Gender and Sexuality. Stevi Jackson
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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 [