Author: Kellen Fu
Layout: oKurA
The history and theories related to sexuality are rarely considered as a subject of discussion in public in China today. However, the trend of perceiving gender identity and sexual orientation as fluid and unstable is gaining popularity worldwide. The book sexuality, written by Veronique Mottier, is a short introduction of a few important events and theories in the domain of sexuality in chronological order. It is perfect for laypersons like me and you to get a basic understanding of sexuality. In this article, I plan to summarize the essence of sexuality in five sections to give you a glance at how the concept of sexuality grows.
Before sexuality
Greek society advocated adult male citizens to become good citizens in the role of the dominator. In this political context, sexual relationships intertwined with power. For male citizens, penetrating is a way of showing his possession of power. It did not matter whether he penetrated a female or a male teenager. Moreover, they didn’t identify themselves in terms of who they had sexual relationships with. Later, in Christian culture, ethics promoted virginity and sexual abstinence. The founding father of Western Christianity, Augustine, even considered sex as one of “original sins”. Christians tended to perceive marriage and sex only as a way to reproduce.
The invention of sexuality
From the Enlightenment, sexual libertinism gradually gained popularity, and Christian ethics were no longer at the center of public morality. Meanwhile, influenced by Darwinian sexual selection theory, sex became a subject in scientific studies. In 1879, the term “sexuality” was compiled in the Oxford English Dictionary, as “possessions of sexual powers, or capability of sexual feelings”. During the 19th and 20th centuries, biological models of sexuality were quite popular. People defined deviancy from the norm as any practices that had no use in reproduction because people assumed the biological instinct for sex is simply to bear children. Thus, heterosexual acts were considered as only natural sexual behaviors. Also, from the 19th century, people started to separate the homosexual as a different species which had totally different abnormal biological instincts, and the modern concept of homosexuality was born. From then on, people were divided into “heterosexual”, “homosexual”, or “bisexual”, either by the society or by themselves. Also, at that time, homosexuality was more perceived as a mental illness that needed to be cured instead of a crime. Nevertheless, the biological models have been heavily challenged from the 1970s from anti-essentialist perspectives. Those scholars have emphasized that sexuality is based on the social nature of sexual experiences and strongly influenced by political constructs, in other words, the relations of power. Moreover, it is worth knowing that it’s hard to define a person as a homosexual in terms of one’s sexual behaviors. According to Kinsey’s studies, 37% of the male sampled in the U.S in the early 1950s had experienced an orgasm in sexual activities with another man, while most of them didn’t consider themselves as homosexuals, which also questioned the credibility of biological models of sexuality.
Feminist critiques of sexuality
There were many controversies and debates around sexuality within the domain of feminism. Feminists didn’t always have a uniform agenda. For example, first-wave feminist campaigns originated at the end of the 19th century. According to moral and biological models of sexuality, they set a high moral standard for women and advocated to protect women from men’s violent sexual instincts. However, some feminists who participated in 19th century radical sex reform fought for greater sexual liberation for both men and women. Another example, some feminists were interested in Marxism and Freudianism and tried to find a link between capitalism and sexual repression against women, while other feminists found uncomfortable with them because apparent misogyny lied in those theories. Also, a greater debate, also known as feminist sex wars, among feminists was whether pornography and prostitution should be banned or not.
Moreover, more and more women started to realize the oppression against women were lying in the fundamental relationships with men, and some of the feminists thus argued for “political lesbianism”, which advanced that “feminism is a theory, lesbianism the practice”, and even “lesbian separatism”, which advocated the exclusion of both men and heterosexual women in women’s lives.
AIDS and eugenics
The great extent of sexual liberation only lasted less than 20 years. Since the 1980s, AIDS has become popular among people, especially within the gay community. Because AIDS was primarily considered as a kind of “gay disease”, the government response was not quick enough, which led to the establishment of self-organized activities and organizations, such as GMHC and ACT UP, to fight for better environment and treatment. As time went by, because more and more heterosexual people were also diagnosed as AIDS positive, the government realized that AIDS risks involved in every kind of unprotected sexual practices but not limited to gay sexual behaviors, and started to provide funding for AIDS-related organizations and popularize the idea of safe sex.
The practices of eugenics were popular from the end of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century. Eugenicists advocated that citizens should accomplish their eugenic duties to make sure the quality of their next generation. In their opinion, sterilization that targeted to certain people, such as inferior race, physically or mentally retarded people, criminals, and abnormal people, including homosexuals and transgenders, can increase the competency of their nation and relax financial burden (because most targets were poor or disabled people that needed government funding). Also, it is worth mentioning that sterilization was highly gender-biased. In Sweden, over 90% of the sterilization were implemented on women.
The future of sex: queer theory
Queer theory emphasizes the social constructed nature of sexuality, which advocates the fluidity of gender identity and sexual orientation. It rejects the binary categories, and thus refuses to identify a person as simply “gay or straight” and “woman or man”. In this way, they challenge the fundamental relationships between “two sexes”. Consequently, queer theory is considered as “permanent rebellion” and “subversion of dominant social meanings and identities”. Politically, they argue for an alliance based on the identity of queer over the identity of woman or black. However, critics of queer theory claim that they oversimplify the complex issues regarding races and gender inequality.
Epilogue
后
记
Thanks to Veronique’s brilliant book, sexuality, I have got the chance to perceive LGBTQIA+ and feminist movements from a different perspective. Because people’s attitudes and society’s constructs of gender identity and sexual orientation are highly changeable based on different cultural, historical, and political contexts, we need to be more open to embrace the new interpretations of sexuality instead of confining ourselves in a one-way street, which believes the cis-gender heterosexual is the only right and acceptable choice.
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