Response paper history of sexuality

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CHAPTER 4

Anthropology Rediscovers Sexuality: A Theoretical Comment

Carole S. Vance

In the beginning was sex and sex will be in the end ... I maintain - and this is my thesis - that sex as a feature of man and society was always central and remains such ...

(Goldenweiser, 1929, p. 53)

This opening sentence from Alexander Goldenweiser's essay, 'Sex and Primitive Society', suggests that sexuality has been an important focus for anthropological investigation. Indeed, such is the reputation anthropologists have bestowed upon themselves: fearless investigators of sexual customs and mores throughout the world, breaking through the erotophobic intellectual taboos common in other, more timid disciplines.

In reality, anthropology's relationship to the study of sexuality is more complex and contradict- ory. Anthropology as a field has been far from courageous or even adequate in its investigation of sexuality (Fisher, 1980; Davis and Whitten, 1987). Rather, the discipline often appears to share the prevailing cultural view that sexuality is not an entirely legitimate area of study, and that such study necessarily casts doubt not only on the research but on the motives and character of the researcher. In this, we have been no worse but also no better than other social science disciplines.

Manifestations of this attitude abound in graduate training and in the reward structure of the profession. Few graduate departments provide training in the study of human sexuality. As a result, there are no structured channels to transmit anthropological knowledge conceming sexuality to the next generation of students. The absence of a scholarly community engaged with issues of sexuality effectively prevents the field from advancing; students interested in the topic perceive that they must rediscover past generations' work on their own. Most advisors actively discourage graduate students from fieldwork or dissertations on sexuality for fear that the topic will prove a career liability. At best, students are advised to complete their doctoral degrees, build up reputations and credentials, and even obtain tenure, all of which are said to put one in a better position to embark on the study of sexuality (Fisher, 1980; Davis and Whitten, 1987). Rather than the collective effort needed to remedy a serious structurallimitation in oUf discipline, this advice conveys the clear message that sexuality is so dangerous an intellectual terrain it can ruin the careers of otherwise competent graduate students and academics.

Nor is there any career track after graduate school for professional anthropologists interested in sexuality. Never attaining the status of an appropriate specialization, sexuality remains marginal. Funding is difficult, as agencies continue to be fearful of the subject's potential for public contro- versy. Colleagues often remain suspicious and hypercritical, as discomfort with the very subject of

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CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORKS

sexuality is cast instead in terms of scholarly adequacy or legitimacy.! Field projects rarely, if ever, focus fully or directly on sexuality; rather, field workers collect data as they can, some of which are never published for fear of harm to one's professional reputation. Some anthropologists retreat into sexology, more hospitable perhaps, yet seriously limited itself as an intellectual ghetto of disciplinary refugees (Vance, 1983; Irvine, 1990).

In light of these disincentives, it is perhaps not surprising that the recent development of a more cultural and non-essentialist discourse about sexuality has sprung not from the centre of anthropo- logy but from its periphery, from other disciplines (especially history), and from theorizing done by marginal groups. The explosion of exciting and challenging work in what has come to be called social construction theory during the past 15 years has yet to be felt in mainstream anthropology.

The intellectual history of social construction theory is complex, and the moments offered here are for purposes of illustration, not comprehensive review (for basic texts, see Katz, 1976; Weeks, 1977; Padgug, 1979; Weeks, 1981; Snitow, Stansell and Thompson, 1983; Katz, 1983; Vance, 1984; Weeks, 1986; Peiss and Simmons, 1989; D'Emilio and Freedman, 1988; Altman et al., 1989; Duberman, Vicinus and Chauncey, 1989). Social construction theory drew on developments in several discip- lines: social interactionism, labelling theory, and deviance in sociology (Gagnon and Simon, 1973; Plummer, 1982); social history, labour studies, women's history, and Marxist history (Duggan, 1990); and symbolic anthropology, cross-cultural work on sexuality, and gender studies in anthropology, to name only the most significant streams. In addition, theorists in many disciplines responded to new questions raised by feminist and lesbian/gay scholarship concerning gender and identity.

Sexuality and Gender

Feminist scholarship and activism undertook the project of rethinking gender, which had a revolu- tionary impact on notions of what is natural. Feminist efforts focused on a critical review of theories which used reproduction to link gender with sexuality, thereby explaining the inevitability and naturalness of women's subordination (for anthropology, see Reiter, 1975; Rosaldo and Lamphere, 1974; Lamphere, 1977; Rapp, 1979; Atkinson, 1982; Moore, 1988).

This theoretical re-examination led to a general critique of biological determinism, in particular of received knowledge about the biology of sex differences (Bleier, 1984; Fausto-Sterling, 1985; Sayers, 1982; Lowe and Hubbard, 1983; Hubbard, Henifin and Fried, 1982; Tobach and Rosoft, 1978). Histor- ical and cross-cultural evidence undermined the notion that women's roles, which varied so widely, could be caused by a seemingly uniform human reproduction and sexuality. In light of the diversity of gender roles in human society, it seemed unlikely that they were inevitable or caused by sexuality. The ease with which such theories had become accepted suggested that science was conducted within and mediated by powerful beliefs about gender and in turn provided ideological support for current social relations. Moreover, this increased sensitivity to the ideological aspects of science led to a wide-ranging inquiry into the historical connection between male dominance, scientific ideo- logy, and the development of Western science and biomedicine (Harding, 1986; Schiebinger, 1989; Ehrenreich and English, 1979; Barker-Benfield, 1976; Haraway, 1989; }ordanova, 1989; Keller, 1984; Harding and Hintikka, 1983).

Feminist practice in grass-roots activism also fostered analyses which separated sexuality and gender. Popular struggles to advance women's access to abortion and birth control represented an attempt to separate sexuality from reproduction and women's gendered role as wives and mothers. Discussions in consciousness-raising groups made clear that what seemed to be a naturally gendered body was in fact a highly socially mediated product: femininity and sexual attractiveness were achieved through persistent socialization regarding standards of beauty, makeup, and body language. Finally,

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discussions between different generations of women made clear how variable their allegedly natural sexuality was, moving within our own century from marital duty to multiple orgasm, vaginal to clitoral erotism, and Victorian passionlessness to a fittingly feminine enthusiasm. Sexuality and gender went together, it seemed, but in ways that were subject to change.

In 1975, anthropologist Gayle Rubin's influential essay, 'The Traffic in Women', made a compel- ling argument against essentialist explanations that sexuality and reproduction caused gender differ- ence in any simple or inevitable way (1975). Instead, she explored the shape of 'a systematic sodal apparatus which takes up females as raw materials and fashions domesticated women as products' (Rubin, 1975, p. 158). She proposed the term 'sexlgender system' to describe 'the set of arrangements by which sodety transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied' (ibid., p. 159).

In 1984, Rubin suggested a further deconstruction of the sexlgender system into two separate domains in which sexuality and gender were recognized as distinct systems (Rubin, 1984, p. 267). Most prior feminist analyses considered sexuality a totally derivative category whose organization was determined by the structure of gender inequality. According to Rubin's formulation, sexuality and gender were analytically distinct phenomena which required separate explanatory frames, even though they were interrelated in specific historical drcumstances. Theories of sexuality could not explain gender, and taking the argument to a new level, theories of gender could not explain sexuality.

This perspective suggested a novel framework: sexuality and gender are separate systems which are interwoven at many points. Although members of a culture experience this interweaving as natural, seamless, and organic, the points of connection vary historicaHy and cross-culturally. For researchers in sexuality, the task is not only to study changes in the expression of sexual behaviour and attitudes, but to examine the relationship of these changes to more deeply-based shifts in how gender and sexuality were organized and interrelated within larger sodal relations.

Sexuality and Identity

A second impetus for the development of sodal construction theory arose from issues that emerged in the examination of male homosexuality in nineteenth-century Europe and America (Katz, 1976, 1983; Weeks, 1977, 1981). It is interesting to note that a significant portion of this early research was conducted by independent scholars, non-academics, and maverick academics usually working with- out funding or university support, since at this time the history of sexuality (particularly that of marginal groups) was scarcely a legitimate topic. As this research has recently achieved the barest modicum of academic acceptance, it is commonplace for properly-employed academics to gloss these developments by a reference to Foucault and Tbe History of Sexuality (1978). Without denying his contributions, such a singular genealogy obscures an important origin of sodal construction theory, and inadvertently credits the university and scholarly disdplines with a development they never supported.

The first attempt to grapple with questions of sexual identity in a way now recognizable as sodal construction appears in Mary McIntosh's 1968 essay on the homosexual role in England (McIntosh, 1968). Alandmark article offering many suggestive insights about the historical construction of sexuality in England, her observations initially vanished like pebbles in a pond until the mid-1970s, when they were again taken up by writers involved in the questions of feminism and gay liberation. It is at this time that an identifiably constructionist approach first appears.

The earliest scholarship in lesbian and gay history attempted to retrieve and revive documents, narratives, and biographies which had been lost or made invisible due to historical neglect as weH as

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CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORKS

active efforts to suppress the material by archivists, historians, and estates. These documents and the lives represented therein were first conceived of as 'lesbian' or 'gay', and the enterprise as a search for historical roots. To their credit, researchers who started this enterprise sharing the implicit cultural ideology of fixed sexual categories then began to consider other ways of looking at their material and to ask more expansive questions.

Jeffrey Weeks, English historian of sexuality, first articulated this theoretical transition (Weeks, 1977). Drawing on McIntosh's concept of the homosexual role, he distinguished between homo- sexual behaviour, which he considered universal, and homosexual identity, which he viewed as historically and culturally specific and, in Britain, a comparatively recent development. His rich and provocative analysis of changing attitudes and identities also contextualized sexuality, examining its relationship to the reorganization of family, gender, and household in nineteenth-century Britain.

Jonathan Katz's work also demonstrates this process. His first book, Gay American History, is in the tradition of a search far gay ancestors (Katz, 1976). In the course of researching his second book, however, he began to consider that the acts of sodomy reported in American colonial documents from the seventeenth century might not be equivalent to contemporary homosexuality (Katz, 1983). Colonial society did not seem to conceive of a unique type of person - a homosexual - who engaged in these acts. Nor was there any evidence of a homosexual subculture or individuals whose subject- ive sense of identity was organized around what we understand as sexual preference or identity. Katz's second book marks a sharp departure from the first, in that records or accounts that document same-sex emotional or sexual relations are not taken as evidence of 'gay' or 'lesbian' identity, but are treated as jumping off points for a whole series of questions about the meanings of these acts to the people who engaged in them and to the culture and time in which they lived.

These intellectual developments are also evident in early wark on the formation of lesbian identity CSahli, 1979; Rupp, 1980; Faderman, 1981; Rubin, 1979) and work considering the question of sexual behaviour and identity in non-Western cultures, for example, Gilbert Herdt's work in New Guinea 0981, 1984, 1987). From this expanding body of wark CDuberman, Vicinus and Chauncey, 1989; Plummer, 1981; D'Emilio, 1983; Bray, 1982; Newton, 1984; Davis and Kennedy, 1986; Vicinus, 1989, p. 171; Gerard and Hekma, 1988) came an impressive willingness to imagine: had the categories 'homosexual' and 'lesbian' always existed? and if not, what were their points of origin and conditions for development? If identical physical acts had different subjective meanings, how was sexual mean- ing constructed? If sexual subcultures come into being, what leads to their formation?

And although these questions were initially phrased in terms of homosexual identity and history, it is clear that they are equally applicable to heterosexual identity and history, implications just now being explored (Peiss, 1986, 1989; Stansell, 1986; Trimberger, 1983; Katz, 1990).

Sexuality as a Contested Domain

Continuing wark on the history of the construction of sexuality in modern, state-Ievel society shows that sexuality is an actively contested political and symbolic terrain in which groups struggle to implement sexual programs and alter sexual arrangements and ideologies. The growth of state interest in regulating sexuality Cand the related decline of religious control) made legislative and public policy domains particularly attractive fields far political and intellectual struggles around sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mass movements mobilized around venereal disease, prostitution, masturbation, social purity, and the double standard, employing grass-roots political organizing, legislative lobbying, mass demonstrations, and cultural interventions utilizing complex symbols, rhetaric, and representations CWeeks, 1981; Peiss and Simmons, 1989; Walkowitz, 1980; Bristow, 1977; Pivar, 1972; Brandt, 1985; Kendrick, 1987; Gordon, 1974). Because state intervention

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was increasingly formulated in a language of health, physicians and scientists became important par- ticipants in the newly developing regulatory discourses. They also actively participated in elaborating these discourses as a way to legitimize their newly professionalizing specialities.

Although socially powernIl groups exercised more discursive power, they were not the only participants in sexual struggles. Minority reformers, progressives, suffragists, and sex radicals also put forward programs for change and introduced new ways of thinking about and organizing sexuality. The sexual subcultures that had grown up in urban areas were an especially fertile field for these experiments. Constructionist work shows how their attempt to carve out partially protected public spaces in which to elaborate and express new sexual forms, behaviours, and sensibilities is also part of a larger political struggle to define sexuality. Subcultures give rise not only to new ways of organiz- ing behaviour and identity but to new ways of symbolically resisting and engaging with the dominant order, some of which grow to have a profound impact beyond the small groups in which they are pioneered. In this respect, social construction work has been valuable in exploring human agency and creativity in sexuality, moving away from uni-directional models of social change to describe complex and dynamic relationships among the state, professional experts, and sexual subcultures. This attempt to historicize sexuality has produced an innovative body of work to which historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and others have contributed in an unusual interdisciplinary conversation.

The Development of Sodal Construction Models, 1975-1990

The increasing popularity of the term 'social construction' obscures the fact that constructionist writers have used this term in diverse ways. It is true that all reject transhistorical and transcultural definitions of sexuality and suggest instead that sexuality is media ted by historical and cultural factors. But a dose reading of constructionist texts shows that social constructionists differ in their views of what might be constructed, variously induding sexual acts, sexual identities, sexual com- munities, the direction of erotic interest (object choice), and sexual desire itself. Despite these dif- ferences, all share the urge to problematize the terms and field of study.

At minimum, all social construction approaches adopt the view that physically identical sexual acts may have varying social significance and subjective meaning depending on how they are defined and understood in different cultures and historical periods. Because a sexual act does not carry with it a universal social meaning, it follows that the relationship between sexual acts and sexual mean- ings is not fixed, and it is projected from the observer's time and place at great peril. Cultures provide widely different categories, schema, and labels for framing sexual and affective experiences. These constructions not only influence individual subjectivity and behaviour, but they also organize and give meaning to collective sexual experience through, for example, the impact of sexual identities, definitions, ideologies and regulations. The relationship of sexual acts and identities to organized sexual communities is equally variable and complex. These distinctions, then, between sexual acts, identities, and communities are widely employed by constructionist writers.

A further step in social construction theory posits that even the direction of erotic interest itself, for example, object choice (heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality, as contemporary sexology would conceptualize it) is not intrinsic or inherent in the individual, but is constructed from more polymorphous possibilities. Not all constructionists take this step; and for those who do not, the direction of desire and erotic interest may be thought of as fixed, although the behavioural form this interest takes will be constructed by prevailing cultural frames, as will the subjective experience of individuals and the social significance attached to it by others.

The most radical form of constructionist theotY is willing to entertain the idea that there is no essential, undifferentiated sexual 'impulse', 'sex drive', or 'lust', which resides in the body due to

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CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORKS

physiologieal functioning and sensation. Sexual desire, then, is itself constructed by culture and history from the energies and capacities of the body. In this case, an important constructionist question concems the origin of these impulses, since they are no longer assumed to be intrinsie or perhaps even necessary. This position, of course, contrasts sharply with more middle-ground con- structionist theory which implicitly accepts an inherent desire whieh is then constructed in terms of acts, identity, community, and object choiee. The contrast between middle-ground and radieal posi- tions makes it evident that constructionists may weIl have arguments with each other, as weIl as with those working in essentialist and cultural influence traditions. Nevertheless, social construction litera- ture, making its first appearance in the mid-1970s, demonstrates gradual development of the ability to imagine that sexuality is constructed.

Cultural Influence Models of Sexuality, 1920-1990

By contrast, conventional anthropological approaches to sexuality from 1920-1990 remained remark- ably consistent. Just as sexuality itself remained an unexamined construct, the theoretieal foundations remained unexamined, unnamed, and implicit, as if they were so inevitable and natural that there could be litde dispute or choiee about this standard, almost generic, approach. For that reason I want to suggest the name 'cultural influence model', to call attention to its distinctive features and promote greater recognition of this paradigm. In this model, sexuality is seen as the basic material - a kind of universal Play Doh - on whieh culture works, a naturalized category whieh remains closed to investigation and analysis.

On the one hand, the cultural influence model emphasizes the role of culture and leaming in shaping sexual behaviour and attitudes. In this respect, it rejects obvious forms of essentialism and universalizing. Variation was a key finding in many studies, in cross-cultural surveys (Ford and Beach, 1951; Mintum, Grosse and Haider, 1969; Broude and Greene, 1976; Gray, 1980; Frayser, 1985), in ethnographie accounts of single societies whose sexual customs stood in sharp contrast to those of the Euro-American reader (Mead, 1923; Malinowski, 1941 [1929 orig.l; Schapera, 1941; Goodenough, 1949; Bemdt and Bemdt, 1951; Levine, 1959; Howard and Howard, 1964; Davenport, 1965; Suggs, 1966; Lessa, 1966; Marshall and Suggs, 1972; Heider, 1976; Marshall, 1976), and in theoretical overviews (Goldenweiser, 1929; Bateson, 1947; Murdock, 1949; Honigman, 1954; Gebhard, 1976). Culture is viewed as encouraging or discouraging the expression of generie sexual acts, attitudes, and relationships. Oral-genital contact, for example, might be apart of normal heterosexual expression in one group but taboo in another; male homosexuality might be severely punished in one tribe yet tolerated in another. Anthropological work from this period was characterized by a persistent emphasis on variability.

On the other hand, although culture is thought to shape sexual expression and customs, the bedrock of sexuality is assumed - and often quite explicitly stated - to be universal and biologieally determined; in the literature, it appears as 'sex drive' or 'impulse'.3 Although capable of being shaped, the drive is conceived of as powerful, moving toward expression after its awakening in puberty, sometimes exceeding social regulation, and taking a distinctively different form in men and women.

The core of sexuality is reproduction. Although most anthropologieal accounts by no means restrict themselves to analysing reproductive behaviour alone, reproductive sexuality (glossed as heterosexual intercourse) appears as the meat and potatoes in the sexual menu, with other forms, both heterosexual and homosexual, arranged as appetizers, vegetables, and desserts. (These meta- phors are not unknown in anthropological narratives.) Ethnographic and survey accounts almost always follow a reporting format that deals first with 'real sex' and then moves on to the 'variations'. Some accounts supposedly about sexuality are notieeably short on details about non-reproductive

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behaviour; Margaret Mead's (961) article about the cultural determinants of sexual behaviours (in a wonderfully titled volume called Sex and Internal Secretions), travels a dizzying trail which includes pregnancy, menstruation, menopause, and lactation but very litde about non-reproductive sexuality or eroticism. Similarly, a more recent book, expansively titled Varieties 0/ Sexual Experience, devotes virtually all but a few pages to reproduction, marriage, and family organization (Frayser, 1985).

Within the cultural influence model, the term 'sexuality' covers a broad range of topics. Its mean- ing is often taken for granted, left implicit as a shared understanding between the reader and author. Tracking its use through various articles and books shows that sexuality includes many wildly differ- ent things: intercourse, orgasm, foreplay; erotic fantasies, stories, humour; sex differences and the organization of masculinity and femininity, and gender relations (often called sex roles in the earlier literature).

In this model, sexuality is not only related to gender but blends easily, and is often conflated, with it. Sexuality, gender arrangements, masculinity and femininity are assumed to be connected, even interchangeable. This assumption, however, never illuminates their culturally and historically-specific connections; it obscures them. The confusion springs from our own folk beliefs that 0) sex causes gender, that is, male-female reproductive differences and the process of reproduction (framed as and equated with 'sexuality') give rise to gender differentiation, and (2) gender causes sex, that is, women as a marked gender group constitute the locus of sexuality, sexual desire, and motivation. Reproduc- tion and its organization become the prime movers in all other malelfernale differentiation and in the flowering of the gender system. Gender and sexuality are searnlessly knit together.

Finally, the cultural influence model assurnes that sexual acts carry stable and universal signific- ance in terms of identity and subjective meaning. The literature routinely regards opposite gender sexual contact as 'heterosexuality' and same gender contact as 'homosexuality', as if the same phe- nomena were being observed in all societies in which these acts occurred. With hindsight, these assumptions are curiously ethnocentric, since the meanings attached to these sexual behaviours are those of the observers and twentieth-century complex, industrial society. Cross-cultural surveys could fairly chart the distribution of same or opposite gender sexual contact or the frequency of sexual contact before marriage. But when investigators report instead on the presence or absence of 'homo- sexuality' or 'sexual permissiveness', they engage in a spurious translation from sexual act or behavi- our to sexual meaning and identity, something later theoretical developments would come to reject.

To summarize, the cultural influence model recognizes variations in the occurrence of sexual behaviour and in cultural attitudes which encourage or restrict behaviour, but not in the meaning of the behaviour itself. In addition, anthropologists working within this framework accept without question the existence of universal categories like heterosexual and homosexual, male and female sexuality, and sex drive.

Despite these many deficiencies, it is important to recognize the strengths of this approach, particularly in its intellectual, historical, and political context. Anthropology's commitment to cross- cultural comparison made it the most relativistic of social science disciplines in regard to the study of sexuality. Its finding of variation called into question prevailing notions about the inevitability or naturalness of sexual norms and behaviour common in America and Europe, and the connection between sexual regulation and social or familial stability. The variability it reported suggested that human sexuality was malleable and capable of assuming different forms. Work in the cultural influ- ence tradition undercut more mechanistic theories of sexual behaviour, still common in medicine and psychiatry, that suggested sexuality was largely a function of physiological functioning or instinctual drives. It began to develop social and intellectual space in which it was possible to regard sexuality as something other than a simple function of biology.

Although work in the cultural influence model contributed to the development of social construc- tion theory, there is a sharp break between them in many respects. This difference has not been

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recognized by many anthropologists still working within the cultural influence tradition. Indeed, many mistakenly seem to regard these new developments as theoretieally compatible, even continu- ous with earlier work. Some have assimilated terms or phrases (like 'sodal construction' or 'cultural construction') in their work, yet their analytic frames still contain many unexamined essentialist elements.4 It is not the case that the cultural influence model, because it recognizes cultural variation, is the same as sodal construction theory. The cultural influence model, then, no longer remains the only anthropologieal paradigm, although it still dominates contemporary work (Frayser, 1985; Masda- Lees, 1989).

It would seem that the development of anthropology in this century - a general movement away from biologized frameworks toward perspectives that are denaturalizing and anti-essentialist - would foster the application of sodal construction theory to the study of sexuality. Despite its challenge to the natural and universalized status of many domains, however, anthropology has largely excluded sexuality from this endeavour of suggesting that human actions have been and continue to be subject to historieal and cultural forces and, thus, to change.

A sodal construction approach to sexuality would examine the range of behaviour, ideology, and subjective meaning among and within human groups, and would view the body, its functions, and sensations as potentials (and limits) whieh are incorporated and mediated by culture. The physiology of orgasm and penile erection no more explains a culture's sexual schema than the auditory range of the human ear explains its musie. Biology and physiologieal functioning are determinative only at the most extreme limits, and there to set the boundary of what is physieally possible. The more interest- ing question for anthropologieal research on sexuality is to chart what is culturally possible - a far more expansive domain. Ecologieal adaptation and reproductive demands similarly explain only a small portion of sexual organization, since fertility adequate for replacement and even growth is relat- ively easy for most groups to achieve. More important, sexuality is not coterminous with or equivalent to reproduction: reproductive sexuality constitutes a small portion of the larger sexual universe.

In addition, a sodal construction approach to sexuality must also problematize and question Euro- American folk and sdentific beliefs about sexuality, rather than project them onto other groups in a manner whieh would be most unacceptably ethnocentric in any other subject area. Thus, statements about the universally compelling force of sexual impulse, the importance of sexuality in human life, the universally private status of sexual behaviour, or its quintessentially reproductive nature need to be presented as hypotheses, not a primi assumptions. Anthropology seems especially well suited to problematize these most naturalized categories, yet sexuality has been the last domain (trailing even gender) to have its natural, biologized status called into question. For many of us, essentialism was our first way of thinking about sexuality and still remains hegemonie.

Sodal construction theory offers a radieally different perspective in the study of sexuality, encour- aging novel and fruitful research questions. Its influence has been increasing in anthropology (see Newton, 1979; Caplan, 1987; Davis and Kennedy, 1989; Whitehead, 1981; Blackwood, 1986; Fry, 1985; Carrier, 1985; Vance, 1990; Parker, 1991), although cultural influence models still dominate (see Frayser, 1985; Gregor, 1985; Cohen and Mascia-Lees, 1989; Masda-Lees, Tierson and Relethford, 1989; Frayser, 1989; Perper, 1989). One might have predieted a gradually intensifying competition between para- digms, possibly even a paradigm shift. The appearance of AIDS, however, has altered this dynamie.

AIDS and Research on Sexuality

The great concern about AIDS has dramatieally increased the interest in conducting and funding sex research. Early in the epidemic, epidemiologists routinely began to include batteries of questions con- cerning the frequency and nature of their subjects' sexual behaviour. Their problems in measurement

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and conceptualization, as weIl as their futile search for baseline data, highlighted the scientific neglect of sex research. Indeed, the fact no large-scale study on American sexual habits has been conducted since the Kinsey volumes (Kinsey, Pomeroy and Martin, 1948; Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin and Gebhard, 1953) now stands as a major embarrassment, resulting in OUf inability to answer even the most basic questions. As scientific groups and policy makers recognized the need for this information, they strongly recommended drastic increases in funding and research efforts in affected countries (Turner, Miller and Moses, 1989; Booth, 1989a; Booth, 1989b). Although in many ways a positive and neces- sary step, the rush to funding nevertheless raises the possibility that the inadequate essentialist and cultural influence models of sexuality will be revived and strengthened.

AIDS encourages the resurgence of biomedical approaches to sexuality through the repeated association of sexuality with disease. The medicalization of sexuality is intensifying, as the public turns to medical authorities for sexual information and advice. In addition, biomedical investigators in medical schools and schools of public health are conducting a significant portion of AIDS-related research in sexuality.5 This signals a shift from a general trend developing after World War II, when research on sexuality increasingly moved out of medical arenas. Thus, medicine's interest in sexuality is expanding to new areas beyond the specialties to which it was traditionally confined: sexually transmitted diseases, obstetrics and gynaecology, and psychiatry.

This development poses several dangers. Biomedical approaches to sexuality often regard sexual- ity as derivative from physiology and supposedly universal functioning of the body. Biomedical models tend to be the most unreflective about the influence of science and medical practice in con- structing categories like 'the body' and 'health'. Social construction approaches are virtually unknown, and the concept that sexuality varies with culture and history is expressed at best via primitive cul- tural influence models. There is limited recognition that sexuality has a history and that its definitions and meanings change over time and within populations. The reliance on survey instruments and easily quantified data in biomedicaIly-based research increases the tendency to count acts rather than explore meaning.

Such surveys have frequently equated sexual identities with sexual acts, for example, and treated 'gay men' and 'heterosexuals' as unproblematic categories. In addition, the high status of medical practitioners in the twentieth century and their recruitment from privileged dass, gender, and racial groups has resulted historically in their dose alliances with dominant ideologies, induding the sexual. Should this pattern persist, they are as unlikely to be aware of marginal sexual subcultures and sensibilities as they are to be sensitive to them.

Framing sexual research within a biomedical model and the perspective of disease also threatens to re-pathologize sexuality. This promises to return sexuality to the position it occupied in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where its public discussion was largely motivated and circumscribed by the discoUfses of venereal disease, prostitution, and masturbation. These public discussions framed by medical experts, ostensibly about health and disease, were implicitly discus- sions about morality, gender, and social order. This danger is heightened by the respect accorded medicine and science and the widespread public belief that science contains no values. The expan- sion of a supposedly objective and value-free discoUfse about sexuality organized under the guise of health opens the door to vastly increased governmental and professional intervention.

The emphasis placed on gay men and their sexual behaviour in the early stages of the epidemic constitutes a sharp departure from previous inattention to subordinate sexual groups. This attention, however, highlights their otherness in a manner reminiscent of nineteenth-century pathology models of homosexuality (Gever, 1989), emphasizing the naturalness of identity and reinforcing the sharp dichotomy between heterosexuality and homosexuality. This otherness is expanding to involve additional stigmatized groups at risk for AIDS, such as IV drug users, their partners, and inner city minority women, drawing on historically and culturally resonant stereotypes (Gilman, 1988).

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The danger posed by increased funding for research on sexuality connected with AIDS is not restricted to biomedicine. Within anthropology, it is unlikely that essentialist models will make a comeback; however, the field may weIl experience the impact of increasingly biomedieal approaches to sexuality in interdisciplinary work conducted in medieal settings. More important, increased fund- ing and urgent calls for research are likely to strengthen cultural influence models of sexuality, as more and more anthropologists will be drawn into work on AIDS (Feldman and Johnson, 1986; Gorman, 1986; Bateson and Goldsby, 1988; Bolton, 1989; Marshall and Bennett, 1990).

Most of these are likely to be medieal anthropologists or specialists in affected geographie areas without specialized training in sexuality. As anthropologists, they can be relied on to bring with them an expectation of human diversity, sensitivity to ethnocentrism, and a respect for the role of culture in shaping behaviour, sexuality included. But this is precisely the problem, as these perspectives will reinvent the cultural influence model as the common-sense, anthropological approach to sexuality. Anthropologists new to sex research may easily think that, because it allows for cultural variation, their own cultural influence approach is identieal to social construction theory. Their own compar- isons with work done from more biologized, biomedieal approaches, particularly in non-Western cultures, will make cultural influence models seem advanced, even cause for self-congratulation.

In all fields, the belated recognition of serious gaps in knowledge about sexual behaviour may emphasize the importance of behavioural data, which appear more easily measured than fantasy, identity, and subjective meaning. Behavioural data lend themselves to easy quantmcation, fitting into the methodological biases of positivist social science. Amid an epidemie, researchers press for rapid results and reject the time, patience, and tolerance for uncertainty that ethnographic and deconstructive techniques seem to require.

Despite these tendencies whieh reinforce cultural influence and biologized approaches, the pie- ture remains complex and contradietory. AIDS-inspired investigations into the realities of peoples' sexual worlds have already disclosed discrepancies between ideologies about sexuality and lived experience. Contradietions increase exponentially in other cultural contexts. These gaps exist in many areas, but are particularly insistent in regard to classmcatory systems, identity, congruence between behaviour and self-definition, the meaning of sexual acts, and the stability of sexual prefer- ence. These inconsistencies point to the usefulness of social construction theory and have spurred new work in anthropology (see Parker, 1987; Murray and Payne, 1989; Carrier, 1989; Singer et al., 1990; Kane, 1990; Asencio, 1990; Hawkeswood, 1990). Much as was the case with early gay history, researchers in sexuality and AIDS may confront the limitations of their models, generating provocat- ive and imaginative work.

Moreover, the entire phenomenon of 'safer sex' has emphasized the culturally malleable aspects of sexual behaviour. The safer sex campaign mounted by the gay community, surely one of the most dramatie and effective public health campaigns on record, made clear that sexual acts can only be understood within a cultural and subcultural context and that careful attention to meaning and symbolism allows the possibility of change even for adults (Patton, 1985; Altman, 1986; Crimp, 1989; Watney, 1987). The self-conscious leadership and participation of gay men, as opposed to biomed- ieal experts, in this endeavour suggests that individuals actively participate in creating and changing cultural and erotie meanings, particularly when they have a stake in doing so. Safer sex campaigns reveal active sexual agents with an awareness of their symbolic universe and an ability to manipulate and re-create it, rather than passively receive a statie sexual enculturation.

The politieal and symbolic mobilizations around the sexual dimensions and meanings of AIDS on the part of many different constituencies also belie the notion that sexuality and its meaning are derived simply from the body, unchanging or easily read. Yet various groups proffer their interpreta- tions of AIDS and its sexual significance as lessons to be read from nature and the body (Patton, 1985; Altman, 1986; Watney, 1987; Grover, 1989; Treichler, 1987; Gilman, 1989; Watney, 1989; Treiehler,

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1988; Juhasz, 1990; Williamson, 1989). The multiplicity of competing lessons and the ferocious struggle for whose interpretation will prevail suggest that sexual meaning is a hotly contested, even politieal terrain. That dominant sectors, particularly the state, religion, and the professional groups exercise a disproportionate influence on the sexual discourse does not mean that their views are hegemonie or unchallenged by other groups. Nor does it mean that marginal groups only respond reactively and do not create their own subcultures and worlds of meaning.

In the midst of the creation of new discourses about sexuality, it is crucial that we become conscious of how these discourses are created and our own role in creating them. Anthropologists have a great deal to contribute to research in sexuality. The new situation brought about by AIDS in regard to sex research is filled with possibilities: to build on the challenging questions social con- struction theory has raised, or to fall back onto cultural influence and essentialist models. The stakes are not low - for research in sexuality, for applied work in AIDS education and prevention, for sexual politics, for human lives. If this is a moment in whieh anthropology 'rediscovers' sex, we need to consider two questions: who will do the looking? and more to the point, what will we be able to see? We need to be explicit about our theoretieal models, mindful of their history, and self-conscious about our practiee.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Frances M. Doughty for helpful conversations, invaluable editorial suggestions, and generous encouragement. I am appreciative of Shirley Lindenbaum's comments, patience, and enthusiasm. Thanks also to Lisa Duggan, Gayle Rubin, David Schwartz, Gilbert Zieklin, Jonathan Katz, Janiee Irvine, Ann Snitow, Nan Hunter, Jennifer Terry, Jacqueline Urla, Libbett Crandon, William Hawkeswood, Jeanne Bergman, Faye Ginsburg, and the anonymous reviewers from Social Science and Medicine for their comments. Thanks to Pamela Brown-Peterside for research assistance.

This paper was presented at the panel 'Anthropology Rediscovers Sex' at the 1988 annual meeting of the Ameriean Anthropologieal Association. Thanks to the convener, Shirley Lindenbaum, and participants for a lively dialogue. I also benefitted from comments made by the members of the Medical Anthropology Colloquium at Columbia University. The responsibility for views expressed in this paper remains mine.

Notes

1. This resistance can have paradoxical effects, to judge from personal experience. My own grant application in 1977 to complete a conventional annotated anthropological bibliography on biocultural influences on sexuality was rejected on the grounds that the investigator 'was too young to engage in research on this topic' and, being unable to read )apanese, 'could not read the important new literature on )apanese macaques in the original'. Far from being discouraging, these comments piqued my interest all the more, since it appeared that anthropologists' volatile reactions deserved scrutiny at least as much as the cross- cultural material.

2. There is no suggestion here that the most radical forms of sodal construction theory are necessarily the best, although the exerdse of totally deconstructing one of the most essential categories, sexuality, often has an electrifying and energizing effect on one's thinking. Whether this degree of deconstruction can be plausibly maintained is another question.

3. Heider's work on the Dani is an exception in regard to conceptualizing variable levels of sexual energy. 4. A different attempt at assimilation is found in the assertion that the debate between essentialists and sodal

constructionists in regard to sexuality is a replay of the nature-nurture controversy. This is a profound

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misunderstanding of social construction theory. In nature--nurture debates, researchers are proposing alter- native biological or cultural mechanisms to explain phenomena they observe. At present, most observers agree that human behaviour is produced by a complex interaction of biological and cultural factors; they differ on the relative weight they assign to each. Although it might be appropriate to find some sirnilarity between essentialists and the nature camp, to equate social construction to the nurture camp is mistaken. Social construction theory is not simply arguing for cultural causation. In addition and more important, it encourages us to deconstruct and examine the behaviour or processes which both nature and nurture camps have reified and want to 'explain'. Social construction suggests that the object of study deserves at least as much analytic attention as the suspected causal mechanism.

5. TIlis is not to say that research is not also being conducted by social scientists outside of medical institutions or that social scientists do not also contribute to studies based in medical schoois, albeit usually in a lesser role. However, the sheer number of biomedically-oriented population surveys coupled with their large sampie sizes and budgets threatens to overshadow and displace sexuality research conducted by less- biomedically-oriented investigators. In addition, medical doctors are perceived to speak more authoritat- ively than social scientists about the body. Given this, increasingly essentialist perspectives which frame sexuality in relation to AIDS as a bodily matter will automatically increase the legitimacy of medical speakers and texts.

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