SOC 101

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Three Models of Sexuality: Drives, Identities and Practices Author(s): Arlene Stein Source: Sociological Theory, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Spring, 1989), pp. 1-13 Published by: American Sociological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/202059 Accessed: 20-08-2014 19:13 UTC

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THREE MODELS OF SEXUALITY: DRIVES, IDENTITIES AND PRACTICES*

ARLENE STEIN

University of California, Berkeley

During the last half of this century, as western societies experienced profound and unsettling changes in sexual and gender relations, the sexual realm has become increasingly contested, commercialized and commodified (Freedman and D'Emilio 1988). The heterosexual couple is still viewed as the building block of social life and social policy, yet the forces holding it together have never been more tenuous. And conservative groupings in the United States have successfully capitalized on this growing anxiety by attempting to legislate their own definition of "proper" sexuality for all. One need only to look at the current range of public discourse-teen pregnancy, sex education, pornography, abortion and, most explosively of late, AIDS-to support the claim that sex is on the front-line of politics, and is an in- creasingly important terrain of social rela- tions (Rubin 1984; Foucault 1978).

Yet the view that sexuality is concerned solely with the biological and psychological capacities of individuals somehow existing prior to social life continues to dominate the popular imagination, even as sex has increasingly become a matter of public discourse, and a viable area of sociological research. Rooted in the efforts of nine- teenth century sexology to devise a science of sex, in its simplest formulation this position views sex as an overpowering, instinctual drive, a "basic biological man- date" which must be firmly controlled by the cultural and social matrix (Gagnon and Simon 1973; Weeks 1985). Freud's effort to distinguish between component "in- stincts" (which are biological) and "drive" (which is psychically and culturally shaped) pointed toward the promise of overcoming

* Thanks to Tomas Almaguer, Nancy Chodorow, Karla Hackstaff, Kristin Luker, Jennifer Pierce and Norbert Wiley for their critical comments on an earlier draft, and to Steven Epstein for helpful discussions on related matters. Any errors or omissions are, of course, my own.

the biologistic bias of sexology, providing a basis for a more sociological interpre- tation of sexual behavior and identity. But in the end his libido theory veered toward nature, postulating a fixed sexual drive which is for the most part independent of social structure. Correspondingly, reduc- tionist interpretations have figured promi- nently among American interpreters (Turkle 1979).

It was the insight of sociology that the drive model leaves important questions about sex unanswered. While sexuality may be grounded in biological drives, these drives are extremely plastic. Humans are driven by their biological constitution to seek sexual release and nourishment, but their "biological constitution does not tell [them] where they should seek sexual release and what they should eat" (Berger and Luckmann 1967:181). In other words, there is great variation in sexual behavior within societies that fails to be explained by the drive model. Sociologists therefore set out on the task of looking at how group membership-in the family and religious institutions, primarily-shapes sexual behavior.

But by assuming a drive model of sexuality, even as they held out the im- portance of social norms in structuring sexual behavior, functionalists tended to find uniformity rather than diversity, con- sistency rather than change. Heterosexual, procreative sexuality reigned supreme. The principal sociological challenge to the positivist conception of sex implicit in this model came from symbolic interactionists, who sought to overturn drive theory by arguing that sex is socially constructed, and has no existence apart from its cultural content. Some went as far as to claim that sexuality is subject to sociocultural molding to a degree surpassed by few other forms of human behavior (Gagnon and Simon 1973).

Rather than aim to uncover universal

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SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

laws of behavior, or the macrostructural determinants of sexuality, sociologists began to analyze the ways in which desires are expressed, sexually and nonsexually, in situationally varied everyday behavior, the product of earlier experiences and social learning. In its broadest terms, there was a theoretical shift from "nature" to "nurture", from a drive model to what is here called an "identity" model of sex, from seeing sex in terms of family and gender systems, to seeing the sexual as increasingly significant in its own right. This intellectual development was the product of historical changes in which sexuality, in modern non-kinship based societies such as our own, had attained a certain degree of autonomy from both family and gender dynamics, due at least in part to the efforts of several contem- porary social movements.

This revised sociological approach, the "identity model", assumed the possibility of a much greater degree of human agency and individual plasticity than did previous models. Yet there is good reason to believe that the continuing popular appeal of the drive model in the popular imagin- ation attests to the apparent force of its explanatory power, related, perhaps, to the fact that most people experience their sexuality as a powerful, natural, unchanging force. Sociological theories of sexuality have yet to satisfactorily address this dilemma. How can we account for social change and sexual transformation, recog- nizing that change on both the micro and macro levels takes place within constraints?

The following represents a preliminary attempt to address this and other theo- retical questions in the sociology of sex. The first part of the essay provides a brief introduction to the origins of the drive model, showing how Freud presented a universal theory of sexual development which made an analytical distinction be- tween "sex" and "society" and viewed the sexual primarily in terms of the property of individuals, despite his efforts to move beyond the biologism of sexology. Postwar functionalist theories of sexuality, discussed in the following section, connected sexual behavior to social institutions but, as they were predicated on a drive model of

sexuality derived from Freud, they tended to understate the extent to which sexuality is socially constructed. In the 1960's and 1970's, as microsocial analyses came to exert a growing influence upon the field of sociology, culture was believed to have unseated nature as the primary determi- nant of sexual patterns, and an "identity" model came to challenge the drive model of sex. The last section evaluates this theoretical development, and looks at post-structuralist theory and the notion of "practices" as both an extension and cri- tique of that model. Finally, possible fruitful directions for further work are discussed.

Origins of the Drive Model: Sexology and Psychoanalysis "Sex research" began in Europe during the latter part of the last century, at a time when medicine was undergoing rapid pro- fessionalization, in part the historical product of a long process of disenchant- ment in which religious authority was overturned in favor of the scientific. Sexologists believed that they could explain the properties of the complex of sexuality by reference to an inner truth or essence and they set out to discover this truth in biology, to devise a "science of sex" which would reveal a single, basic, uniform pattern ordained by nature itself (Weeks 1985). The "modernization of sex", its transformation into a field for rational rather than moral inquiry was evidenced by the work of such researchers as Krafft- Ebbing, who conducted a series of detailed case studies, categorizing the vast array of sexual variations, from acquired sexual inversion to zoophilia. His elaborate tax- onomy of natural sexual "variations" was conceived against the notion that these were immoral "deviations". Sexuality in- hered in anatomy and physiology, not in values and emotions (Robinson 1976). The sexual drive, the sexologists believed, was a biological, unchanging force, given at birth.

Drawing a strict separation between the researcher as "subject" and sex as "object" of study, such positivistic explanations failed to consider that humans, unlike

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animals, have the capacity for self-reflection, and that this capacity plays a powerful role in shaping the expression of seemingly physical drives. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, came to evidence a much more complex and sophisticated psycho- dynamic understanding of the operation of "normal" sexuality and its relation to the whole person. Rather than focus on the species, the body or the syndrome, as did sexology, Freud revealed the operations of sexuality through the protracted, inter- subjective relationship between analyst and patient. He went beyond positivism to acknowledge the volatile, psychic origins of adult sexuality. Trained as a neurologist, however, he was heavily influenced by the biologistic leanings of sexology (Freud 1905). A bitter controversy rages to this day in search of the "true" Freud, due in large part to his own ambivalence and ambiguities in his writing.

The debate centers on the extent to which Freud emphasized psychological versus neuropsychological factors in ex- plicating human behavior-whether he saw his central task as the search for meaning, seeking clues to the unconscious, or whether he was primarily interested in mechanical and physical analogues (ener- gies, forces, cathexes) (Rabow 1987). Klein (1976) argued that Freud worked simul- taneously with two distinct conceptions of sexuality. The first conception, termed the "clinical theory", focused upon "the values and meanings associated with sensual ex- periences in the motivational history of a person from birth to adulthood", empha- sizing psychological factors (51). The second, "metapsychological theory", saw sexuality as an "energetic force that 'seeks' discharge". Whether sexual motives should be seen as inherently social and inter- subjective (a striving to bond), or whether they should be viewed more as instinctual, biologically rooted forces (a striving to relieve sexual tension) is thus at times unclear.

While the clinical, or psychological theory, points to the existence of an unconscious psychic realm which is rela- tively autonomous from both biology and society, the metapsychological, or drive- discharge theory is rooted in the biologism

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of Freud's sexological contemporaries. Metapsychological variants of Freudian theory have been criticized for constructing an opposition between human connected- ness and human nature, privileging primal aggressive and libidinal drives over love and relationality, and containing an implicit assumption that people are originally anti- social (Chodorow 1985). Clinical theory, on the other hand, acknowledges that the sexual realm is not a thing-in-itself, the essence of selfhood which is somehow inscribed onto the individual at birth, but is deeply rooted in intrapsychic fantasies stemming from the individual's infantile sexuality, formed in relation to parental intervention (Freud 1905).' It recognizes the importance of subjectivity and meaning in the shaping of human sexual experience, and is continuous with object-relations theory, an attempt to purge psychoanalysis of its drive orientation (Person 1987). Object relations theory replaces Freud's notion of primary narcissism with a primary relationality, as embodied in the pre- oedipal relationship of mother and child, seen as the key to the formation of individual subjectivity.

But since Freud himself did not clearly separate the two conceptions-meta- psychological and clinical-the former, Klein noted, has achieved the "spurious status" of being seen as the Freudian theory of sexuality (Klein 1976:16). Spuri- ous or not, because the drive model of sexuality has tended to be the one which has been assimilated into sociology, and because object relations theory has yet said little about sexual questions, this section will focus upon Freudian theory

Object relations analysts posit that the primary aim of the sex "drive" is object seeking rather than pleasure seeking (Fairbairn 1952). Adult sexuality is less a single physical event (as in Freudian drive theory) than an interpersonal bond rooted in early psychic experience, based on the absence or lack felt by the baby when separated from its mother or from other sources of pleasure and nourishment. What- ever the character of our desired objects, the form of our desire is often a longing not just to be with but to become one with the desired object. This longing is surrounded by a constant anxiety about loss, as both our actual separation from the mother, and our potential separations from other objects of desire (Greenberg and Mitchell 1983).

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rather than on neo-Freudian variants.2 It is argued that Freud, by isolating the exist- ence of an unconscious psychic realm relatively autonomous from both biology and society, moved beyond the simplistic biologism of sexology, yet was limited by a psychological reductionism which under- stated the extent to which sexual behavior is socially constructed.

Freud is perhaps best known for his theory of childhood sexuality. Libido, the psychic energy associated with the sexual drive which impels the individual toward erotic activity, is already at work in the infant, influencing behavior and clamoring for gratification (Freud 1905). Before the oedipal phase, the sexuality of the child is labile and relatively unstructured-as Freud put it, "polymorphously perverse." In the drama of the oedipal crisis, the child struggles with incestuous desires for the mother and father, to an eventual identifi- cation with the parent of the same sex. Proceeding along a course believed to be determined broadly by constitutional factors which are common to all, but which can "accidentally" vary considerably from person to person, the undifferentiated infant finally becomes a little man or a little woman.

But the instinctual aims of the infant are incompatible with the requirements of civilization; the developmental process which forms subjectivity necessarily entails a great deal of sexual repression and sublimation of desires. This repression helps to shape the individual but it also leads to various perversions and neuroses which "form a part of the normally accepted constitution" (Freud 1905:33-34). It is the

Of late, object relations theory is becoming increasingly important in psychoanalytic sociology, particularly among sociologists of gender. Feminists have argued that in a patriarchal society dominant conceptions of sex, constructed by men, tend to be individualistic, and drive-oriented (MacKinnon 1987; Phillipson 1984; Chodorow 1985;1978). However, feminist theorists tend to be concerned primarily with gender, not sexual dynamics, telling us little about questions of sexual desire and identity as relatively autonomous from gender (Rubin 1984). Certainly there are important links between sexuality and gender identity; we experience sexuality in a gendered way. One of the problems with using psychoanalytic theory to study sexuality, however, is that sexuality and gender are frequently conflated.

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particular way in which sexual drives are channeled and regulated, rooted in the structure within which the child's love-life is confined, the Oedipal triangle, that gives rise, in Freud's case histories, to "hysterical misery". Sexual repression is thus incor- porated into the very structure of the psyche, and is instrumental in forming the mature ego (Chodorow 1985). It is not something which is imposed upon the adult, from which she/he can be liberated. But the internalization of sexual norms is typically incomplete. Unresolved sexual problems and/or unrealized sexual wishes often seek expression in sublimated form, and this sublimation of sexual energies, Freud believed, is the impulse behind creative endeavor and a necessary means of stabilizing the institutions of civilization.

While he acknowledged that the sexual instinct is made up of component parts, comprised of a direction (some specific aim to accomplish) and an object (the instrument by which the aim is to be fulfilled) which need not vary together, he retained a telos of "normal" development, arguing that when the instinct diverges in terms of aim and object, exists without an object, or is displaced, such sexual fixations result in perversion (Freud 1905). However much he may have relativized the notion of "perversions", believing in an essential "bisexuality", and seeing "perversion" or "abnormality" as value-neutral terms, his telos of normal development pathologized any deviation from gendered, heterosexual genital sexuality.

Freud thus extended the meaning of the word "sex" beyond the sexological em- phasis on physical outlet, suggesting that it included all the activities and love that originated in the primitive sexual drives, as well as impulses expressing themselves in ways no longer evidently sexual (Freud 1920). Yet in the final analysis, the drive model assumed a separation between "sex" and "society", nature and culture, with the former existing prior to the latter, requiring restraint, in order for society to function properly. Sex was, of necessity, a fixed quantity, "a motor force in culture and an innate force with which culture must con- tend" (Person 1987:38). The drive model posited a universal theory of human nature

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which claimed that "infancy is transhistori- cal. . .any human infant has much more in common with all other human infants in all times and places than with the older humans of its own time and place" (Horowitz 1987:71). Therein lies its primary strengths and weaknesses: it put forth a powerful universal theory of sexual develop- ment and sexual desire but was unable to adequately account for sexual diversity or social change.

Since the family is the site where biology, society and psychology converge most evidently, Freud's rooting of sexuality in a determinate way in the family makes perfect sense. Sexual desire may indeed be deeply structured by infantile experience, internal conflicts not fully resolved, and repressions of instincts in early life. But the drive model also has blind spots: it obscures the importance of later develop- ment and adult experience, understates the impact of the social milieu that shapes those experiences, and retains a telos of normal sexual development, even as it expands the meaning of the word "sexual". In the final analysis, it can be argued that Freud rendered nature partly social, moving beyond the biological determinism of sexology to begin to understand how desire is constituted intersubjectively. But lacking a theory of social structure beyond the family, the drive model of sexuality tended to downplay the actual links between social structure and sexual behavior.

The Sociological Challenge: Sexuality, Social Structure and Identity The intellectual hegemony of sexology and psychoanalysis (particularly biologistic versions of the latter) in the area of sex led Sagarin (1971:384) to write that "the period from the Darwinian revolution to the Second World War was quite barren of any sociology of sex". Henslin (1971) explained that a sociology of sex would need to go beyond the individualistic thrust of much sex research to account for the ways in which sexual behavior is shaped by group membership. Following the psychoanalytic belief that sexual be- havior is structured primarily within the family, in the postwar era the first systematic

sociological treatments of sexuality situated sexuality in a determinate way in the nuclear family, with religious and other institutions seen as additional generators of sexual norms. Later, as microlevel interpretive approaches gained headway, interactionism moved the sociology of sexuality beyond an emphasis on the family, shifting the focus from the deter- mining power of social norms to the more interactive developmental and situational circumstances under which individuals de- vise "sexual scripts".

Tied to the functionalist tradition, the sociology of sexuality explored the con- nections between sexuality and social struc- ture, retaining the analytical distinction, derived from Freud, between "sex" and "society". "Every society shapes, structures and constrains the development and ex- pression of sexuality in all of its members" wrote Beach (1977:116). Kingsley Davis (1961) argued that "the sexual impulse is both powerful and capable of intricate conditioning", principally by "linking it with marriage and the family"-for example, "by making marriage normatively superior to other types of sexual union" (259). Numerous studies of the "social control" of sexuality drew upon represen- tative samples to claim that social insti- tutions-the family and, to a lesser extent, religion-are the source of both general perspectives and specific norms that govern sexual expression through processes of socialization and social influence through- out the life of an individual (DeLamater 1981).

Functionalist analyses assumed a drive model of sex inherited from psychoanalysis, which claimed that it was up to society to generate norms in order to keep wayward sexual impulses in check. But whereas the basic premise and indeed the starting point of psychoanalysis was that the internaliz- ation of norms tends to fail, Parsons' notion of social role-the idea that there exist socially provided norms for individual behavior, first learned and then enacted- assumed both the corrigibility of the in- dividual and correctness of training by group members; the fit between the indi- vidual and society was assumed to be a close one (Rose 1983). The "oversocialized"

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conception of the individual implicit in this model came under attack by Wrong (1961), who denied the inevitability of internaliz- ation in the face of human truculence and complexity. Such criticisms, coupled with the dissemination of the Kinsey Institute studies, set the stage for post-functionalist studies of sexuality.

Alfred Kinsey and his associates con- ducted a series of surveys of the sexual behavior of middle class Americans, corre- lating such activities as masturbation, homosexuality, and premarital sex with age, class and gender variables. The massive amount of interview data collected revealed the enormous diversity of behavior within the United States, evidencing a great disparity with the accepted social norm of procreative, heterosexual intercourse. For example, the "Kinsey Scale" placed homo- sexuality and heterosexuality on a con- tinuum, having uncovered a much greater incidence of homosexual activity, particu- larly among men, than was popularly believed to exist (Kinsey, Pomeroy and Martin 1948). Such findings served to relativize sexual behavior and debunk notions of pathology, calling into question rigid sexual norms and laying the foun- dation for more liberal sex research. Kinsey's work revealed that Parsonian functionalism theorized hegemonic hetero- sexuality at a time when it was beginning to come unstuck.

But his research drew preliminary links between sex and social structure at the expense of understanding the connections between sexuality and the self, failing to get beyond the notion that sexual activity was anything more than a "summation of orgasms" (Brake 1982:23). The notion that sexuality reflects one's relationship to the world was taken up by symbolic interactionists, who drew upon Freudianism and role theory, defining themselves against both. Symbolic interactionists combined a critique of internalization with an extension of socialization's relevance to the indivi- dual, incorporating elements from inter- pretive and behaviorist viewpoints. Like the behaviorists, they favored a situational approach that emphasized adjustment to circumstances; but while they rejected the internalization thesis, they did not abandon

the concept of socialization. Instead, they emphasized the more general and less deterministic idea of "learning" or "acquir- ing" as its defining characteristic, arguing that every interaction provides a socializing experience (Long and Hadden 1985).

When applied to the field of sexuality, the central task of symbolic interactionism was to describe and theorize the processes by which sexual meanings are negotiated through interaction. As against the Freudian model, it was argued that sexual behavior was not somehow fixed in early childhood through the machinations of the oedipal complex; sexual "conduct" emerges with adolescence and is, for the most part, discontinuous with early childhood. Sex is not a drive; it has no existence outside of society but is itself a product of social forces, shaped through daily overt influ- ences, part of a lifelong learning process (Gagnon and Simon 1973). As against the functionalist view that sexual behavior is a matter of socialization into sexual roles within the family, they argued that sexual behavior was the product of a much more interactive process, embodied in the notion of sexual scripts.

After having been associated with the Kinsey Institute, Gagnon and Simon (1973) moved from their early Kinsey-inspired empiricism to first apply the interactionist position to studies of sexuality. Every individual has a motivation to seek out sexual gratification, and it is through socialization that the person learns some or all of the scenarios that are available through which to achieve this, they claimed. A cultural scenario is a set of beliefs that specify in general terms the parameters of some social activity, designating the roles involved in the activity, the times and places appropriate for the activity, and the kinds and sequences of activities that are acceptable. A scenario provides general behavioral guidelines, with which an actor matches his/her preferences, and when specific actors interact following these guidelines, their behavior constitutes a script. Implicit within the interactionist position was the view that modern societies tend to bestow an exaggerated importance to sexuality; sexual behavior is, for the most part, a simple, everyday occurence

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constructed from social motives and settings which are variable.

In this way, interactionists shifted the research emphasis from sexual roles to the looser notion of sexual identity-from showing how social norms constrain and shape the sexual impulse, to showing how individuals, as active agents, negotiate sexual conduct through social interaction. In contrast to the functionalist concept of social roles, which tended to be a one- sided and mechanistic, interactionists be- lieved that the formation of identities "entails a dialectic between identification by others and self-identification, between objectively assigned and subjectively appro- priated identity (Berger and Luckmann 1967:132).3 While certain sexual scripts- heterosexual intercourse, for example- remain dominant in the contemporary era, individuals are not shaped by cultural scenarios, or social roles, in any simple fashion: the social world "requires that we bargain with life for our identities" since "contemporary societies provide fewer bases for external imposition of continui- ties" (Gagnon and Simon 1987, p. 371).

As interactionists came to put forth a more voluntarist, fluid notion of sexual behavior and identity, the notion that fixed social roles act as a constraint upon behavior became the preoccupation of labelling theorists, who focused on the processes by which social categories constrain individual choice by creating deviant identities and by placing certain individuals, such as homosexuals, within them (Plummer 1982). In the debates about homosexuality, label- ling theorists claimed that social stigma acts as a constraint upon individual choice, implying that the labels mask the fact there is no essential difference between hetero- sexuals and homosexuals. The differences between those two groups are the effect of cultural categories, specifically the emer- gence of a "homosexual role" (McIntosh 1968). Social stigma and labelling make more of the difference between homo-

3Sexual identity includes, among other things: one's sexual preference or orientation (object choice), the conscious identification of self with social sexual typologies (such as homosexual or heterosexual), and one's erotic role identity (such as active or passive).

sexuality and heterosexuality (or procrea- tive heterosexuality and the numerous sexual practices which deviate from it) than is perhaps deserving; the variability of sexual behavior across cultures, as evidenced by numerous anthropological studies, attests to the power of culture in shaping sexual patterns (Ortner and Whitehead 1981; Herdt 1981).

In the "essentialist-constructionist" de- bates on homosexuality which raged through the 80's, symbolic interactionist and labelling studies of sexuality were enthusiastically embraced by many activists and sociologists sympathetic to the view that homosexuality is "socially constructed", the consequence of "nurture", not "nature" (Weeks 1985; D'Emilio 1983). As sociol- ogists of homosexuality came increasingly to reject sexology, psychoanalysis and functionalism as theoretical models for understanding homosexuality, interaction- ism and labelling theory gained hegemony in the field. The social science literature on lesbianism after 1960 reflected this shift: lesbianism ceased to be a sexual or social disease and became, according to Krieger (1982), "a lifestyle choice linked with a sense of personal identity", a product of multiple influences rather than traceable to a single cause. Indeed, etiology, or explanations of "causes" of homosexuality, ceased to dominate the discussion, replaced by studies of behaviors and perceptions of experience, focusing less on how lesbians differ from the norm than how they are similar to other women. Increasingly, such studies viewed the homosexual in a social context-in relationships, institutions, communities and a larger society-rather than in isolated individual terms or in relation to a family of origin. They con- sidered homosexuality to be a matter of total personal identity rather than primarily a sexual condition, and they viewed it as subject to choice and as changeable in definition rather than something that is given.

In the broadest sense, there was a shift from "thinking about lesbianism in terms of deviance, narrowness, simple causation, isolated occurrence, and fixed nature to thinking of it in terms of normality, diversity, multiple influence, social context,

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choice and change" (Krieger 1982:227). Much the same could be said for studies of male homosexuality (Bell and Weinberg 1979). The trend toward normalization of homosexuality in the social science litera- ture met with mixed results. Reified con- ceptions of homosexuality as pathology were debunked and deconstructed, setting the stage for a conception of "homosexual" as "adjective rather than noun" (Risman and Schwartz 1988). But whether homo- sexuality is as fluid or freely chosen as much of the "constructionist" literature has supposed is debateable. Some have argued that the attempt to downplay the centrality and fixity of sexual identity is often at odds with the experience of many homosexuals (and heterosexuals) who view their sexuality as an unchanging, core characteristic of the self (Epstein 1987). Others have posited that the new emphasis on sexuality as a matter of "choice" reflects some easing of sexual norms among the middle classes but fails to appreciate the extent to which power relations in a heterosexual, male-dominated culture con- tinue to constrain sexual options, privi- leging heterosexuality over homosexuality, and male sexuality over female sexuality (MacKinnon 1987; Kitzinger 1987; Rich 1980).

In their desire to cast off reified individual constitutional factors or social norms as determinants of sexual behavior, inter- actionists have frequently chosen to see sexuality as a malleable feature of human behavior, imputing to individuals the capa- city to rise above their social situation and create their sexualities practically at will, within certain constraints. Missing from much of the recent literature on homo- sexuality and alternative "sexual lifestyles", for example, is a nuanced theory of determination which could account for the persistence of heterosexual hegemony on the individual level. The interactionist position never really answers the question of how heterosexual (and, by implication, homosexual) desire, comes to be consti- tuted within the individual. Why do people choose to adopt some sexual scripts over others? Lacking a theory of the uncon- scious, interactionism fails to explain how deeply needs and desires are related to the

development of the self. Nor does inter- actionism, or social constructionism gener- ally, adequately explain determination on the macro level. Where do cultural scen- arios come from, and how they are trans- formed? The literature has yet to acknow- ledge that some social groups have vested interests in maintaining particular cultural scenarios, or norms, and that the common social location of subordinate groups- women and homosexuals, for example- has created the conditions for a collective subjectivity to challenge hegemonic groupings.

The tendency of recent sociological liter- ature to assume that social institutions in the modern era exercise a diminishing grip upon individuals' sexual lives may reflect a real loosening of norms, and the increasing capacity of individuals to shape their own sexualities. But in the effort to cast off the frequently reified notion of roles, the extent to which certain groups in society retain the capacity to normalize some types of sexual conduct at the expense of others has often been underestimated. Also understated is the extent to which, individually and collectively, many choose to resist those norms. In short, what is missing from recent sociological theories of sexuality is a conceptualization of power, a theme taken up by Michel Foucault.

Foucault and Post-structuralism: Power and Practices

The History of Sexuality (1978) stands clearly within the social constructionist tradition, concluding that not only the particular forms of regulation of sexual behavior and the separate elements of a sexual script, but even the notion of sexuality itself is a social construct: "Sexu- ality must not be thought of as a kind of 'natural given' which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge gradually tries to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct" (152). By breaking with a drive model of sexuality and historicizing socially constructed sexual categories, it could be argued that Foucault extended the work of symbolic interactionists and labelling theorists; by introducing the element of

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power, it could be said that he provides a theory of determination that goes beyond the liberal individualism of much middle- range sociology. But if the goal of a sociology of sexuality is to theorize the relationship between sexuality and social structure, Foucault's post-structuralism may pose limitations on his use by socio- logists.

Foucault's larger intellectual project was to show how institutional discourses, ex- pressed through expert "regimes of truth", come to construct subjectivity. Sexuality is not some preexisting instinct, biological force or transhistorical psychoanalytical category, the truth or essence of our being, held somehow in check through the oper- ation of social norms, he has argued. Rather, sexuality is constructed through the very operation of these norms. Sexology and psychoanalysis, disciplines whose object it was to examine and uncover the "truth" of sex and to explain "unnatural" sexuali- ties, made sexuality a key component of the modern self through processes of "individualization" and "normalization" (58). As the result of the "discursive explosion" during the Victorian era, sexu- ality became a mainstay of individual identity, heterosexual monogamy came to function as a norm, and sexual deviants came to see themselves as distinct persons, possessing particular "natures" and stig- matized identities.

In this way, Foucault broke with the positivist tradition which viewed sex as a natural, universal entity which can somehow be isolated and "discovered". Like the interactionists discussed earlier, he argued that "the real" is itself an effect, the discursive product of a particular, positivist epistemology; sexuality can not be separ- ated or studied apart from its cultural meanings. Identities, too, are fictive unities given to something that is always unstable and incoherent; in the end, the only objects of study (or of belief or of conscious- ness or politics) are not objective realities but epistemological categories.

Historically, certain social groups- namely religious, and now medical experts -have possessed disproportionate power to define those cultural meanings. Following from this, one might suppose that Foucault

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is posing a vision quite compatible with the sociological notion of social control dis- cussed earlier, which looked at the ways in which institutions generate norms that channel and control sexual desire. But his model is fundamentally different. First, as mentioned, for Foucault there is no pre- existing natural sexual instinct that is repressed by social forces. Second, unlike most sociological conceptions of power, in his schema power is diffuse, and productive rather than repressive.4 It operates rela- tionally, with the full participation of the individuals .upon which it impacts, by colonizing a "microphysics" of powers that operate according to their own logic on a local level (1980, p. 142). While power may have originated in the experts, it has since taken on a life of its own, centered in a multiplicity of free-flowing discourses which circulate through time and inscribe themselves upon individuals.

In the face of this diffuse type of power Foucault believes that we can no longer point to any one locus of power, or even set of central institutions which can some- how be overthrown, or reformed, thus liberating sexuality. The most we can hope for is that individuals might engage in a critical transgression of social norms, by deconstructing sexual identities, and playing with "bodies and pleasures" (1980). The hope is that the tremendous role that sexuality plays in society would lessen, and we would move toward a vision of social life as the pure, but diffuse, deployment of power, freed of systems of social norms and roles. This may not be a vision of sexual liberation in the sense of Marcuse (1955) or Reich (1945), but it is an attempt to uphold individual desire as an end in itself. Such is typical of the postmodernist project. Whereas the goal of the Enlighten- ment tradition is to theorize a lifeworld based on substantive rationality, the post- modernists have rejected rationality in favor of prerational desire, a vision funda- mentally at odds with many of the premises of modernist sociology (Lash 1985).

4 In the classic sociological view of power, inherited from pluralist political science, power is defined as "the ability to get someone to do something that they would not otherwise do" (Dahl 1957).

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SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

For example, following Foucault's model, it becomes difficult to develop a conception of causality. Correspondence theories of truth are challenged; causal models which argue for structural domi- nations that flow from the cultural, social, historical, political, or symbolic realms are questioned (Denzin 1986). Foucault fails to provide an understanding of either the grassroots reality that was the object of strategies of control, or a real sense of how that control might be resisted; the matter of how power is actually constituted is left rather vague. The oversocialized concep- tion of the individual implicit in this view may in part be a methodological effect; the post-structuralist reliance on the study of texts rather than actual sexual behavior has perhaps led Foucault to mistake trans- formations of representations for trans- formations of conduct (Gagnon and Simon 1987:368). It is also due to his post-modern conception of (lack of) self.

Scientific discourses may indeed have reconstituted sexual practices and identities, fundamentally altering modern subjectivity, as he has argued. But it could be argued in response that individuals are not simply plastic and directionless; they possess a fundamental core of identity, shaped through early experiences within the family, that resists total administration. Foucault deconstructs the "identity model" of sexu- ality but, lacking an appreciation for the dialectical relationship between identities as self-expressions and identities as ascrip- tive impositions, he fails to replace it with one that thematizes the relationship be- tween sexuality and social structure in anything but repressive terms. In arguing that there is no longer a viable subject which is able to resist the defining power of sexual discourses, and that we should therefore throw off those oppressive identi- ties and embrace unspoken "practices", Foucault discards agency along with structure.

Foucault presents a reflexive critique of positivist knowledge, rejecting all univers- alistic, totalizing, and indeed all causal models, of sexual behavior, and thus moves away from the concerns of many sociologists. Freud's notion that the family provides the bedrock upon which all indivi-

dual desire is patterned, or the functionalist assumption that, in addition to the family unit, religious and other institutions struc- ture modern sexuality in predictable ways, is no longer applicable, if it ever was. Instead, a proliferation of circulating dis- courses takes hold upon individuals and constructs sexual subjectivity by imposing identities upon them.

In sum, by introducing the notion of power, providing an understanding of how, historically, sexual discourses have come to shape individual subjectivity and sexual identity, Foucault extends the work of liberal, pluralist sociology, making pre- liminary links between the micro and macrosocial levels, and providing a useful self-reflexive critique of positivist social science. But it has been argued that Foucault's "practices" model, with which he seeks to replace both the drive and identity models, leads him to discard agency along with structure, thus diminish- ing the prospects for social change.

Conclusion: Drives, Identities and Practices

We began with a look at how sexology, and at times Freudian theory, embodied a positivism in which techniques and pro- cedures of the social sciences were seen as a means of uncovering laws that could predict and control sexual behavior. Basic to this conception was the dichotomy of subject and object: the belief that the researcher, as subject, can stand back from the object (sexual behavior) and study it "objectively". The separation of subject and object, culture and nature, the non-material world of ideas, attitudes, beliefs and the world of physical things, has been a persistent tension in theories of sexuality. In its simplest formulation, it is predicated on a drive model of sexuality, in which sexuality is seen as an instinctual force existing prior to society.

Sociological theories of sexuality in the postwar era began with a variant of role theory which assumed this distinction be- tween sexuality and society. Through the machinations of social norms, society con- strained the sexual impulse in order to maintain the integrity of the family system,

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THREE MODELS OF SEXUALITY

functionalists argued. This paradigm assumed a close fit between norms and actual behavior, relegating deviations from the procreative, heterosexual standard to the deviant role. Implicit within it was a conception, derived from Freud, of sexu- ality as a natural impulse that possessed some essential, organic integrity quite apart from its appearance in society, and which required social norms to keep it in check.

But it has been argued that the assump- tion that roles, emanating from institutions, determine behavior in a simple and direct fashion, is a symptom of functionalist reification, evidencing an "undialectical conception of the relationsip between what [people] do and what they think" (Berger and Luckmann 1967, p. 91). In contrast, interpretive sociologists opened up the possibility that institutions and roles may place limits on human behavior, but such structures are subject to transformation by human action. In sociological parlance, this led to a shift from "institutions", "roles" and "social control", to "identities", "scripts" and "social change". Individuals came to be seen as playing a greater part in shaping sexual behavior through social learning and daily situational interaction. The theory of sexuality implicit in this latter paradigm differed from the drive model insofar as it held that culture had triumphed over nature; there is no natural sexual impulse which must be repressed in order for society to function smoothly.

This theoretical trend may have reflected the loosening grip of institutions and norms upon individuals. But reacting to the oversocialized individual implicit in functionalist theory, such interpretive sociologies went perhaps the other extreme. As critics have pointed out, the interaction- ist challenge to naturalism relied upon a radically undersocialized model of persons who create society themselves situationally rather than being created in its normative image. This led them to present a liberal, pluralist schema which saw actors primarily in individual terms. For example, Gagnon and Simon (1987), in a recent reformu- lation, contend that sexual scripts exist at three analytically distinct levels: cultural scenarios (social norms), interpersonal

scripts (where social norms and individual desire meet), and intrapsychic scripts (in- dividual desire). But where cultural scen- arios come from, and why individuals choose to follow some over others continues to be rather unclear.

In interactionist forms of role theory a link between personal agency and social structure is attempted but ultimately evaded by dissolving structure into agency. On the social level, what is missing is a conception of power, and the element of resistance to power and social pressure-the open or covert social struggles-attending defi- nitions of sexuality. As mentioned earlier, the absence of a conception of power has led interactionists to understate the extent to which certain groups retain the capacity to normalize favored sexual patterns and stigmatize others. It has also led them to underestimate the extent to which the common social situation of particular groups had led to collective action. On the indivi- dual level, what is missing is a conception of how deeply needs and desires are related to the development of the self as a relational entity, and how that develop- ment is structured by family dynamics. In sum, sociologists have yet to put forth a more nuanced sense of social and individual determination which links the micro and macro levels of sexuality.

Acknowledging this, it has been argued that symbolic interactionism and function- alism can be usefully conjoined to one another. The former could be held to deal with microsociological issues relating to small-scale social relationships, while macrosociological issues, concerned with aspects of the institutional character of society, could be left to functionalism (DeLamater 1987). As Giddens (1979) has illustrated, however, the successful intro- duction of a theory of action into sociology, and the bridging of the subject-object dichotomy, cannot be achieved without a complementary re-working of the idea of structure. The prospect of transcending the dualism of structure and agency in social theory lies in relating power as a resource drawn upon by agents in the production and reproduction of interaction to the structural characteristics of society (257).

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SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

It could be argued, for example, that all cultural scenarios which make sexual prac- tices likely or possible are embedded, to some extent, in social institutions. These practices obtain a degree of regularity by virtue of the fact that they are subject to the objective conditions of their production (Bourdieu 1977). Such objective structures are themselves "products of historical practices and are constantly reproduced and transformed by historical processes" (83). Sexual roles, or sexual scripts, as defined by Gagnon and Simon (1973), could thus be seen as practices, or points of articulation between actors and struc- tures. In this way practices would not be seen as somehow autonomous from struc- ture (as frequently in interactionism), or determined structurally (as in functional- ism), but as a dialectical relationship between the objective structures and the cognitive and motivating structures which they produce and which tend to produce them (83). A set of practices, or habitus, could be viewed as a subjective but not individual system of internalized structures (Bourdieu 1977).

This "microstructural" approach to sexuality points to the possibility of linking the micro and macro levels, offering a way of thinking about sexuality that theorizes the interweaving of personal life and social structure without collapsing towards voluntarism or overdeterminism on one side (as does much sociology) or biological or psychological reductionism (as does sexology and, frequently, psychoanalysis). Like Foucault's model, it acknowledges that sexuality in the modern era is consti- tuted through a multiplicity of centers of power but, unlike his notion of "practices", it retains a sense of structure and agency, and their relationship. A focus on the interconnections of structure and practice, acknowledging that people constitute the social relations they live in, but that these social relations are structured entities, may provide one avenue for thinking about future research directions in the field of sexuality, a task made all the more im- portant by its growing politicization.

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