This narrow conception of the application of scientific method found passionate adherence among sexual researchers for the obvious reason that it provided protection and legitimacy. The language of science, its postures, even its costumes, became the conceptual rubber gloves that allowed for the examination of what the larger social world predominantly viewed as “dirty business”. […]

The naturalization of sex occurred in the larger context of the application of scientific method to a wide number of human activities, not all of which could equally be subjected to this objectifying approach. A new sexual science was viewed as the accumulation of the exhaustive and precise delineation of the parts constituting the sexuality […]

Similarly, the naturalization of sex that accompanied its modernization tended to welcome Freud’s drive theory and its corresponding invention of a sexually responsive infant and child, even when much of the other baggage of psychoanalytic theory was rejected. Viewing sexuality as a biologically ordered developmental process allowed for the introduction of a language of sexual […]

Cultural license was granted to contemplate the sexual, but in an isolation that actually reinforced the continuing exile of the sexual from the rest of social life. The experience of sexual conduct was necessarily viewed as translatable into the facts of sexual behavior—the idea that the establishing of the physical geography of the sexual orgasm […]

Modernism represented a pervasive adherence to the concept of progress, to the idea of constant movement toward the achievement of ever-changing ideals. As modernism in art was to take us ever closer to the purest expressions of the sublime, modern science was charged with bringing us closer to pure truth, final truth—and if not these, […]

The scientific study of sex can trace the earliest of its most significant roots almost to the memory of living humanity. But the growth, one might almost say explosion, of scientific attention to the sexual must really be charted from the end of the Second World War. A period of some forty years, half of […]

There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is going to go on looking and reflecting at all. (Michel Foucault 1985) INTRODUCTION The very use of the term postmodern in application to so many […]

If any single concept dominates discourse about postmodernism, with the possible exception of “discourse” itself, it is the concept of pluralism. What we have been slow to incorporate in our discourses is that pluralism permeates all aspects of life; it is not merely a matter of ideas or intellectual fashions, but a pluralism of human […]

The postmodern condition, then, calls into question what is perhaps the most fundamental assumption of traditional sociological theory: that society, more than having conceptual utility, constitutes an organic reality, an objective reality that coercively frames our considerations of social life. Society, so described, was viewed as constituting a continuing truth of our lives, against which […]

These developments can be described as an evolutionary drift from being what I have called a paradigmatic social order to its current and possibly permanent postparadigmatic social condition. Paradigmatic contexts are those that realize a high degree of consensual meanings, shared meanings that tend to fit together almost seamlessly, since they are of ten experienced […]