SEX, SEXUALITY AND GENDER

- BASIC CONCEPTS

THADDEUS ALFONSO Ph.D., PDF

Department of Psychology
CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bangalore
SCHEDULE
Learning activity Time allowed
Introduction & aims 10 mins
Session 1. Challenging biological determinism and defining sex, 160 mins
sexuality and gender
Group work & lecture (x2) 130 mins
Reading images 20 mins
Session wrap-up 10 mins
Session 2. Heteronormativity and sexual stratification 100 mins
Introduction and lecture 30 mins
Group work 20 mins
Lecture & group work 50 mins
Session 3. Understanding sexuality as historically & socially 80 mins
constructed
or Transgender issues in cross-cultural perspective
Guided reading and group work 80 mins
Conclusion & personal reflection 45 mins
Total 395 mins
MODULE AIMS
To:
❑ Introduce and critique biologically determinist
understandings of sex, gender and sexuality

❑ Introduce Critical Sexuality Studies definitions of sex,

sexuality and gender and examine the history of the
construction of sexuality

❑ Examine the relationships between sex, sexuality and

gender through consideration of heteronormativity and
sexual/gendered inequity
PARTICIPANTS WILL :
Critique biologically determinist constructions of sex and sexuality

Identify key theorists and concepts in the study of sexual inequality

Think critically about the relationships between sex, sexuality and

gender

Reflect on the effects of normative constructions of sex, sexuality and

gender as these are relevant to their sociocultural and research settings
GROUP WORK
Group 1
– List differences between women and men and consider:
• On what are these perceived differences based? (e.g. biological, social, cultural or
religious beliefs)

Group 2
– List similarities between women and men and consider:
• On what are the perceived similarities based? (e.g. biological, social, cultural or
religious beliefs) (10 mins)
• Feedback (10 mins)
DISCUSSION

 All participants to consider together:

 What are the effects of highlighting differences rather than
similarities between men and women?
 To what extent do assumptions about biologically determined
sex differences between women and men influence popular
culture, sayings or beliefs in the Indian subcontinent?
(10 mins)
BIOLOGICAL DETERMINISM

• Biologically determinist theories of various kinds reduce

social organisation and social complexity to an effect of
biology or nature

– Biological determinists include sociobiologists, some

geneticists, psychologists and ‘pop psychology’ writers

• Complex, socially embedded behaviours have all been

explained as an effect of evolutionary reproductive
strategies.
 BIOLOGICAL DETERMINISM
 In the biologically determinist school of
thought:

 Biological facts about sex are thought to constitute

natural differences between men and women

 Heterosexuality is considered a “natural” outcome

of this sex difference due to the drive to reproduce
the species
 BIOLOGICAL DETERMINISM

Key assumption driving biological determinism:

• The primary function and goal of all human sexual activity is the
reproduction of the species.

• Humans have sex because we must reproduce.

• Homosexuality becomes explained as an “unnatural” genetic

deviation.
 ‘THE GAY GENE’

Geneticists search for a ‘gay gene’ to prove there is a biological basis for, and
explanation of, male homosexuality
Small differences found between the post-mortem brains of heterosexual and
homosexual young men (LeVay, 1991)
Research on pairs of homosexual brothers found that some had similar markers on the
X chromosome, indicating a genetic basis for sexuality (Hamer et al. 1993)

LeVay’s work proved difficult to replicate

Hamer et al.’s work has been refuted

CHALLENGING DETERMINISM

If reproductive differences between the sexes “naturally” drive

individual behaviour, why do we need social institutions that police
and set moral guidelines for sexual behaviour?

The family, religion, government, the military…

CHALLENGING DETERMINISM

The research evidence for many biologically determinist claims

simply does not hold up.

– Sex “difference” research may be popular, but it masks a great

deal of evidence for sex similarities.

– Differences are often context-specific.

CHALLENGING DETERMINISM
 Despite continuing interest in a genetic basis for sexuality, no gay or
heterosexual gene has yet been found
 Most sex is not reproductive
 Human sexuality more complicated than ‘survival of the species’ or of
one’s gene pool
 ‘Biological drive’ arguments are political
 Often used to resist social change and legitimate an unequal, gendered
and sexualised social order
 Institutionalised power relations affect understandings of sex, gender, and
sexuality
DEFINITIONS
 Write down your own definitions of the terms sex, sexuality, and gender
(5 mins)

 Compare your definitions with those of the person next to you

(5 mins)

 Each pair to report back to the whole group (10 mins)

 Brief group discussion (10 mins)

 COMPLEXITIES
• Is there a difference? OFlevel
Yes, on one SEX & GENDER
– Sex is biological – male, female, also intersex (reproductive differences
based on genitalia, chromosomes, hormones)

• Also refers to sexual acts, as in ‘having sex’

– Gender is ‘the structure of social relations that centres on the

reproductive arena, and the set of practices that bring reproductive
distinctions into social processes’ (Connell 2002: 10)

• Gender underlies assumptions regarding ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ behaviour

Hijra in India Caster Semenya, South A ‘Tom’ in Thailand
African athlete

Trinidadian
Jowelle De Souza
 Temptation to make an absolute distinction between sex and gender:
 ‘Nature vs nurture’ or ‘essentialism vs social constructionism’

 Understanding of the sexed body as ‘natural’ can sustain social inequity

between men and women
 Butler (1990) argued that gender determines sex
 Sex is not ‘natural’ but a social construction
 Knowledge systems used to describe and reinforce sex differences already gendered
by the language used to express ideas about the body
 Cannot neatly separate the sexed body from the gendered
body
 Mutually constituted through sociocultural processes

 Biological science is a social construction, expressed through

language which is gendered and value-laden
 In Critical Sexuality Studies, the ‘natural’ body is political
‘Bodies cannot be understood as just the objects of social
process…they are active participants in the social process...
They participate through their capacities, development
and needs … through the direction set by their pleasures
and skills. Bodies must be seen as sharing social agency.’
(Connell 2002: 40)
DISCUSSION

 Bodies have physical capacities and limitations

 These influence how bodies can be socially experienced or
intervened with

 In Critical Sexuality Studies:

 Sex, sexuality, and gender necessarily involve various
dimensions of bodily and social capacities and phenomena
 These will be expressed differently in different sociocultural
settings
 Discussion (5 mins)
WHAT IS ‘SEXUALITY’?

 Quite a new term

 Came into English, French, and German usage at the end of the 18th
century
 Usually meant reproduction through sexual activity among plants and animals

 Used about love and sex matters in European discourse in the 1830s

 What does it mean according to the dictionary?

 Depends on which dictionary you read
 Mirriam Webster (2013):The quality or state of being sexual
• Four intertwining strands of sexuality:

– Sexual desire or attraction

• To whom (or in some cases what) someone is attracted (physically and emotionally)
– Sexual activity or behaviour
• What a person does or likes to do sexually (intercourse, masturbation, oral sex, sexual fetishes)
– Sexual identity
• How someone describes their sense of self as a sexual being (e.g. ,heterosexual, bisexual, lesbian,
gay, homosexual)
– Sexual experience
• Observations of others’ sexualities; education or training related to sexuality; experiences that
may not have been consensual
• No clear boundaries!
THE SEXUALITY MATRIX

Desire

Identity
Behavior

Experience
GENERAL THEORETICAL DEFINITION

Sexuality … [is] a historical construction which brings together a host of

different biological and mental possibilities and cultural forms — gender
identity, bodily differences, reproductive capacities, needs, desires, fantasies,
erotic practices, institutions, and values — which need not be linked
together, and in other societies have not been.

Weeks, J (2003: 7) Sexuality: Second Edition, Routledge

 INDIAN THEORETICAL DEFINITION

For some, it could mean the act of sex and sexual practices, for
others it could mean sexual orientation or identity and/or
preference. For others, it could mean desire and eroticism.
Sexuality encompasses many ideas and has many facets (Chakraborty, K., &

Thakurata, R. G. (2013). Indian concepts on sexuality. Indian journal of psychiatry, 55(Suppl 2), S250–S255.
THEORETICAL DEFINITION

 Sexuality is “characterized by diversity” and involves

“embodied sexual practices, identities, knowledge, and
strategies of resistance of the colonized and
postcolonial subject” (2004: 2). Kempadoo, K (2004: 2) Sexing the

Caribbean, Routledge.
• Are these images of sex, sexuality, or gender?
• What would we need to know to make sense of this question?
(5 mins + 5 mins feedback)
• Images by Rodell Warner from the “Photobooth” series (2009-2011)
• Are these images of sex, sexuality, or gender?
• What would we need to know to make sense of this question?
(5 mins + 10 mins feedback)
SESSION SUMMARY
 Review the notes made at the start of the session on
definitions of sex, sexuality, and gender and consider:

 To what extent do they equate with working definitions so

far?

(5 mins)

 Final questions or comments about this session?

Like gender, sexuality is political. It is organized into
systems of power, which reward and encourage
some individuals and activities while punishing and
suppressing others.
Gayle Rubin (1984: 309)
 Heteronormativity
… the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make
heterosexuality seem not only coherent—that is, organized as a sexuality — but also
privileged. (Berlant and Warner, 2000: 312)

 Heteropatriarchy
…the systems that support the combination of heteronormativity and patriarchy (male
dominance)

 Maintained and perpetuated by social institutions

 E.g. media, education, law, family, religion, healthcare systems
 usually through exclusion and marginalization
BRAINSTORM

 Can you think of examples of

heteronormative assumptions that are
present in the Indian sub-continent?
(5 mins)

Theories of sexual stratification:

Adrienne Rich and Gayle Rubin

 Offer opportunities for reconfiguring
heteronormativity.
 Adrienne Rich
‘Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence’
(1980)
– Women’s Liberation era theorist and poet whose work was
influential in developing lesbian and gay studies.

• Heterosexuality is not a natural outcome of sex

difference
– It is a social institution maintained by a series of inducements
and punishments for women

– Key question: ‘What social forces stop women from expressing

their sexual and emotional attraction to other women?’
 Inducements & punishments
Inducements Material
• The marriage contract (legalised sexual subordination of women)
• Financial and material support (husband)
• Sphere of influence (the domestic)
• Stay-at home child allowance for women
• Reduced earning capacity for women compared with their male partners
Symbolic or ideological
• Romance and love – made complete with a man (heterocoupling)
• Female beauty as an ideal of female worth
• Motherhood within marriage as female self-fulfilment
• Women valued only insofar as they are valuable to men
Punishments • Social ostracism for unmarried mothers, women who leave their husbands, and financially
independent women
• Women who are sexually independent labeled as ‘loose,’ ‘skettels,’ sluts’
• Criminalisation, pathologisation, and abuse of lesbians and women who are not exclusively
heterosexual
• A system of gendered sexual violence that keeps women (and their sexuality) in its proper
place
 Gayle Rubin
• Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality (1984)

– Hierarchies of sexual value

• People and practices high in the hierarchy are rewarded with various benefits; those low in the
hierarchy are punished and vilified.
• Heterosexual couples who are married, monogamous, and of the same generation accrue more
benefits than those who are not married and/or who engage in more marginalized sexual
practices

– What is more important:

• The sexual categories people fit into and the kinds of sex they have, or
• Democratic sexual morality: how people treat each other, their level of mutual consideration, and
the presence or absence of harm and coercion?
 Discuss Rubin’s diagram about the sexual
cultures, identities, and practices relevant or
currently topical in the Indian subcontinent

 Can you redraw the model to fit our local setting?

(15 mins)

 Feedback (10 mins)

CHARMED CIRCLE: SUMMARY

 Diagram not intended to be a fixed representation of how

heteronormativity works at all times, in all places
 The inner circle boundary line can shift over time and from place to place, for
instance:
 Homosexuality was never illegal in French colonies but was criminalized by the British in all of its colonies;
today, same-sex marriage is technically legal in the Dutch Caribbean territories that remain part of the
Kingdom of the Netherlands, but very few have been performed.
 Polygamy is illegal in Caribbean territories, but it is commonly practiced.
 Intergenerational sex between males was permitted in Ancient Greece but is illegal in Greece now.

 Whoever controls the boundary determines what is expected and abnormal and
contains the system of rewards and punishment.
GUIDED READING
 Focus questions:
 How do Indian legal and cultural systems affect transgender people?

 What (if anything) in the reading is particular to the Indian and local
understandings of gender and sexuality?

 How can transgender identities challenge heteronormativity? How might they

reinforce heteronormativity?

 What challenges do transgender individuals present for biological determinists?

 Discuss in small groups, and consider:

 Can you add your case studies to support the argument

that sexuality is historically and culturally constructed?
(15 mins)

 Feedback (15 mins)

 In Critical Sexuality Studies, human sexuality is understood as:

 Diverse

 Dynamic and

 Deeply inventive

 The field challenges fixed notions of sex, gender, and sexuality

 It grounds the interrelationship between these concepts in

specific social, historical, and cultural contexts
 Critical Sexuality Studies challenges the notion that sex and
sexuality are biologically determined, but:
 This does not mean the body or biological limitations/capacities are
irrelevant.

 Sex, sexuality, and gender are invariably linked to power

relations—institutional and interpersonal—and to systems of
regulation and reward.

 Heteronormativity and heteropatriarchy exist across the world,

but take variable forms.
PERSONAL REFLECTION

THANK YOU