PROGRAMA DOUTORAL EM SEXUALIDADE HUMANA

História e Antropossociologia da Sexualidade

Sociologia e Sexualidade

Sofia Aboim
ICS-ULisboa
sofia.aboim@ics.ulisboa.pt

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Aims:
1. Examine the connections between sexuality and sociology
over time and the history of the construction of sexuality.

2. Introduce and critique biological determinism and biologicist

understandings of sex, gender and sexuality.

3. Examine how Critical Sexuality Studies (re)defined notions of

sex, sexuality and gender.

4. Examine the relationships between sex, sexuality and gender

through consideration of heteronormativity and
sexual/gendered inequity.

5. Examine how contemporary sociology addresses sexuality/ies.

Aim 1.
Connecting
sexuality and
sociology
over time
 1. Alliance with medical knowledge
and the birth of sexology from the
19th onwards.
2. Invisibility of sex and sexuality until
the post-war period, namely the
1960s and 1970s.
3. Oversight: imperialism/colonialism
What and hierarchical systems were
sociology had founded upon sexual/gender power
to justify the inferiority of the
to say about colonized, women, minorities, etc.
sexuality? 4. Emphasis on reproduction and the
‘gender normals’ (Garfinkel, 1967)
by functionalism (Parsons and the
Chicago School).
5. The sexual “revolution” (Wilhelm
Reich, 1936; Herbert Marcuse, Eros
and Civilization, 1956).
 The study of sexuality

◦ Havelock Ellis (1859-1939)

◦ Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935)
◦ Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902)
◦ Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
Sociology, ◦ Alfred Kinsey (1894-1956)
sexuality and ◦ Egas Moniz (1874-1955)
medicine
Problem of defining the ‘normal’:
◦ Heterosexuality
◦ Masculinity & Feminity
◦ Whiteness
◦ Repression and sexual drive
 v Sexology is dominated by white, middle-
class, heterosexist attitudes
v Sexuality research is based on male
sexuality /oversight (e.g. female genital
alienation, C. Labuski)
The birth of v Women as passive and submissive, but
Sexology… dangerous (hysteria)
v Sexuality used by men to maintain power
over women
v Lack research on female orgasm,
satisfaction
Em 1925, Freud escreveu (‘Some Psychical
Consequences of the Anatomic Distinction between
the Sexes’, 1925: 253):
Once a woman has become aware of the wound in her
narcissism, she develops, like a scar, a feeling of inferiority.
When she has passed beyond the stage when she first tried
to explain her lack of a penis as being a personal
punishment to herself and has realised that this sexual trait
is universal, she begins to share the contempt felt by men
for a sex that is the lesser in such an important respect as
this, and, in trying at least to maintain this opinion, insists
on being like a man.
São Tomás de Aquino (1225-1274)

“Em animais perfeitos, gerados pelo coito, a força activa está

no sémen do macho; mas a matéria fetal é dada pela
mulher... E depois da alma sensível, pelo poder do princípio
activo no sémen, ter sido produzida como parte principal da
coisa gerada, então é que essa alma do feto começa a
desenvolver-se em direcção à perfeição do seu próprio
corpo, através do alimento e do crescimento.

(São Tomás de Aquino, Summa Theologica II, q. 18, art. 1, ad

4.)
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many doctors taught that masturbation was harmful, and so devices, such
as the two barbed rings and the shock box shown here, were created to keep children-especially boys-from
achieving unwanted erections.
The ’cure’ of hysteria

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The Unisexual
body
ØPre-Enlightenment
ØMale and female bodies were
fundamentally a single entity
ØFemale reproductive organs are
the same as male organs, but
inverted.
 Ø18th century – Male and female bodies seen
as totally different (Lacqueur 1992; 1997
The Shildrick; 2000 Schiebinger)
dimorphic ØJustification, through science, for social
body inequalities
ØIntense interest in sexual difference, not
only at the superficial level, but even to
skeletons, brains, hormones, etc.
All in all...

"Ideology, not the accuracy of

observation, determined how
bodies were seen and what
differences mattered."
(Lacqueur 1992: 88)
Sociology, sexuality and medicine

The study of sexuality by sociology

◦ Functionalist canon and sex roles

◦ Criticism of the ‘gender normal’
◦ Frankfurt School and sexual freedom
◦ Ethnometholology, Garfinkel and the study of Agnes (1967)
◦ Gagnon and Simon (1973) and the concept of sexual scripts
◦ Critique to medicalization: Peter Conrad; Michel Foucault and The History of Sexuality
◦ Social constructionism
◦ Sexual/intimate citizenhip

◦ Two main developments:

◦ Critique of the normal/deviant binary
◦ Emphasis on the individual and self (sexual) realization
 Sexual expression varies across
societies

Institutions influence societies'

Sociological hold regarding the expression
Theory of sexuality
• Family
• Religion
• Economy
• Medicine
• Law
• Media
 Sexuality research is based on male sexuality

Social construction of sexuality based on power,

historically held by men

Feminist Women as passive and submissive

Erasure of women’s bodies (e.g.
Theory https://anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.10
02/ase.2173?af=R)
Sexuality used by men to maintain power over women

Lack research on female orgasm, satisfaction

 Heterosexism and homophobia should be
resisted
Heterosexism is not the norm, with all else
Queer Theory deviant
Sexual categories are cultural constructions
that limit and restrain
 A move from the biopolitical to regimes of governmentality,
as proposed by later Foucault

• Biopolitics: the style of government that regulates populations through

biopower” (the application and impact of political power on all aspects of
human life); Michel Foucault: Security, Territory, Population, p.1 (2007)
• Governmentality: as the "art of government" in a wide sense, i.e. with an
idea of "government" that is not limited to state politics alone. Rather it
includes a wide range of control techniques that apply to a variety of
objects, from one's control of the self to the “biopolitical” control of
populations, whether by the state or other disciplinary institutions and
forms of knowledge.

The struggles as a field for the definition of normality

(Bourdieu)

Rethinking medicalization and pathologization and separate

Theoretical processes as a result of inner and outer struggles, which
backgrounds might lead to a reconceptualization.

The need to rethink the connection between control and the

boundaries of the human itself; and henceforth the role of
medicine and other regulatory institutions and discourses.
 The history of medical classifications

Example:
The legal turn for gender self-determination
without a medical diagnosis

The paradoxes: the legal discourse of human

rights vs the perpetuation of a medical
condition
Historical
background:
From illness to life-style, from the sick role
to the consumer ‘self’
 1) The medical construction of the biological model of
the transsexual from Magnus Hirschfeld and
Four Havelock Ellis to Harry Benjamin: the birth of a new
biopolitical category under legal (and medical)

historical suspicion
◦ Psychiatry and psychotherapy
moments ◦ Religion
of struggle ◦ Radical ‘womanist’ feminisms
 2) The alliance between the medical and the legal: the
pathologization/ psychiatryzation moment and the
recognition of a ‘condition’, from disorder, dysphoria and
now incongruence.
◦ “Trans-sexualism” only first appeared in the International Statistical
Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems - ICD-9
(1975).
◦ In 1980, “transsexualism” and “gender identity disorder of
childhood” appeared in DSM-III. Since then, placement of gender

Four
diagnoses has shifted over time within both ICD and DSM.
◦ During the revision process for DSM-5 (2013), LGBT advocacy
groups lobbied for removing gender diagnoses from the manual, as
historical homosexuality was removed in 1973. In addition to the name change
(gender dysphoria), diagnostic criteria were made more stringent to

moments avoid diagnosing gender variance per se as a mental disorder.

◦ In contrast to DSM-5, the ICD-11 operated under a different set of

of struggle parameters. WHO (World Health Organization), a United Nations

agency, alerted that there is substantial evidence that the stigma
associated with the intersection of transgender status and mental
disorders contributes to precarious legal status, human rights
violations, and barriers to appropriate health care for this
population.
◦ Changes in ICD-11 (2018): (1) retaining gender diagnoses to
preserve access to care but (2) moving these categories out of the
ICD-11 chapter “Mental and Behavioural Disorders.” The diagnoses,
renamed “gender incongruence of childhood” (GIC) for
prepubescent children and “gender incongruence of adolescence
and adulthood,” will be included in a proposed new chapter called
“Conditions Related to Sexual Health.”
 ICD-11 for Mortality and Morbidity Statistics
(May 2018)
HA40 Gender incongruence of adolescence or adulthood

Gender Incongruence of Adolescence and Adulthood is characterized by a

marked and persistent incongruence between an individual´s experienced
gender and the assigned sex, which often leads to a desire to ‘transition’, in order
to live and be accepted as a person of the experienced gender, through
hormonal treatment, surgery or other health care services to make the
individual´s body align, as much as desired and to the extent possible, with the
experienced gender. The diagnosis cannot be assigned prior the onset of
puberty. Gender variant behaviour and preferences alone are not a basis for
assigning the diagnosis.

https://icd.who.int/browse11_2018-05-18/l-
m/en#/http%3a%2f%2fid.who.int%2ficd%2fentity%2f90875286
 3) The trans activist moment from the 1990s
onwards and the fight against medical control:
◦ The emergence of a corpus of trans knowledge
◦ Ascendancy of views of gender (and sex) as
socio-cultural constructions against the
Four biological model
◦ Proliferation of categories and juxtaposition
historical between emic and etic

moments
4) From the 2000s onwards: The multiplication
of struggle of modes of governamentality (regimes of
disciplinarity) and the separation of the legal
and the medical.
Aim 2.
Challenging
biological
determinism and
defining sex,
sexuality and
gender
Biological determinism,
sex and sexuality
• Biologically determinist theories of various kinds
reduce social organisation and social complexity
to an effect of biology or nature
– Biological determinists include
sociobiologists, some geneticists,
psychologists and ‘pop psychology’
writers
• Complex, socially embedded behaviours have
all been explained as an effect of evolutionary
reproductive strategies
• Presently, biologicism is on the rise with the
conservative backlash
In the biologically determinist school of thought:
◦ Biological facts of sex are thought to constitute natural differences
between men and women
◦ Heterosexuality is considered a “natural” outcome of this sex
difference due to the drive to reproduce the species

Key assumption driving biological determinism:

◦ The primary function and goal of all human
sexual activity is the reproduction of the species
◦ Humans have sex because we must reproduce
◦Homosexuality becomes explained as an “unnatural”
genetic deviation
‘The gay gene’
Geneticists search for a ‘gay gene’ to prove there is a
biological basis for, and explanation of, male homosexuality
◦ Small differences found between the post-mortem brains of
heterosexual and homosexual young men (Simon LeVay,
1991)
◦ Research on pairs of homosexual brothers found that some
had similar markers on the X chromosome, indicating a
genetic basis for sexuality (Hamer et al. 1993)
LeVay’s work proved difficult to replicate
Hamer et al.’s work has been refuted
 Sex hormones

Charles-Edouard Brown-Sequard
1889 – reported results of self-medication to the
Societe de Biologie (Paris)
Self-injection with crushed guinea pig and dog
testicles
"a marked renewal of vigor and mental clarity"
Organoterapia
 “Even a Congresswoman must defer to
scientific truths…there just are physical and
psychological inhabitants that limit a female’s
potential… I would still rather have a male
John F Kennedy make the Cuban missile crisis
decisions than a female of the same age who
Hormones could possibly be subject to the curious
mental aberrations of that age group”
and gender
Dr Edgar Berman (personal physician to VP
difference Hubert Humphrey (1970)), cited in Fausto-
Sterling, 1992: 91

About gender and hormones,

https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S0104-
59702008000500007&script=sci_arttext&tlng
=en
 "Many – perhaps most – of the mysteries of
how the brain works have not yet been
unraveled, but the differences between the
masculine and female brains – and the
processes by which they become different –
Different are now clear. There is more to be known,
brains more details and qualification perhaps to add
– but the nature and cause of brain
differences are now known beyond
speculation, beyond prejudice, and beyond
reasonable doubt." (Moir and Jessel 1989:
11)
Challenges of Feminism
Anne Fausto-Sterling

ØChallenging "scientific" evidence /scientific

process (see also, Birke 1999; Oudshoorn (ch.
3 in Schiebinger (ed.) 2000)
ØMedical management of intersex children
Øhttps://gender.eui.eu/new-identity-identity-
rethinking-sex-gender-anne-fausto-sterling/
ØDualisms in Duel:
https://www.scielo.br/pdf/cpa/n17-
18/n17a02.pdf
The Trans question:
Feminine Essentialism
Germaine Greer, author of the best-seller The Female Eunuch, accused Glamour
magazine of misogyny “for honouring Caitlyn Jenner at its Women of the Year
ceremony (2015), claiming that the move was tantamount to affirming that with
enough plastic surgery someone who is assigned male at birth can “be a better
woman” than someone “who is just born a woman.”
“Post-operative or even non post-operative transsexual MtF people do not sound like,
behave like or look like a woman, but they dare it say so.’ (Germaine Greer:
Transgender women are 'not women' - BBC Newsnight, 2015)

Andrea Dworkin in 1974 wrote (Woman Hating, pp-113-14):

“It is commonly and wrongly said that male transvestites through the use of
makeup and costuming caricature the women they would become, but any
real knowledge of the romantic ethos makes clear that these men have
penetrated to the core experience of being a woman, a romanticized
construct.”
 Doing better in arguments about sex, gender, and trans rights,
by Kathleen Stock, 2019

‘Several of us endorse a cluster account of

femaleness, according to which
possession of some vague number of a
certain set of endogenously-produced
primary sex characteristics — including
vagina, ovaries, womb, fallopian tubes,
and XX chromosomes — is sufficient for
femaleness, though no particular
characteristic is necessary or essential.

Whether or not this is ultimately right, the main point is that a cluster account is
consistent with realism about biological sex categories, and with the claim that
those who have none of the named primary characteristics in question cannot be
correctly categorized as female. In other words, our view still rules out all or nearly
all trans women from counting as female, without committing us to an essentialist
account of femaleness.’
 Erasure
The erasure leaflet - Socialist Feminist Network

In a nutshell, trans women seem to be replacing the main enemy (C. Delphy).
 • If reproductive differences between
the sexes “naturally” drive individual
behaviour, why do we need social
institutions that police and set moral
guidelines for sexual behaviour?
– The family, religion, government,
the military…
Challenging
• The research evidence for many
determinism biologically determinist claims simply
does not hold up
– Sex “difference” research may be
popular, but it masks a great deal of
evidence for sex similarities
– Differences are often context-
specific
Despite continuing interest in a genetic basis
for sexuality, no gay or heterosexual gene
yet found
Most sex is not reproductive
◦ Human sexuality more complicated than
‘survival of the species’ or of one’s gene pool

‘Biological drive’ arguments are political

◦ Often used to resist social change and
legitimate an unequal, gendered and
sexualised social order
◦ Institutionalised power relations affect
understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality
Aim 3.
Examine Critical
Sexuality Studies
definitions of sex,
sexuality and
gender
 Complexities of sex & gender
• Is there a difference
– Sex is biological (?) – male, female, also intersex (reproductive
differences based on genitalia, chromosomes, hormones)
• Also refers to sexual acts, as in ‘having sex’

– Gender is ‘the structure of social relations that centres on the

reproductive arena, and the set of practices that bring
reproductive distinctions into social processes’ (Connell 2002: 10)
• Gender underlies assumptions regarding ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’
behaviour
Hijra in India Caster Semenya, South A ‘Tom’ in Thailand
African athlete

Trinidadian
Jowelle De Souza
Temptation to make an absolute distinction between sex and
gender:
◦ ‘Nature vs nurture’ or ‘essentialism vs social constructionism’
Understanding of the sexed body as ‘natural’ can sustain social
inequity between men and women
Butler (1990) argued that gender determines sex
◦ Sex is not ‘natural’ but a social construction
◦ Knowledge systems used to describe and reinforce sex
differences already gendered by the language used to express
ideas about the body
 Cannot neatly separate the sexed body from
the gendered body
◦ Mutually constituted through sociocultural
Sociology and processes

sexuality Biological science is a social construction,

expressed through language which is
today gendered and value-laden
In Critical Sexuality Studies, the ‘natural’
body is political
‘Bodies cannot be understood as just the objects of
social process…they are active participants in
social process...
They participate through their capacities,
development and needs … through the direction set
by their pleasures and skills.
Bodies must be seen as sharing social agency.’
(Connell 2002: 40)
 Quite a new term
◦ Came into English, French and German usage
at the end of the 18th century
◦ Usually meant reproduction through sexual activity
among plants and animals
◦ Used in relation to love and sex matters in
European discourse in the 1830s
What is What does it mean according to the
‘sexuality’? dictionary?
◦ Depends on which dictionary you read
◦ Mirriam Webster (2013): The quality or state
of being sexual
• Four intertwining strands of sexuality:
– Sexual desire or attraction
• To whom (or in some cases what) someone is attracted (physically and
emotionally)
– Sexual activity or behaviour
• What a person does or likes to do sexually (intercourse, masturbation, oral
sex, sexual fetishes)
– Sexual identity
• How someone describes their sense of self as a sexual being (e.g.
heterosexual, bisexual, lesbian, gay, homosexual)
– Sexual experience
• Observations of others’ sexualities; education or training related to
sexuality; experiences that may not have been consensual

• No clear boundaries!
The sexuality matrix
Desire

Behavior Identity

Experience
 Sexuality … [is] an historical construction
which brings together a host of different
biological and mental possibilities, and
cultural forms — gender identity, bodily
differences, reproductive capacities, needs,
General desires, fantasies, erotic practices,
institutions and values — which need not be
theoretical linked together, and in other societies have
definition not been.
Weeks, J (2003: 7) Sexuality: Second Edition,
Routledge

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• Are these images of sex, sexuality or gender?
Images by Rodell Warner from the “Photobooth” series (2009-2011)

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• Are these images of sex, sexuality or gender?
Aim 4.
Heteronormativity
and sexual
stratification
Like gender, sexuality is political. It is organised into
systems of power, which reward and encourage some
individuals and activities, while punishing and suppressing
others.
Gayle Rubin (1984: 309)
“Sexual order”
Heteronormativity
… the institutions, structures of understanding and practical orientations that make
heterosexuality seem not only coherent—that is, organized as a sexuality — but also
privileged. (Berlant and Warner (2000: 312))

Heteropatriarchy
…the systems that support the combination of heteronormativity and patriarchy
(male dominance)

Maintained and perpetuated by social institutions

◦ e.g. media, education, law, family, religion, healthcare systems
◦ usually through exclusion and marginalisation
Rubin’s ‘charmed circle’
 Charmed circle: summary

Diagram not intended to be a fixed representation of how

heteronormativity works at all times, in all places
◦ The inner circle boundary line can shift over time, and from place-to-
place, for instance:
◦ Homosexuality and same-sex marriage
◦ Recognition of a “third gender”
◦ Prostitution and sex work
◦ Polygamy is illegal in Caribbean territories and Southern Africa, but it is commonly practiced.
◦ Intergenerational sex between males was permitted in Ancient Greece but is illegal in Greece now.
◦ Changes in Portugal across time
◦ Global change and backlash

◦ Whoever controls the boundary determines what is normal and

abnormal, and controls the system of rewards and punishment
Aim 5.
Understanding
sexualities as
historically and socially
constructed

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 Human sexuality is understood as:
◦ Diverse
◦ Dynamic and
◦ Deeply inventive

The field challenges fixed notions of sex,

gender and sexuality
Conclusion
It grounds the interrelationship between
these concepts in specific social, historical,
cultural contexts
Critical Sexuality Studies challenges the notion that sex
and sexuality are biologically determined, but:
◦ This does not mean the body or biological
limitations/capacities are irrelevant
Sex, sexuality and gender are invariably linked to power
relations—institutional and interpersonal—and to
systems of regulation and reward
Heteronormativity and heteropatriarchy exist across the
world, but take variable forms