sexuality

sexuality This word initially denoted organisms capable of reproducing sexually (thus plants had sexuality), and was applied to things rather than people (humans had sex, a man's spermatozoa had sexuality). Then, early in the nineteenth century, it began to be used to denote a whole nexus of concepts around sexual expression, sexual activity, and sexual powers, detached from the original connotation. In spite of this, it took some time to develop as a concept: for example, the pioneer British sexologist Havelock Ellis entitled his series of investigations Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897–1928), rather than Studies in Sexuality, which might now seem a more appropriate title.

Freud and Foucault

It was perhaps Freud who gave it its particular modern meaning as a term describing not only the sexual drive as such but the direction which it takes in a particular individual. He distinguished the sexual instinct from the sexual object, arguing that the very numerous instances in which the instinct was not attached to something appropriate — a suitable member of the opposite sex — suggested that the instinct was initially independent of any object. The sexual instinct permitted much variation in the choice of objects it was directed towards, and often also, he pointed out, a considerable lack of discrimination — he cited bestiality as an example. These vagaries, however, were not to be confused with insanity. Sexuality was thus not coterminous with the sexual instinct. Freud was accused of making sexuality too important, allocating it a central place in human motivation and extending its ramifications into areas that many had not previously thought to be sexual. It could, conversely, be argued that he was making explicit an obsession with the importance of sex that characterized his times.

Michel Foucault has famously described sexuality, in A History of Sexuality; Volume I, Introduction (1976), as a system of discourses rather than a ‘given’, that came into existence during the nineteenth century — created, he argued, by the desire to regulate sex, and to define and prohibit certain kinds of behaviour. While Foucault's conclusions are supported by perhaps over-broad and sometimes unsubstantiated generalizations, and the establishment of elegant antitheses with which one might want to contend, he has certainly drawn our attention to the rise of a particular way of looking at and defining sexual matters. Sexuality, in the sense of a personal and idiosyncratic amalgam of drive and direction, central to a person's individuality, was generated out of a perception of sex as a problem, or a series of problems.

Foucault has also forced us to think differently about existing naïve concepts of what sexuality is and does. It is not a force of nature which was repressed during the course of the nineteenth century and then liberated through the breaching of the taboo of silence which had prevented it being spoken about. Rather, it is a nexus of concepts and relationships brought into being through a complex process of naming the forbidden, in order to control and regulate it. And through that process, forbidden desire and behaviours were given names by which they could be discussed and spoken. In fact it was a product of the great nineteenth-century urge to catalogue and classify, mediated by a sense that there was something peculiar, slippery, elusive, and dangerous about the subject. The ‘hydraulic’ view of sexuality as something that can either be dammed up, liberated, or channelled, is thus seen to be just one way of looking at the phenomenon of sex, and one which is, moreover (though Foucault does not make this point) open to the criticism of being heavily dependent upon a male model of sexual functioning.

Towards a plurality of sexualities

With this delineation of ‘sexuality’, as a particular way of looking at or talking about sex created by a particular kind of society during a particular historical epoch, often goes an assumption that previously there was no such thing as ‘sexuality’. There was the sexual instinct, there was lust, there was sin or crime or insanity, but there was not ‘sexuality’ in the sense of the individual's personal and centrally-defining blend of drive and desire. This assumption has been much contested, in particular the corollary that prior to the definition of the homosexual as an individual of innately inverted sexuality, in the late nineteenth century, there was no such thing as the ‘homosexual’ but merely individuals convicted of acts which were defined by the law as sodomy. Historians had demonstrated a strong case for the emergence of something like a ‘homosexual identity’ well before the writings of the sexologists created the category, and in fact these writers based their conclusions on contacts with individuals who already had the sense of their own difference from a norm.

With the rise of feminism and feminist analyses of sex in society, and with the contemporaneous rise of gay studies and theory, the idea of ‘sexuality’ meaning a particular association of sexual desire and its object (hetero or homo) is itself seen as too coarse a definition; it tends to conflate very different kinds of preference and behaviour. Recent feminist, gay, and ‘queer theory’ writers have preferred to talk about ‘sexualities’ rather than sexuality as such. These sexualities may be defined as constructed partly through social means (the provision of roles or scripts for sexual identity and behaviour) and partly on the basis of personal psychological factors.

It thus follows that the notion of some biological basis for ‘sexuality’ is an over-simplistic concept. While there may be (as a current example) some predisposition in biochemistry or brain structure to same-sex attraction, it will be manifested in various ways because of the ways society defines ‘sexuality’. The same predisposing factor at different times and in different cultures, and according to other elements of personal psychology, will be expressed in very different ways — a furtive (married) cottager, a drag queen, an AIDs activist. ‘Sexuality’ is a bundle or a container rather than a reified thing in itself.

Lesley A. Hall