Gender & Sexuality

Question 1

Psychoanalytic perspective on sexuality (Freud)

Answer 1

1. Oedipus Complex
   -girls, transfer desire from mother to father to other men
   -boys, transfer desire from mother to other women
   • For girls, pleasure decentred from clitoris and on to vagina
   • Failure to achieve heterosexuality through these means, also a gendered failure

Question 2

Explain the idea of sexuality constructed through gender categories (MacKinnon)

Answer 2

• presents the agenda behind constructions of gender/sexuality
• link between gender, sexuality and patriarchal power
• heterosexuality as microcosm of wider male power and control over women
• control women through institution of heterosexuality (not just sexual practices)
• proved by restrictions on abortion, birth control, harassment, prostitution
• privileging of heterosexuality is about male power over women

Question 3

Explain claiming a political lesbian identity

Answer 3

• people are forced into compulsory heterosexuality, women coerced into it through routine socialization, the media, the family, institution of motherhood
• heterosexuality may not be a ‘preference’ at all, but has had to be imposed, managed, organized, propagandized, and maintained by force
• this movement focuses on the importance of removing sexuality from gender by claiming a political lesbian identity
• lesbian existence and lesbian continuum

Question 4

Explain essentialist view of sexuality as natural

Answer 4

• most commonly held view
• heterosexuality is ‘natural’, something we are born with
• needed for procreation so it must be natural
• legitimized when we focus on mating and reproduction
• the moral stance: there is one natural, normal sexuality and anything else is sinful, perverse, wrong and deserving of punishment
• ex. criminalizing homosexuality
• originally influenced and heavily sustained through theological, biological and (later on) medical discourses

Question 5

Explain the theory of sexuality as a social construction

Answer 5

• sexuality is constructed through institutions like law, the state, media, education, family, sexual education
• sexual norms change, sexual attitudes change
• foucault: desires are not pre-existing biological entities
• new sexualities are constantly produced
• sexuality is sustained by a variety of languages/discourses (scientific, religious, popular, medical) that tell us what sex is, what it ought to be
• people use these discourses to direct their practices – these scripts help us make sense of our sexuality

Question 6

What is the “repressive hypothesis”? Who are the “other Victorians”?

Answer 6

• supposes that since the rise of the bourgeoisie, any expenditure of energy on purely pleasurable activities has been frowned upon
• as a result, sex has been treated as a private, practical affair that only properly takes place between a husband and a wife. Sex outside these confines is not simply prohibited, but repressed
• discourse on sexuality is confined to marriage
• those who turned to psychiatrists or prostitutes in the Victorian era as the “other Victorians.” These “other Victorians” created their own space for discourse on sexuality that freed them from the confines of conventional morality
• Unlike the aristocracy that preceded it, the bourgeoisie became rich through work and industriousness. Such a class would value a stern work ethic, and would frown upon wasting energy on frivolous pursuits. Sex for pleasure, then, became an object of disapproval, as an unproductive waste of energy

Question 7

History of ‘sexperts’ over time

Answer 7

1. The Priest
   - heterosexual marriage blessed by the Church
   - remains intact through ideologies like monogamy, reproduction, etc.
   - families policed through the ideologies of religion
2. The Doctor
   - 18th, 19th century medical intervention into family life
   - sexuality treated as matter of the state
   - preserve ideas of purity, sinfulness, redemption – but take on a scientific world view
3. Early Sexology
   - early beginnings, late 19th century
4. Havelock Ellis (1897) – Sexual Inversion
   - much larger focus on classification of types of sexualities
   - ‘Perversions’ were pathologized, ex. bdsm, fetishism, exhibitionism, homosexuality
   - heterosexuality – monogamy, reproduction, etc. – remained the focus of what was ‘normal’ and ‘acceptable’ behaviour
   - medical dominance over female bodies particularly common

Question 8

Alfred Kinsey

Answer 8

• his work has been a decisive factor in changing attitudes about sex
• credited with moving sex and sexual behaviour away from the medical discourse
• The Kinsey Report – 18,000 interviews
• challenged major assumptions about sex and what people were interested in sexually
• homosexuality, extra-marital affairs, premarital sex major areas where his research changed the way we think about them
• ‘The Kinsey Scale’: there is a difference between a sexual identity and sexual behaviours
• the development of a homosexual identity is dependent on the meanings the person attaches to the concepts of homosexual and homosexuality”
• critique of essentialism is that different meanings can attach themselves to the same acts
• KS is more confirmation that sexuality is socially produced
• desire is one thing, identifying with a particular social identity is another