Theories of Sexuality and Gender
Professor Gregory Tomso
Department of English and World Languages
Q:Why do we need to
spend an entire class
studying sexuality and
gender?
A:Congressman Todd Akin!
http://www.youtube.c
om/watch?v=yKa5CYKOHc&feature=related
“Well you know, people always want to try to
make that as one of those things, well how do
you, how do you slice this particularly tough
sort of ethical question. First of all, from what I
understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s
a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to
try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s
assume that maybe that didn’t work or
something. I think there should be some
punishment, but the punishment ought to be on
the rapist and not attacking the child.”
180,481 people in
Missouri voted for
this guy in 2012
NOT TRUE
Legitimate Rape?
If there’s legitimate rape, then there must be
illegitimate rape, right?
So what is “illegitimate rape?”
“I forced her to have sex with me against her will, your honor, but it wasn’t rape
because her eyes were saying yes even though her lips were saying no.”
Taylor Ferrara: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg_4O6XmKAQ&feature=related
This “legitimate” v. “illegitimate” rape business sounds an awful lot like
dunking witches, doesn’t it?
If she floats, she’s a witch---so kill her!
If she sinks, she’s innocent—but now she’s dead, alas!
Either way, she’s dead!
The same idiotic logic applies to legitimate v. illegitimate rape . . .
If he forced her to have sex, and she didn’t get pregnant, it might have been
rape, but we don’t really know.
If he forced her to have sex, and she did get pregnant, she must have enjoyed it,
so it clearly wasn’t rape.
Either way she’s been raped, and she’s also been F*^%*D!
“the female body has
ways to try to shut that
whole thing down”
Really? Now what could
those be? And how does
the female body know
when to flip the switch?
Secret female sperm radar?
Divine knowledge?
Kantian faculty that knows good sperm from bad?
Teeth?
Hormones?
A few conclusions:
Akin’s comment suggests that “the female body” is a wondrous thing that works in mysterious
“ways.” His vagueness romanticizes female sexuality and physiology, making it at once
fascinating, inscrutable—and deadly. He makes it seems as if women’s bodies are simply too
complex for us to understand. This is a form of misogyny akin to men’s belief in hysteria—the
mysterious “wondering womb”—and to the mythology of the “vagina dentata”—the vagina with
teeth.
His comment also indirectly posits that “the female body” possesses some sort of innate
mechanism (divine, mental, or otherwise) that can tell good from bad, right from wrong, loving
sperm from evil sperm. The idea that women are innately moral (i.e., “the angel of the home”)
is an old Victorian stereotype.
His remark about “legitimate rape” also suggests that the “truth” of rape can be found in
women’s bodies, not their words. His comment implies that women “ask for rape” nonverbally
even if they say “no” and that “the female body” may operate independently of a woman’s will
or intention. In both cases, a woman’s words and thoughts are subordinated to her biology.
The implication here is that women, despite what they might think, say, or know, are ultimately
not in control of their own bodies—and that men know what is best.
By attributing his understanding of “the female body” to “doctors,” Akin uses science to justify
his own stance on abortion, an extremely political and ideological issue. Science has long been
used to justify violence against women and sexual minorities on the basis of their supposedly
inferior, defective, complicated, or dangerous bodies.
Sex/Sexuality
• Our common assumption is that sex is a natural and immutable. We
habitually speak of members of “the opposite sex.”
•Yet “sex” refers both to acts and to categories of people, i.e. biological males
and females.
•Biological sex implies a seemingly natural sexuality: males are attracted to
females; females are attracted to males. Modern humans believe we posses
an innate quality called “sexuality” that defines who we are.
•For some humans, biological sex is not a clear indicator of sexual attraction or
gender expression.
•Drag, intersex, transgender, transsex, sissies, tomboys, gays and
lesbians, etc.
Gender
•What we habitually call “gender” today might be more accurately referred to as
biological sex.
•When a questionnaire asks, “What is your gender,” the choices are normally
“male” or “female,” not “masculine or feminine.”
•Gender is more clearly defined as the social, cultural or political expression of one’s
biological sex
• there can be masculine women and feminine men
Jeffrey Weeks (1945 - )
Executive Dean of Arts and Human Sciences
at London South Bank University
Sexuality and its Discontents ( 1985)
Sex, Politics and Society (1989)
Coming Out (1977)
Sexuality
•An abstract noun that refers to the quality of “being sexual” (Weeks 4)
•Developed its modern meaning in the second half of the nineteenth century
•Designates “personalized sexual feelings that distinguish one person from
another” (Weeks 4)
•“My Sexuality”
•This modern understanding and experience of sexuality may be more mythical
than real.
•Sex and Gender theorists argue agree that there is no “mysterious essence” of
sexuality that resides in each of us.
•The separation of humans into “heterosexuals” and “homosexuals” is a modern
development that begin in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is one of
the most curious, distinctive and powerful developments in the history of
modern life.
Essentialism
•The belief that human sexuality and gender are unchanging, universal
“essences” that reside in all humans.
•Upholds popular beliefs in “hard-wired” sexual orientations: hetero and homo.
•“I’m gay because I was born this way.”
•“Homosexuality is a sin. It says so in the bible.”
•Affirms absolute differences between genders/sexes
•“Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.”
• “Unmanly” or “Unwomanly” behavior
•Grounded in appeals to god or nature
•Espoused by conservatives and liberals alike
•That behavior is “unnatural”
•Nature made me this way, therefore I’m happy and healthy.
•Neither of the above claims interrogates the thing (masculinity,
homosexuality, etc.) that is being condemned or defended
Critique of Essentialism
•Reductionist: “reduces the complexities of the world to the imagined simplicities
of its constituent units” (Weeks 7)
•Everything has to fit into pre-determined categories
•You become a statistic, a mark made in a box on a questionnaire
•Deterministic: “seeks to explain individuals as automatic products of inner
propulsions, whether of the genes, the instinct, the hormones, or the mysterious
workings of the dynamic unconscious” (Weeks 7)
•No room for personal choice or for what sex and gender theorists call
agency
•Agency is the capacity of individuals to think critically and make choices
•It is not the same thing as the Protestant notion of “free will”
•Agency is always constrained by social contexts and
historically-specific knowledges
•Weeks argues that sexual essentialism rests on a “naturalistic fallacy,” i.e., an
erroneous assumption that “the key to our sex lies somewhere in the recesses of
‘Nature’” (6).
Biological Determinism
•A particularly seductive form of essentialism that draws on the
legitimacy of science to re-inscribe cultural norms of gender, sex and
sexuality
•Generally operates through:
•Argument by analogy: it happens in rats, so it must
happen in humans
•“Tyranny of Averages”: averages tend to be ready as
moral norms and absolutes
•The “black hole” hypothesis: we haven’t found that gay
gene yet, but we know its out there, somewhere.
•Genetic and evolutionary arguments can be “deeply conservative”
(Weeks 47).
•Example: Some argue that homosexuality is a form of
social altruism that has been naturally selected over time.
•Yet, this theory can never account for the complexity of
gay and lesbian subcultures and the vast range of erotic
and sexual practices that we call homosexual.
•Genetics and the new evolutionism “deny human agency and creativity
in favour of a hypothetical evolutionary metahistory” (Weeks 49).
So what is an alternative to
essentialism and biological
determinsm?
Constructionism
•Sex, sexuality and gender are the products of social arrangements, historical
events, and discursive/linguistic categories.
•Constructionism is not relativism, or the idea that “anything goes” (Weeks 9); nor
is constructionism opposed to the cultivation of political and ethical values; thus,
it is not nihilism.
The Social Production of Sex and Sexuality
I.
Kinship
• Definitions of families change over time and across cultures
• Family structures affect sexual practices by regulating
marriage, legal age of consent, object choice, etc.
• “Gay marriage” is a key example of changing family
definitions today
II. Economic and Social Organization
• Labor, migration, colonization, slavery, epidemics, new
technologies all affect sex and sexuality
• The global pandemic of HIV/AIDS is a primary example of how
changing economic and social conditions influence our
understandings of sex and sexuality
The Social Production of Sex and Sexuality
III. Social Regulation
• Churches, families are traditional regulators of sex
• Governments, doctors, employers are also regulators
• Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts
• WE are all regulators of sex.
IV. Political Interventions
• Rise of the Religious Right
• Promise Keepers, Straight Edge, etc.
• South African President Mbeki denies that HIV causes AIDS
V. Cultures of Resistance
• Feminism
• The Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement
• US?
Rethinking Sex: Weeks’ Argument in Favor of Diversity over Perversity
•“Sex only attains meanings in social relations, which implies that we can
only make appropriate choices around sexuality by understanding its
social, cultural and political context” (Weeks 84)
•This approach “involves a decisive move away from the morality of ‘acts’
(Weeks 84).
Instead of offering moral judgments, sex and gender theorists ask:
•What makes this particular activity valid or invalid,
appropriate or inappropriate?
•What are the social factors that make acts meaningful?
•What are the power relations at work in determining the
meaning of acts?
(Weeks 85-6)
Rethinking Sex: Some Examples
Heterosexuality
•Most marriages, most rapes, and most cases of child abuse are
heterosexual.
•By focusing on genital intercourse alone, we miss what is really at stake in
these very different expressions of heterosexuality.
•Talking about the act of intercourse is not enough. Sex and gender
theorists will also ask:
•Is the act a means of perpetuating relations of domination and
subordination?
•If so, are there any alternatives? Is the act itself violent, or do
other factors make it so?
•Is it ever possible for men and women to exist on equal terms?
•Is change even possible? Or desirable?
Rethinking Sex and Power: Some Examples
Pedophilia
•Depending on age, biological sex of those involved, and the particular acts
performed, pedophilia appears in many forms. Thus, we should speak of
pedophilias, not a single pedophilia.
•Society clings to the idea of the “anonymous” pedophile, although most
abuse of children is carried out by relatives or close family friends.
•Some questions:
•What social function has pedophilia served in other
societies, such as ancient Greece?
•At what age is a child no longer a child? Is 17 year old too
young to have sex with a 21 year old? A 41 year old?
Rethinking Sex and Power: Some Examples
Sadomasochism
•Krafft-Ebing describes S/M as “nothing else than excessive and
monstrous pathological intensification of phenomena . . . which
accompany the psychical sexual life” (Weeks 88)
•Modern practitioners call S/M a form of pleasure and a medium for
exploring new “relational virtualities” (Foucault). For some, it takes
advantage of the fact that sex is a form of ritual and play.
•Some questions to consider
•Should people have the right to consent to activities that
are conventionally regarded as painful and harmful?
•Under what conditions are choices to experience pain
and harm valid?
•Does lesbian S/M entail different relations of power
from “straight” S/M?
Sex and Power: Summing Up
“A disaggregation of sexual practices . . . opens them up to social and
political interrogation. Inevitably we will not find simple answers for and
against particular activities in doing this. But deconstructing the unitary
categories of the moralists and the early sexologists has the inestimable
value of opening up crucial debates about the parameters within which
valid decisions and choices can be made.”
(Weeks 89)
“Questions of sexuality are inevitably, inescapably, political questions “.
(Weeks 90)
“…Conflicts over sexual values . . . acquire
immense symbolic weight. Disputes over sexual
behavior often become the vehicles for
displacing social anxieties.”
“Sex is always political.”
Gayle Rubin
Anthropology and Women’s
Studies
University of Michigan
United Nations Security
Council Resolution 1820,
2008.
“Noting that civilians account for the vast
majority of those adversely affected
by armed conflict; that women and girls are
particularly targeted by the use of
sexual violence, including as a tactic of war to
humiliate, dominate, instill fear in,
disperse and/or forcibly relocate civilian
members of a community or ethnic group;
and that sexual violence perpetrated in this
manner may in some instances persist
after the cessation of hostilities”
Another Definition of Essentialism
“. . .the idea that sex is a natural force that exists prior to social life and
shapes institutions. Sexual essentialism is embedded in the folk
wisdoms of Western societies, which consider sex to be eternally
unchanging, asocial, and transhistorical. Dominated for over a century
by medicine, psychiatry, and psychology, the academic study of sex has
reproduced essentialism. These fields classify sex as a property of
individuals. It may reside in their hormones or their psyches. . . . within
these ethnoscientific categories, sexuality has no history and no
significant social determinants.” --page 9
Examples: All African-American men are hypersexual, Homosexuality is
a disease
“
Historical eras “recodify the relations of sexuality”
and leave a “residue in the form of laws, social
practices, and ideologies which then affect the way
sexuality is experienced”
Today: Abortion, Gay Marriage, “Promiscuity,” Transsexuality/Intersex
19th Century: Prostitution and Masturbation
•“White Slavery Scares”
•“Anti-Onanism” campaigns
•Comstock Laws
1950’s: Renegotiation of American Masculinity
1970’s
Anti-Gay Organizing and the Rise of the “Religious Right”
and the “Neo-Conservative” Movement
1977 campaign to repeal the Dade County, FL gay rights ordinance
“SAVE OUR CHILDREN”
Anita Bryant
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS91gT3XT_A
Rubin: Five areas need to be
addressed
•sex negativity
•fallacy of misplaced scale
•hierarchical valuation of sex
•domino theory of peril
•lack of theory of benign sexual
variation
Michel Foucault
(1926-1984)
College de France
The History of Sexuality, Volume I (1976)
Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume I
•Foucault states that:
•1. We tend to believe that cultural, social, religious, familial and
governmental forces are trying to repress our innate sexuality.
•2. According to this way of thinking, sexuality is opposed to power, which
is trying to destroy or contain it.
•3. Talking about sex is the new sermon.
Sex and the Sermon
“Today it is sex that serves as a support for the ancient form—so
familiar and important in the West—of preaching. A great sexual
sermon . . . has swept through our societies . . .” (7)
“What sustains our eagerness to speak of sex in terms of repression
is doubtless this opportunity to speak out against the powers that
be, to utter truths and promise bliss, to link together
enlightenment, liberation and manifold pleasures.” (7)
Q: But does Foucault believe that
sex is repressed?
A: No, he doesn’t.
Look for rhetorical clues:
•“It would seem” (3)
•“The Story goes” (3)
•“We are told” (5)
The Repressive Hypothesis
The erroneous belief that sex
was repressed in Western
society during the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries and, as
a result, that sex is opposed to
the workings of power.
Foucault’s Three Doubts about the Repressive Hypothesis (10):
1. Is sexual repression truly an established historical fact?
2. Do the workings of power really belong primarily to the category of
repression? (Are prohibition, censorship and denial really truly the most
important forms of power in our society?)
3. Does the discourse /critique of repression represent a break with
what came before? Was there really a “historical rupture” between then
and now? Or, rather, is the discourse of repression actually a part of “the
same historical network” as the past it denounces?
But weren’t those uptight Victorians really repressive?
We can re-evaluate the Victorian era in light of Foucault’s “repressive
hypothesis.”
In the 19th century:
•Women, children, homosexuals, blacks and others were the subjects of
intense moral and scientific scrutiny.
•Punishments for sexual transgression were severe, include mutilation,
imprisonment, and death.
BUT:
•These forms of violence do not constitute a repression of some innate sexuality.
Instead, they constitute a proliferation of discourses about sex. We had to invent
homosexuality, nyphomania, necrophilia, etc. before we could diagnose,
condemn, and treat them.
• There is a veritable explosion of sex in the Victorian era. Everyone seemed to
be worried about, and talking about, sex!
• Granted, that led to a lot of misery for a lot of people; but is also led to new
identities and new pleasures.
What’s in a game of “curdled milk”? Or,
lessons from the village idiot (31).
The incitement to discourse around sex and
sexuality:
“a steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex . . . a discursive
ferment that gathered momentum from the eighteenth century onward”
Foucault studies the “general economy of discourses on sex in modern
societies since the seventeenth century” (11).
He wants to “account for the fact that [sex] is spoken about, to discover
who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from which they
speak, the institutions which prompt people to speak about it and which
store and distribute the things that are said” (11).
Q: How is Foucault’s method similar to,
and different from, those of Weeks and
Rubin? To what discipline does each
belong?
Question:
If power is not opposed to sex, then what is the relationship
between sex and power?
Answer:
Sex, as a social construct, is the product
of power relations within a given society.
“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” (Foucault
105, in Weeks 16)
Sex and Power
• If sex is social construct, it cannot be a timeless force
burning inside each of us.
“We must abandon the idea that that we can fruitfully
understand the history of sexuality in terms of a dichotomy
of pressure and release, repression and liberation. Sexuality
is not a head of steam that must be capped lest it destroy
us; nor is it a life force we must release to save our
civilization. Instead we must learn to see that sexuality is
something which society produces in complex ways”
(Weeks 19)
A Foucauldian Theory of Power
“The usefulness of abandoning the repressive model, in its crude
form, however, is that it does direct us towards an attempt to
understand the actual mechanisms of power at work in any
particular period. Power no longer appears a single entity which is
held or controlled by a particular group, gender, state or ruling class.
It is, in Schur’s phrase, ‘more like a process than an object,’ a
malleable and mobile force which takes many different forms and is
exercised through a variety of different social practices and
relationships. If this approach to power is adopted then we need to
abandon any theoretical approach which sees sexuality moulded by
a dominant, determining will—whether it be of ‘society,’ . . . or
‘capitalism,’ as Marxists might argue, or ‘patriarchy’ or ‘men,’ as
some feminists would propose. Power does not operate through
single mechanisms of control. It operates through complex and
overlapping—and often contradictory—mechanisms, which produce
domination and repression, subordination and resistance.”
(Weeks 35)
Power and Sex/Sexuality before the Eighteenth Century
•Canonical Law
•Christian Pastoral
•Civil Law
A. Based on juridical (legal) prescription and prohibition
B. “Abominations” were acts committed against the law
The Perverse Implantation
Starting in the 18th-century, a discursive explosion around sex that led
to:
•An extreme move toward heterosexual monogamy as the human
norm—as form of sexuality exempt from scrutiny.
•Increased scrutiny of everyone else (children, madmen, criminals,
single women, confirmed bachelors, patients, etc.)
•The rise of “peripheral sexualities” (masturbators, homosexuals,
fetishists, pederasts, etc.)
It’s not that these “perverts” were formally known and tolerated; rather,
their identities “were solidified in them” so that they became visible as
perverts for the first time (48).
The Perverse Implantation
Four operations of power
Lines of penetration (across all ages, “onanism”)
Incorporation of perversions/specification of individuals (akin to
new sexual “species”)
Perpetual spirals of pleasure and power (parent/child;
teacher/student; adult/adolescent, etc.)
Devices of sexual saturation (space and social rituals: dorms,
schools, asylums, etc.)
Following Foucault: Subjectivity
• “Subjectivity” refers to our sense of ourselves; our awareness of ourselves;
our understanding of who we are, where we come from, and where we are
going.
•Subjects possess agency, except in cases of extreme mental and physical
disability or illness.
•As previously discussed, our own agency as individual human actors allows us
to make choices about our behaviors, values, and the meanings of our
feelings. We are also capable of changing our beliefs and re-thinking what we
consider to be true about the world.
The “Subject” in Subjectivity
•Subjects, like genders and sexualities, are social constructs.
•“Individuals are shaped, and shape themselves, in relationship to . . . preexisting sets of meanings . . . which seek to regulate and control their behaviour
according to firm and consciously and unconsciously imbibed rules” (Weeks 57)
•While acknowledging individual agency, sex and gender theorist do not
generally believe that subjects possess a unique or supernatural “essence” or
spirit that defines their “true being.”
•As human subjects, we follow social scripts that are established by schools,
churches, the state, our families, etc. The “scripts laid down in certain social
practices se the parameters within which individual choices are available” (Weeks
57).
•Subjectivity takes shape in the same complex web of power relations as gender,
sex, and sexuality. As subjects, we act within networks of power. Sometimes we
uphold dominant power relations (hegemony); sometimes we subvert them.
•As subjects, we will never achieve “liberation” from power.
•Foucault: “Where there is power, there is resistance.”
Judith Butler (1956 --
)
UC Berkeley
Columbia University
Gender Trouble (1990)
Bodies that Matter (1993)
Performativity
•Following Judith Butler, contemporary sex and gender theorists view gender as
“fantasmatic ideal” that must be performatively maintained.
•Performativity refers to the discursive, cultural and historical iteration
(replication) of sex and gender ideals/norms . It describes how an ideal,
like “pure” masculinity or femininity, or absolute maleness or femaleness,
can be sustained over time through constant repetition.
•Yet, every time a norm is reproduced, it is subject to change. Thus, what
counts as masculine or feminine in one place or time may change in
another. Also, there is wide biological variation among males and females.
•Butler’s notion of performativity does NOT have anything to do with the
theater or stage plays; thus, it is distinct from performance.