essay
pewpewpew
original_ideal.docxFunctionalist Approach to Sexual Identity
This approach posits sexual identity as a fundamental, unchanging core of meaning that precedes and transcends culture and politics. According to this theory, sexual identity derives its sense and legitimacy through its grounding in nature and/or history, where "history" is seen as an unbroken line of development whose truth is unquestionable.
Conflict Approach to Sexual Identity
This approach emphasizes the cultural and political circumstances in which identities are produced. It foregrounds the complex processes through which narratives of sexual identity express broader social relations, including and especially relations of power. Those relations remain invisible to the extent that identities are naturalized--that is, represented as outside or prior to particular historical circumstances.
Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality
Foucault's analysis of sexuality is inspired by the conflict approach to sexual identity. He argued that sexuality became a preoccupation in industrializing nations in the nineteenth century. A host of moral codes, laws, medical theories, and treatments were designed to investigate and control sexuality. He argued that the institutional categorization of sexuality emerged as a coherent practice in the nineteenth century.
Foucault did not mean, of course, that sexuality did not exist before the nineteenth century. He meant that before the nineteenth century, sexuality was not scrutinized as closely by medical and legal institutions. People obviously had feelings about sex and engaged in sexual activity with members of the opposite or same sex. These feelings and acts were subject to discussion and representation in literature and pornography, for example. Sexual feelings and acts were also occasionally subject to legislation.
Sexuality as a "Regulatory Fiction"
Foucault argued that the historical production of "normal" sexuality as an idea did not precede, but actually coincided with, the emergence of the concept of "homosexuality." He argued that homosexuality is not an actual mode of being but rather what he termed a "regulatory fiction," produced as part of a system of social control that works on the basis of drawing a distinction between "normal" and "deviant" sexual identities. This key distinction, which is reproduced through legal and medical discourses (particularly psychiatry), underwrites a whole network of practices that work, through treatment, punishment, and exclusion, to enforce social conformity.
According to Foucault, the reasons for the production of homosexuality as a object of discourse at a particular juncture in history stem in part from the need to secure the integrity of the newly emerging institution of the nuclear family as a place for the reproduction of bourgeois social values. Thus, the regulatory fiction of sexuality is closely tied to the regulatory fiction of gender and to the rise of capitalism.
Queer Theory
Taking the conflict perspective on sexuality, queer theorists take issue with the fact that our culture tends to recognize two sexualities: heterosexual and homosexual.
Does human sexuality fall into two and only two camps? Queer theorists say, “No.”
Queer theorists argue that an individual’s sexuality is indefinable, that the very notion of a sexual identity is a human construct designed to “fit” into the social fabric, that sexual preferences are not wholly innate, but dependent on a social context. People are not necessarily attracted to sex itself, but to the meaning gained from having the sexual attraction.
Queer theorists stress that no one is normal or abnormal. Everyone is equally complete. What a person does it simply meaningful for her or him.
Sexual categories are not natural categories; we use these categories because they have gained social currency. They’re useful. As Foucault points out, a problem with the categorization of sexuality is that one category becomes normal and the others deviant.
