Companion to Sexuality Studies

Nancy A. Naples

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119315056
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

An inclusive and accessible resource on the interdisciplinary study of gender and sexuality

Companion to Sexuality Studies explores the significant theories, concepts, themes, events, and debates of the interdisciplinary study of sexuality in a broad range of cultural, social, and political contexts. Bringing together essays by an international team of experts from diverse academic backgrounds, this comprehensive volume provides original insights and fresh perspectives on the history and institutional regulatory processes that socially construct sex and sexuality and examines the movements for social justice that advance sexual citizenship and reproductive rights.

Detailed yet accessible chapters explore the intersection of sexuality studies and fields such as science, health, psychology, economics, environmental studies, and social movements over different periods of time and in different social and national contexts. Divided into five parts, the Companion first discusses the theoretical and methodological diversity of sexuality studies.Subsequent chapters address the fields of health, science and psychology, religion, education and the economy. They also include attention to sexuality as constructed in popular culture, as well as global activism, sexual citizenship, policy, and law. An essential overview and an important addition to scholarship in the field, this book:

• Draws on international, postcolonial, intersectional, and interdisciplinary insights from scholars working on sexuality studies around the world
• Provides a comprehensive overview of the field of sexuality studies
• Offers a diverse range of topics, themes, and perspectives from leading authorities
• Focuses on the study of sexuality from the late nineteenth century to the present
• Includes an overview of the history and academic institutionalization of sexuality studies

The Companion to Sexuality Studies is an indispensable resource for scholars, researchers, instructors, and students in gender, sexuality, and feminist studies, interdisciplinary programs in cultural studies, international studies, and human rights, as well as disciplines such as anthropology, psychology, history, education, human geography, political science, and sociology.

Part I
Introduction

1
The Diversity and Academic Institutionalization of Sexuality Studies

Nancy A. Naples

The Companion to Sexuality Studies captures the history and the institutional regulatory processes that socially construct sex and sexuality over different periods of time and in different social and national contexts. It attends to the diverse knowledges produced by sexuality researchers since the late nineteenth century through the present. This chapter also offers a brief overview of the history and academic institutionalization of sexuality studies. The second half of the chapter provides an introduction to the remaining 24 chapters that constitute this volume to demonstrate both the richness and diversity of fields and institutional formation in the areas of science, health, psychology, culture, social and economic institutions, policy, law, and social justice movements.

History of Sexuality Studies

While the field of Sexuality Studies spans over a century and a half, sexuality has been a central concern for all institutions from religion to politics and science long before that time. In writing this history, the work of sexologists became the dominant approach to sexuality research from the mid‐1880s. Sexology viewed sex and sexuality through methods informed by a strong attachment to scientific principles that were also infused with assumptions of heterosexuality and, binary gender difference as the norm.

Sociobiology influenced much of early Sexuality Studies and continues to influence many scientists interested in explaining differences in genders, sexual identities, and sexual practices (Wilson 1975; Kessler 1990). Evolutionary psychologists and neurologists continue to explore evolutionary processes in contemporary gender and sexuality research. For example, in a 1995 article on “Brain Research, Gender and Sexual Orientation,” authors Dick Swaab, Louis Gooren and Michel Hofman of the Netherlands Institute for Brain Research in Amsterdam wrote that “recent brain research revealed structural differences in the hypothalamous in relation to biological sex and sexual orientation” (p. 283). Writing over a decade later, Fernano Saravi (2008) notes that:

Activity, connectivity and structure of certain regions [of the brain] have been repeatedly shown to considerably differ between gay and straight people (insert a snarky joke about bisexual erasure) as well as cis‐ and transgenders. But, as with so many things in neuroscience, it is yet not 100% clear in which way the connection goes ‐‐ did these neural differences predetermine who you like or did your experiences and behaviour gradually shape these structures the way they are now? Still, a lot of scientists think these differences have been there from the very beginning, influenced by hormonal or genetic factors.

Andrea Ganna et al. (2019) found that “both biology and one’s environment may be a factor that influences sexuality” and that “a range of experiences in a person's development as well as social and cultural factors that all could affect behavior” (Ennis 2019, n.p.). Their findings indicate the impossibility of disentangling the biological and environmental factors in shaping an individual’s sexuality (see also Davis 2015).

Research on sexualities was also conducted by scientists and psychologists who adapted findings from animal studies of gender and sexuality. In 1938, Zoology professor Alfred C. Kinsey was approached to teach the first class on human sexuality at Indiana University. The class was designed to cover the topics of sexuality, contraception, and reproduction. Rebecca Clay (2015) reports that Kinsey found a lack of “scientific literature on human sexual behavior” and that the few research studies he found were primarily “based on small numbers of patients or were judgmental in tone” (n.p.). As a consequence, he launched a long and notable career interviewing diverse people about their sex lives. He and his colleagues collected close to 18,000 sexual histories that revealed the complicated ways people experience and express their sexuality. Kinsey is best known for developing a scale that places heterosexuality and homosexuality on a six‐point continuum to reflect his research findings that many people’s desires and behaviors cannot be categorized as either heterosexual or homosexual (Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin. 1948 [1998]). In fact, he found that while some people exhibit traits or identities that can be considered exclusively one or the other, others express mixes of both homosexuality and heterosexuality. Those who have an equal mix of both were placed at the center of the scale.

In the late 1950s and 1960s, US sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson (1966) faced a backlash from the medical profession on their research into sexual response using techniques including videotaping couples’ sexual encounters and individuals masturbating. Their work subsequently inspired the expansion of sexuality research that continues to this day through the Institute of Sex Research established at Indiana University and renamed the Kinsey Institute in 1981.

Beginning in the 1970s, gay and lesbian social movement activists and their allies inside and outside of the academy pushed for incorporation of more critical and interdisciplinary analyses to challenge longstanding scientific, psychological, and criminological approaches which had pathologized sexual desire, expression and behaviors which did not adhere to heterosexuality. Early courses often included co‐teaching by faculty from different disciplines to offer broad understanding of sexual diversity and sexual practices over time and place. While the courses on Human Sexuality that were offered in universities before that time were more likely to be taught by scientists and psychologists, academic faculty in Sociology, Anthropology, and History brought attention to the powerful role of socialization, culture, and historical context for producing and reproducing sexual norms and behaviors (Leacock 1981; Lerner 1977; Rossi 1973). Faculty trained in the Humanities fostered recognition of the role of language and discourse for constructing what counts as legitimate sexual expression and whose experiences and artistic expressions have been devalued or ignored in academic curricula and research (Cixous and Sellers 1994; Nochlin 1971).

Michel Foucault’s (1978) now classic work on the History of Sexuality identified hidden regulatory processes that included repression of sexuality. Foucault notes how Sigmund Freud made some progress in opening up sexuality as a fundamental site for understanding identify formation and psychopathology but accomplished this by “normalizing the functions of psychoanalysis” (p. 5) as the site for analysis of sexual “perversions” (p. 42).

By the late 1970s, the women’s movement organized and organized against gender inequality in marriage and other social and economic institutions, and the gay and lesbian movement was effectively pushing against the presumption of heteronormativity and the pathologizing of so‐called nonnormative sexualities in academic research and social policy. Furthermore, as feminist anthropologist Gayle Rubin explains,

as soon as you get away from the presumptions of heterosexuality, or a simple hetero‐homo opposition, differences in sexual conduct are not very intelligible in terms of binary models. Even the notion of a continuum is not a good model for sexual variations.

(Rubin with Butler 1997, 76–77; also see Rubin 1984)

Lesbian feminist scholars also challenged the presumption of heterosexuality and marginalization of lesbian sexuality within the feminist movement (see, for example, Poirot 2009) and paved the way for both the possibility of separate institutional academic formations as well as theorizing complex intersections between sexuality and gender.

One of the many contributions of feminist analysis of gender was recognition of its social construction, rather than the biological essentialist understanding found in the dominant research paradigm. As Mary Crawford (2006) explains:

Distinguishing sex from gender was a very important step in recognizing that biology is not destiny – that many of the apparent differences between women and men might be societally imposed rather than natural or inevitable.

(p. 26, quoted in Muehlenhard and Peterson 2011, n.p.)

In the late 1980s, feminists, began to reconsider the distinction between sex and gender. As Chalene Muehlenhard and Zoe Peterson point out in their assessment of the diversity of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Editors
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Theoretical and Methodological Diversity
• Part III: Health, Science, and Psychology
• Part IV: Sexuality and Institutions
• Part V: Popular Culture
• Part VI: Citizenship, Policy, and Law
• Part VII: Human Rights and Social Justice Movements
• Index
• End User License Agreement