural explanations of human nature, it is perhaps not wholly unexpected. Having said that, second wave feminists who proposed explanations of women’s subordination based on biological or psychological differences also argued that these could be challenged through social action. Perhaps the best known example is Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1972), in which she puts forward the view that women’s role in biological reproduction has provided the basis for their social subordination and that this will remain the case until reproductive technology replaces child- bearing, and collective social responsibility replaces child- rearing in family units. However, she also pays considerable attention to the historical variability of family forms, and while she sees women’s reproductive capacities as the root of their subordination she insists on ‘the relativity of the oppression: though it has been a fundamental human condition, it has appeared in different degrees and different forms’ (1972: 73, emphasis in original). Thus her essentialism is tempered by a degree of social constructionism.

      The French philosopher Michel Foucault has had a profound impact on feminism and the study of sexualities since the 1980s. Foucault published the first of a three- volume history of sexuality in France in 1976, and it was widely translated and began to influence academic work on sexuality in the English- speaking world. In the first volume, subtitled The Will to Know, Foucault argued that the history of sexuality in the West requires an understanding of how knowledge operates and how various different types of knowledge – sexology and psychology in particular – have come to dominate our ways of thinking about human gender and sexuality. By going beyond critiques of the essentialism in these disciplines, he created a new perspective on them.


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