Although most early sexologists primarily explored the peripheral sexualities, others, in particular Havelock Ellis, focused on ‘normal’ sexual behaviour itself. The study of normative sexuality led to the partial problematization of biological naturalness. Sex was still understood in terms of biological essence, but some 19th-century sexologists, such as Geddes and Thomson, could not help noticing that ‘natural’ sexual instincts were, in fact, quite diverse. Even among the first generation of sexologists, the naturalizing account of sexual orthodoxy thus simultaneously led to a partial problematization of sexual normalcy. The suggestion by Ellis that normality itself reflected social definitions rather than natural instincts, and that there might be a continuum rather than a sharp break between normal and abnormal sexual practices, opened up the path for social understandings of sexuality.
Later sex research involved large-scale surveys and statistical analysis of sexual attitudes and behaviours in numerous countries. The best-known examples of these are the 1950s studies of the sexual behaviour of 12,000 Americans by Kinsey, and the successive Hite reports which surveyed the sexual experiences of 15,000 men and women in the US from the 1970s onwards. Again, an important consequence of these naturalistic, quantitative surveys of sexual attitudes and behaviour was to show that the frontiers between ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’ sexuality are not as clear-cut as had previously been thought. Kinsey’s studies in particular created public scandal in the early 1950s, when they revealed that 37% of the male sample had engaged in sex to orgasm with another man, most of whom considered themselves as heterosexuals — a finding that is fairly routine in contemporary
surveys of sexual behaviour. This meant that same-sex activity could no longer be labelled as the deviant behaviour of a small, diseased minority of people. It is an important paradox in the history of sexology that while the biological model conceptualized sexuality in terms of natural instincts, normal and abnormal sexuality, and biological gender differences, the same type of research has also led to the problematization of the very categories that it was based upon. The biological understanding of sexuality was thus challenged from within the sexological discourse that had formulated it in the first place.
The biological model was also challenged by the very subjects that it endeavoured to describe. Within the ‘peripheral’ sexualities that sexual science created, sexual meanings have been experimented on and contested. As Jeffrey Weeks points out:
[T]he speaking perverts, first given a carefully shaded public platform in the volumes of early sexologists, have become highly vocal on their behalf. … They speak for themselves in street politics and lobbying, through pamphlets, journals and books, via the semiotics of highly sexualised settings, with their elaborate codes of keys, colours and clothes, in the popular media, and in the more mundane details of domestic life.
Taxonomic labels such as ‘homosexual’ or ‘lesbian’ have been re-appropriated in politically creative ways by the categories to which they were initially applied, as we shall see later (see p. 102).
A third major challenge to the biological model came from Freud. He developed a theory of unconscious drive/libido that saw sexual desire not as something that could be controlled and overcome, but as ever-present in men as well as women. Within this framework, he portrayed female hysteria as a symptom of the unhealthy repression of female sexual instincts. His influential Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) conceptualized sexuality not as a pre-given, ready-made natural
instinct from which subjects can then deviate, but rather as a drive that is constructed in the process of childhood psychological development. Freud argued that the channelling of the child’s diffuse sexuality into socially acceptable forms is central to its development into adulthood. As the Freudian feminist Juliet Mitchell puts it:
[I]n childhood all is diverse or perverse; unification and ‘normality’
are the effort we must make on our entry into human society.
While placing central importance upon sexuality by seeing human agency as driven by unconscious desire, Freud’s analyses of individual cases of hysteria and neurosis moved away from biological accounts, linking civilization and sexual repression.
The final and possibly most decisive challenge to the biological model of sexuality has resulted from the emergence of anti-essentialist perspectives across a range of disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities from the 1970s onwards. These new theoretical models reject the idea of sexuality as natural or biological, emphasizing instead the social nature of sexual experience. Following Foucault’s controversial but highly influential account, in his canonical History of Sexuality: An Introduction, of sexuality as a ‘historical apparatus’ whose origins can be retraced to the 18th century, authors such as David Halperin in classics, Stephen Heath in literary criticism, and Jeffrey Weeks, Ken Plummer, and numerous others in sociology have argued prominently for the need to understand sexuality as a historically and culturally situated domain of experience that is shaped by social relations of power. Following this social model of sexuality, sexual identities are not merely the expression of natural instincts, but are social as well as political constructs.
Against this backdrop, the claim that heterosexuality, homosexuality, lesbianism, and even sexuality itself were invented in the 19th century does not mean merely that the terms were
invented in that period (although they were). More fundamentally, it means that the ways in which individuals experience and make sense of their sexualities and identities in modernity are heavily shaped by the core elements associated with the conceptual apparatus of sexuality, in particular the idea of ‘natural’ sexual instinct, the assumed biological basis for gender differences, and the notion of sexual identity.
As we have seen, cultural understandings of sex have, in the West, been shaped by three models: the moral/religious model, the biological model, and the social model of sexuality. Although these three models have, historically, emerged successively, it is important to emphasize that they are still co-present today. Moral, biological, and social understandings of sexuality continue to have a great influence on the ways in which sexual meanings are organized in society, politics, and in our everyday lives. They have important implications for the ways in which we conceptualize our sexual behaviours and identities, as well as the possibilities for personal and political transformation.
Chapter 3