Sexuality and the Subject

The study of sexuality is a vital area of contemporary social theory. During the course of the twentieth century, in Western society, thinking on sexuality shifted from a conception of sex as a biological, essential, and fixed aspect of human “nature” to theorizations of sexuality as a social construct, shaped and regulated through cultural discourses and other social formations.

In large part, this shift was a direct result of feminist challenges to a binary understanding of gender that traditionally rested on fixed, mutually opposed categories of “male” and “female.” A number of feminist scholars pointed to the lack of clear-cut biological differences between the two sexes; and increasingly, gender was theorized to be an ideological enterprise rather than a natural fact. The French feminist Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) catalyzed these debates when she famously wrote, “One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one.” Her argument for the social construction of gender was taken up by feminists seeking to attack the gendered power differences that were at the heart of women's oppression. Yet these theoretical breakthroughs led to a quandary: If the category is eradicated, how then can women unite for political action against oppressions based on that category? The problem is one of a politics of identity. Debates within the feminist movement continue to hinge on whether women share certain “essential” characteristics or whether “woman” is a socially constructed category.

Radically questioning these essentialized categorizations of gender has had powerful implications for the related notion of sexuality. The ways in which medical and legal definitions of gender impinge on sexuality offer an understanding of sexuality, too, as shifting and ideologically driven rather than natural or essential. As a result of such theorization, the idea of sexuality has changed from a binary conception of hetero-versus homosexual to the more pluralistic notion of sexualities that are not biologically determined. In this area, as well, debates rage over whether sexuality is genetically based, whether it is a matter of individual agency, or whether it is ideologically directed. These theoretical discussions have powerful implications for our understanding of identity or subjectivity, because gender and sexuality are constitutive elements in the formulation of the self.

In these debates over essentialism and social constructionism, there has been a growing recognition of the mechanisms of ideology through which gender and sexuality are given meaning in society. The field of feminist cultural studies focuses on the analysis of representations of gender and sexuality and their interactions with social processes and human behaviors. As part of such analyses, the related functions of race, ethnicity, nationality, class, age, and other social vectors have been noted. The social struggles and movements of the mid-twentieth century were especially significant in revealing the multiple imbrications of antihegemonic identity politics. Thus, feminist analysis, which in its early manifestations was centrally concerned with gender and power, now seeks to account for the variety of factors that work together to construct hierarchies of power and privilege in society. Gay and lesbian theorists and critical race theorists have also engaged in multiperspectival approaches to understanding power and oppression and how cultural discourses and texts reproduce hierarchies of class, gender, race, and sexuality.

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