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 midâ1880s. 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 âBrain Research, Gender and Sexual Orientation,â authors Dick Swaab, Louis Gooren and Michel Hofman of the Netherlands Institute for Brain Research in Amsterdam wrote that ârecent brain research revealed structural differences in the hypothalamous in relation to biological sex and sexual orientationâ (p. 283). Writing over a decade later, Fernano Saravi (2008) notes that:
Andrea Ganna et al. (2019) found that âboth biology and oneâs environment may be a factor that influences sexualityâ and that âa range of experiences in a person's development as well as social and cultural factors that all could affect behaviorâ (Ennis 2019, n.p.). Their findings indicate the impossibility of disentangling the biological and environmental factors in shaping an individualâs 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 âscientific literature on human sexual behaviorâ and that the few research studies he found were primarily âbased on small numbers of patients or were judgmental in toneâ (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 sixâpoint continuum to reflect his research findings that many peopleâs 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 couplesâ 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 coâteaching 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 Foucaultâs (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 ânormalizing the functions of psychoanalysisâ (p. 5) as the site for analysis of sexual âperversionsâ (p. 42).
By the late 1970s, the womenâs 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 soâcalled nonnormative sexualities in academic research and social policy. Furthermore, as feminist anthropologist Gayle Rubin explains,
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:
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...
