Download What is sexual identity?

The Social Construction of
Sexual Identities
From Advancing Sexuality Studies:
a short course on sexuality theory
and research methodologies
Schedule
Learning activity
Introduction & aims
Session 1. Sexual identities and social constructionism
Small group work & brainstorm
Lecture
Show objects
Time allowed
10 mins
120 mins
55
55
10
Session 2. Sexualities in transnational perspective
Lecture & Pre-reading review
Small group discussion & feedback
55 mins
25
30
Session 3. How is your sexuality socially constructed?
Pairs work
Small group work & feedback
75 mins
25
50
Session 4. Sexual identity and cultural objects
Small group work
Large group discussion
90 mins
60
30
Conclusion
Total
15
365 mins
2
Module aims
To:
• Introduce participants to social constructionist understandings of
sexual identity from anthropology, history and contemporary
sociology
• Explore contemporary work on sexual cultures and identity in
transnational contexts
• Bring together perspectives on culture and sexuality by exploring
the ways in which sexuality is symbolised and objectified
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Participants will:
• Develop a critical understanding of sexual identity as
socially constructed in relations of discourse and power
• Be able to assess the strengths and limitations of cultural
perspectives on sexuality, especially in transnational
context
• Examine connections between culture and sexuality
through material culture, exploring symbols through which
ideas about sexuality are represented and scripted
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Session 1.
Sexual identities and social
constructionism
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What is sexual identity?
• In groups of three or four:
– Make a list of sexual identities in your social context
• Try to think of as many different kinds of sexual identity as you can
– If there is more than one term for a particular identity, group these
together
– Include:
• traditional names, formal scientific or legal terms, more recent terms, slang
terms, etc
– Organise these identities into a hierarchy that reflects their
respective positions within society
(20 mins)
• Feedback (5 mins)
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What is sexual identity?
• Take two different sexual identities from the list:
– How are people with these identities thought about?
• What meanings are attached to these identities? Does gender inform how
these identities are thought about?
– Where do these ideas come from?
• Scientific truths about sexual nature?
• Legal rules about appropriate social conduct?
• Traditional or contemporary ideas about morality?
– How are these identities reproduced?
• Do people take them on by choice, or are they forced upon them?
– Can people engage in the sexual practices these identities refer
to and not be labelled with these identities?
(20 mins)
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Brainstorm
• What is sexual identity and how does it relate to sexuality?
(10 mins)
8
Social construction, sexual identity
• Identity is not fixed and unchanging
• It is dependent on social meaning
• Sexual identities do not simply name sexual practices
• They constitute individuals as particular kinds of people
– Adulterer
– Homosexual
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• Dominant (Western) ideas about sexuality:
– Sexual behaviour naturally follows sexual difference (male and
female)
– Sexuality is natural, innate – biological instinct to reproduce; a
psychological drive
– Deviations from the natural or normal indicate immorality,
depravity or disorder
10
Social construction of sexuality
• Rather than types of persons, sexual behaviours,
sexual instincts or drives, this approach focuses on:
– Meanings
– Practices
– Identities
• And their relationship to:
– Discourses
– Institutions
– Power relations
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• Discourses
– Institutionalised ways of thinking about a possible object that, in
turn, limit how that object might be thought about
– Michel Foucault – Knowledge is power (‘power/knowledge’)
– Power exercised through discourse - it may be difficult to speak
about the thing being described in any other way
– Discourses are ‘truth claims’ that support established power
relations
• Women are more suited to raising children because they give birth
• Sex education for young people encourages sexual promiscuity
• Homosexuality is unnatural
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• Social constructionist theory
– A way of thinking about the world
– The power of culture, language and knowledge to construct
‘reality’
– There is no prior, objective ‘reality’ beyond our interpretation of it
• We all interpret ‘reality’ differently depending on our social position and
cultural background
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• Cross-cultural variability in sexuality
– Sambia of New Guinea (Herdt, 1981)
– Practices that appear the same have different meanings in
different cultures
– Same-sex sexual experience before marriage
• In many cultures, same-sex sexual activity raises personal
questions about whether one is homosexual, bisexual, or
heterosexual
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‘Sexuality’
• Historical scholarship - Foucault (1978); Weeks (1977)
• Prior to late 19th century:
– People engaged in sexual acts and behaviours, but were not understood to
have distinct sexual identities
• ‘Sexuality’ emerged as a discrete attribute of human experience in
19th century European thought
– Rise of professional discourses regulating personal conduct and behaviour
– Emergence of specific forms of sexual deviance
• Sexuality can no longer be regarded as an intrinsic attribute of ‘self’
or as biologically inherent (Gagnon & Parker, 1995)
• An outcome of intellectual and social processes bound up in
language and knowledge systems of post-Enlightenment
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Binary thinking
• Western systems of meaning-making
– Oppositional or binary
•
•
•
•
•
Day – Night
White – Black
Man – Woman
North – South
Developed – Underdeveloped, etc
• Difference is the basis to meaning-making
• One term is powerful by virtue of defining the other as different
• The power to classify, define and make knowledge about an Other –
contributes to their subjectification and marginalisation
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• Heterosexual - homosexual
• But 1960s onwards:
– From homosexual, to gay and lesbian – identity politics
movements on the basis of identification with ‘master-discourses’
– Challenged the dominant (institutionalised) meanings that applied
to the category homosexual
– Identity can be a source of power
• New possibilities for being sexual emerge even in conditions of regulation
and repression
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• Heterosexuality an ‘unmarked’ category
– Homosexuality is understood to be the deviation from the
heterosexual norm
• Brainstorm
– How do we know people are heterosexual?
– How often are people required to identify themselves as
heterosexual?
– How do they do this?
• Questions?
(5 mins)
(5 mins)
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The ‘charmed circle’
Source: Gayle Rubin (1984) Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality
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• Heterosexuality is not a natural category
– Favoured practices and norms
• Individuals are subject to regulations that construct
heterosexuality as ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ – and individuals
who identify as heterosexual as moral citizens
• Others are constituted as unnatural, sinful, ill, or immoral
• Heterosexual/homosexual binary sustains unequal sexual
and social relations, and constrains the possibilities for
sexual expression
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• Brainstorm:
– What purposes might the classification and differentiation of
sexual desires, sexual bodies, or sexual practices actually serve?
– Who benefits from this organisation of social life?
(5 mins)
21
• Masturbation
– A specific social problem in 19th century Europe (how to stop
children from engaging in ‘self-abuse’)
– Shift from shameful activity to legitimate aspect of personal
(private) sexual expression in 20th century
– A ‘normal’ activity: individuals less likely to think of themselves as
deviant or immoral
– Enormous shift in meaning over 120 years
• Debates between experts
• Political activists and social groups
• Broader shifts in social values and attitudes
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• The social construction of sexual problems in medical
discourse:
– ‘Female sexual disorder’
– ‘Erectile dysfunction’
• Are these:
– Biological problems with pharmaceutical solutions (Viagra,
Hormone Replacement Therapy)?
– Or social problems?
• Unequal gender relations between men and women?
• Understandings of male sexuality that prioritise the erection and
penetration as the definition of sex? (Tiefer, 1995; Marshall, 2006)
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Cultural objects
Show your cultural object to the group. You do not need to
add significant comment on your cultural object at this
stage
(10 mins)
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Session 2.
Sexualities in transnational
perspective
25
Session 2. Pre-reading review
Brainstorm:
• What social, economic and political processes are understood to
be central to globalisation?
• How is globalisation understood to impact upon cultures?
(5 mins)
26
• Sexuality is increasingly complicated in the context of
globalisation
– The range of factors that influence how people’s sense of sexual
identity or subjectivity take shape are increasingly difficult to trace
or determine
• Identities are not so easily understood as being shaped by
one local culture or another
• Grewal and Caplan (2001) – a more complicated model of
transnational relations might include looking at:
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Grewal & Kaplan (2001)
‘the way social and political movements are cosmopolitan
and class-based, generating new sites of power rather than
simply forms of resistance. We could also investigate the
empowering practices of consumption and engagements
with media and new technologies that create new subjects
that trouble the model of rights and citizenship. Above all,
there should be much more attention to the power relations
of travel – contacts and transactions of all kinds – that are
part of the knowledge production through which subjects
are constituted’ (2001: 761).
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• Need for research that unpacks the ‘local’-’global’,
‘powerless’-‘powerful’ binary
– Contemporary sexualities take shape in relation to traditional and
transnational sources, e.g. fashion
• Ideas about lifestyle, freedom and individualism can affect
changes in cultural and political attitudes toward the sexual,
not necessarily because of a coherent sexuality politics or
rights-based movement
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Small group discussion
•
In your society:
–
–
–
What are among the most prevalent influences on the way
people think about and practise sexuality?
In what ways are contemporary sexualities influenced by the
state or other forms of national power such as the law?
Do you see changes in sexual attitudes and practices that
might be associated with transnational processes?
(20 mins)
•
Feedback
(10 mins)
30
Session 3.
How is your sexuality socially
constructed?
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Pairs discussion
• In pairs:
– Use the questions in Handout A to help you reflect upon the
relationship between sexuality and culture in your own life
– Try to come up with two specific examples for each theme
• Over time
• In different contexts
• In relation to power and other social factors
(25 mins)
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Small group work
• In groups of 4-6, compare & contrast your findings
• On a flipchart, attempt to hierarchically organise the cultural
influences on sexuality
(25 mins)
• Feedback
• Discussion
– Are the influences identified conceived as bearing down on an already existing
sexuality, or do they constitute sexuality in social interaction?
– Does it make sense to think of sexuality in terms of discrete local or global
domains, or are these closely interrelated?
(25 mins)
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Session 4.
Sexual identity and cultural
objects
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Small group work
•
Break into groups of 3-4:
–
•
Produce a ‘critical sexual history’ of each cultural object
Use the questions in Handout B to guide your discussion:
–
–
–
Does the object evoke personal meanings from your own experiences or
those of friends and family?
What does the object reveal about social and cultural context?
Does the object evoke ideas regarding social, political and/or economic
changes and their relationship to contemporary sexualities?
(60 mins)
35
Group discussion
• To what extent do the objects belong to the particular social and
cultural contexts within which you live?
• Do the objects evoke ideas of ‘traditional’ sexualities or ideas more
strongly associated with modernity?
– Can sexuality be easily categorised as ‘traditional’ or ‘modern’?
• Do the objects suggest ideas about contemporary changes in social
context and political-economies?
– How do these changes relate to sexual identity and culture?
– What, if anything, do the objects imply about globalisation and cultural change?
• Are the objects regionally specific or culturally specific, or linked to
broader flows of information globally?
– Are such distinctions between global and local meaningful when we look at
actual cultural objects and the ideas about sexuality that they may represent?
(30 mins)
36
Conclusion
• Critical perspectives on sexual identity introduced from a
social constructionist perspective
– Common assumptions about ‘natural’, trans-historical or universal
sexuality are questioned
• Range of factors at work in the constitution of sexual
subjectivities in local and global contexts
– ‘Culture’ is not stable or fixed
• The effects of globalisation mean that the character and
limits of ‘local contexts’ are increasingly open & changeable
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• Module created by:
– Dr Paul Boyce, University of London and Dr Clare
Hemmings, London School of Economics and Political
Science
• Short course developed by:
– The Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and
Society, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia
and
– The International Association for the Study of Sexuality,
Culture and Society (IASSCS)
– With funding from The Ford Foundation
Available under an Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike licence from
Creative Commons
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