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.
2.8 Women’s ‘Difference’
By introducing sociological analyses of ‘sex’, second wave feminism developed the concept of gender to challenge prevailing assumptions and politics about the naturalness of women’s inferior social status. As in first wave feminism, however, there remained some distinct strands of feminist thought which focused on the fundamental difference that women’s ‘sex’ entailed. Remember that many first wave feminist campaigners were part of religious movements that viewed women in traditional Christian terms, and that religion was the dominant framework for understanding human nature, social order and morality for many centuries, until its gradual decline in the industrialized era of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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.
Moving away from biologically based arguments, some feminists developed psychological arguments, particularly drawing on Freudian ideas, to suggest that children’s early relationships within the family reproduce dominant masculinity and subordinate femininity at a psychological level. However, even in these cases, writers such as Juliet Mitchell (1975) acknowledge the potential for change, in her case calling for a ‘cultural revolution’ to transform femininity and masculinity. A more radical variant of psychoanalysis places the emphasis on women’s essential difference. The most famous proponent of this ‘difference theory’ is the French philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray (1985), who rejects what she sees as the masculinist form of knowledge underlying the main psychoanalytic traditions. She argues that women’s specificity, based on their bodily difference, has been masked and denied by a patriarchal order that has defined them as lacking in relation to men. But again she envisages the possibility of change through recognizing and revaluing women’s specificity and bringing into being a form of femininity that has heretofore not been allowed to exist.
2.9 Sexuality, Knowledge and Power: The Impact of Foucault
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.
Foucault argued that the regulation of sexuality was not only repressive but also productive, and that sexology, medicine and the law effectively created sexuality – both ‘perverse’ and ‘normal’ sexualities. These knowledges are a form of discourse. The French word discourse literally means ‘speech’, but Foucault used the term more broadly to denote ways of thinking about and constructing knowledge of the world. He argued that discourse creates its own objects: rather than ‘things’ being taken to exist outside of discourse (our ways of knowing and speaking about them), he focuses on what is produced through discourse. The knowledge constructed about sexuality in the Victorian era, then, was not knowledge about a pre- existing ‘thing’ called sexuality, but knowledge that brought it into being – including the modern usage of the word ‘sexuality’ and a whole lexicon of terms for classifying and categorizing sexualities. These are difficult ideas to understand and best illustrated by one of Foucault’s well- known examples. What had once been merely a sinful act – sodomy – and a ‘temporary aberration’ was redefined as homosexuality, a proclivity of a particular category of person, or ‘species’ – the homosexual (1981: 43). It became possible, as Foucault said, to be a homosexual. Foucault therefore radically challenges the commonsense view that the Victorian age was one in which sexuality was repressed. Instead he argues that there was a ‘discursive explosion’ around sexuality in this era, from which emerged the modern ideas of sexuality as deeply rooted in our inner psychological being. Thus Foucault offers new insights into how biological and psychological forms of essentialism developed. His ideas have influenced historians of sexuality such as Jeffrey Weeks (1989), who draws on Foucault in his detailed historical account of the regulation of gender and sexuality in the Victorian era, showing how legal judgments increasingly relied on sexological and psychological explanations to make their case.
Foucault’s theories are one of range that have been described as ‘post- modern’ because they radically question the possibility of any ‘truth’ existing outside discourse and therefore challenge modernist forms of scientific – and sociological – knowledge. These ideas