Understanding the making of sexualities
Jeffrey Weeks
We are living in the midst of a long, unfinished but profound revolution that is transforming sexual and intimate life. Across the globe, but especially in the late modern (and capitalist) societies of the old ‘west’, there have been dramatic changes in family, marital and erotic behaviour, sexual identities, parenting patterns, relationships between men and women, men and men, women and women, adults and young people, and in laws, norms and values. Many of these changes have been, or are still, bitterly contested, but others have been rapidly assimilated. As a result, the true nature of the transformation is easily forgotten, and the complex histories that produced them can all too easily be obliterated. Without a sense of history, and an understanding of the ways we lived in the past, we have no benchmarks by which to measure the magnitude of change, no way of really understanding the present or preparing ourselves for the future (see Weeks 2007). That is why sexual history as it has developed since the 1970s is so important.
The American historian, Vern Bullough (1976: 1–17), famously complained at the beginning of the 1970s that sex in history was a ‘virgin field’. Ken Plummer (1975) similarly noted that sociology had sorely neglected sexuality. The study of sexuality was marginal to the key academic disciplines, and threatened to marginalise those who ventured onto the landscape. It made you, in Plummer’s phrase, ‘morally suspect’ (Plummer 1975: 4).
Much has changed. We now know a great deal about such topics as marriage and the family, prostitution and homosexuality, forms of legal and medical regulation, moral codes and religious traditions, masculinities and femininities, women’s bodies and health, illegitimacy and birth control, rape and sexual violence, the evolution of sexual identities and sexual practices, transgenderisms and heteronormativities, social networks and oppositional sexualities, and the impact of colonial and postcolonial regimes of power, domination and resistance (Phillips and Reay 2002; Weeks 2000). Historians have deployed sophisticated methods of family reconstitution and demographic history, have intensively searched for new, or interrogated old, documentary sources and made full use of oral and life history interviews to reconstruct the subjective or the tabooed experience. Encouraged by a vigorous grassroots’ history, fed by modern feminism and gay and lesbian politics and made urgent by the impact of the HIV crisis, there is now an impressive library of articles, pamphlets, books, films, videos and a mass of cyber-dialogue about all aspects of sexual history, as well as a well-honed critique in the form of queer theory (Weeks 2009).
But having said this, we are still left with a dilemma: What is the magic element that defines some things as sexual and others not? The rejection of essentialist theories gave the sexual a fluidity that challenges as it stimulates intellectual curiosity. The history of sexuality is, as Robert Padgug (1979) suggested, a history of a subject in constant flux. But that, as it has turned out, has become the strength of sexual history. Its originality lies in a willingness by its practitioners to question the naturalness and inevitability of the sexual categories and assumptions we have inherited – including the category of the sexual itself. Gagnon and Simon talked in their pioneering study of Sexual Conduct in the early 1970s of the need that may have existed at some unspecified time in the past to invent an importance for sexuality (Gagnon and Simon 1973). Michel Foucault, clearly aware of such theorising, was more specific:
Sexuality 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 tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct.
(Foucault 1978: 105)
This thesis has been enormously influential. But it has always been wrong to see Foucault in isolation. His work made a vital contribution to the history of sexuality precisely because it grew out of work that was already creatively developing in challenging naturalistic assumptions about the sexual. From social anthropology, sociology and post-Kinsey sex research came a growing awareness of the vast range of sexual practices that exist in other cultures and within our own culture, offering a mirror to our own transitoriness. The ‘new social history’, with its emphasis on the history of populations and of ‘mentalities’, the experiences and beliefs of the down-trodden and oppressed as much as the powerful, has posed new questions about what we mean by ‘the present’ as well as about the ‘history of the past’ (Weeks 2000). It has also shown the importance of language and discourse in not simply reflecting but constituting the ‘real’.
Finally, and most powerfully of all, the emergence of new social movements concerned with sex have challenged many traditional certainties, producing new insights into the power and domination that shapes our sexual lives. The politics of homosexuality have placed on the historical agenda questions about the social explanations of sexual preference, the making of identities, the arbitrariness of sexual categorisations, the significance of entrenched homophobia and the nature of heteronormativity. The women’s movement has forced a recognition of the multiple forms of female sexual subordination, from male violence and misogyny to sexual harassment and a pervasive language of sexual denigration and abuse. It has dramatised the institutionalised nature of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ (Rich 1984). It has demanded recognition of women’s rights over their own bodies by reposing questions about consent and reproductive rights, desire and pleasure.
What the new sexual history, born out of these diverse influences, has done is to open the whole field of the erotic to critical analysis and assessment. What became known as the ‘social constructionist’ approach to sexuality has been centrally concerned precisely with the diverse ways in which our emotions, desires, erotic practices and intimate relationships are shaped by the societies in which we live (Stein 1992). It is fundamentally concerned with the ways in which sexualities have been shaped in a complex history, and in tracing how sexual patterns have changed over time.
Despite the hegemony of constructionist approaches, however, sexual history remains a battleground for differing interpretations of the past and present (Weeks 2008a). A naive progressivism, a sort of Whig interpretation of sexual history, which sees the present as an inevitable result of liberalising forces, has long lost any resonance as history has failed to walk in a straight line. But it is in danger of being replaced by a declinist vision that laments the passing of a lost world of social order and family harmony before the ‘Great Disruption’ (Fukuyama 1999); or by a strange melange of arguments – from neo-Marxists, feminists, queer theorists – that seem to suggest that nothing has really changed at all.
The late modern individual, the argument goes, is forced to live the illusion of freedom while actually being wrapped in the gilded cords of late capitalism (Hennessy 2000; Binnie 2004; Elliott and Lemert 2006). Critics of neoliberalism argue that ideas of individual autonomy and self-responsibilisation are not so much illusory or deceptive as the very forms of regulation that can be most effectively articulated with the current form of capitalist organisation (see Weeks 2007: Chapter 6). As applied to sexuality and intimacy, critiques of neoliberalism often deploy a particular reading of the work of Foucault (for example, Rose 1999; cf. Weeks 2005), which stresses the discursive construction of subjectivities within specific regimes of power. Under neoliberal imperatives, individuals become ‘entrepreneurs of themselves, shaping their own lives through the choices they make among the forms of life available to them’ (Rose 1999: 230). This elaborate and sophisticated form of subjectivity/subjectification identifies self-governance as the principal form of social regulation.
Recent liberalising sex reforms have been read in this light. Critics of same-sex marriage, for example, have seen it as a move toward creating the respectable gay as opposed to the transgressive, disruptive and challenging queer. ‘Respectability’ involves a voluntary regulation of the sexual self in the interests of full acceptance and citizenship (Richardson 2004). Some have seen this process working its way through the management of HIV in the ‘post-crisis’ world (in the west, at least). A surveillance medicine, based on a risk rationality, replaces hospital medicine, with the aim of creating self-reflexive, self-managing subjects. People with HIV learn to calculate and manage risk, using their knowledge of their HIV status, their T-cell count and viral load and the likelihood of infection to negotiate sexual partnerships (Adkins 2002; Davis 2005). An emphasis on individual freedom and rights, and the importance of self-surveillance and regulation for the individual who has internalised the norms and goals of liberal forms of governance, is central to the new society (Richardson 2004).
There are two major problems to my mind in such arguments. First, they tend to deny the reality of many if not most of the changes that have taken place, certainly in the west, and the real gains in terms of human freedom and social justice. The long revolution has been overwhelmingly beneficial to the vast majority of people who have experienced it, despite the problems, inequalities, prejudices and discriminations that remain. Second, they ignore the agency of people, in their millions, who have actually made the changes. Collective struggles – of feminism and lesbian and gay movements especially – have contributed to, complemented, but also often obscured the reality of myriad individual struggles by women and men over many years to gain control over the conditions of their lives – in controlling fertility, entering into freely chosen or escaping oppressive relations, challenging sexual ignorance, battling against sexual violence, affirming sexual identities, having sexual pleasure, avoiding sexual pain. These have been, in Giddens’ (1992: 4–17) phrase, ‘everyday experiments’ in which people have created the conditions for posttraditional ways of life. Unless we understand the impact of these two elements it is impossible to make sense of the history that is making us, and that we make.
Between the 1960s and the 2000s, most parts of the western world underwent a historic transformation in sexual beliefs and intimate behaviour – what I call the ‘Great Transition’. There was no single cause, no regular pattern across regions and countries, no common agenda for its main actors, chiefly members of the baby-boom generation. The process was messy, contradictory and haphazard. But in the end it drew in and involved millions of people, reimagining and remaking their lives in many different ways.
Among the most important effects are: the separation of sex and reproduction; the separation of sex and marriage; the separation of marriage and parenting; the separation of heterosexuality and parenting; and the separation of heterosexuality and marriage. Together they signal the effective demise of the traditional model of sexual restraint and opened the way to a new moral economy – one that was less hierarchical and more democratic, more hedonistic, more individualistic, more selfish, perhaps, but also one that was vastly more tolerant, experimental and open to diversity and choice in a way that had been inconceivable just a generation earlier. These changes can be traced across a range of historic actors (see Weeks 2008b, on which the following is based).
The position of women remains the most sensitive marker of deep-structured change. On most of the key issues – of education, employment opportunities, family roles, reproductive and sexual choice – there have been major shifts. The category of gender itself has been fundamentally challenged by the emergence of movements of transgendered people (Ekins and King 2006). The gender order (Connell 1987, 1995, 2002) has been shaken, even destabilised.
Many factors underlie the transformations, but a key one has been the dramatic changes in the social relations of reproduction. There was birth control before the pill, and dramatic falls in the birth rate before the 1970s. But the pill, as a womancontrolled and relatively reliable contraceptive, both helped to realise and symbolised a massive shift, a world historic shift indeed: the separation of sex and reproduction (McLaren 1999; Cook 2005).
The issue of reproductive rights has wider resonances: the right to have children as well as not, the right to terminate pregnancies in defined situations as well as to go ahead with them, the right to control fertility and to enhance it. There are also complex issues about non-traditional means of conception and the rights of non-heterosexual parents. Above all, there are fundamental questions of access to resources, of power and opportunity, on a global scale (Petchesky 2003).
The impact of these changes has been uneven. Even the most self-confident women still hear the ‘male in the head’ (Holland et al. 1998) calling them back to sexual subordination. Even the most enlightened men find it difficult to cast off their privileges. Reproductive rights remain a battleground on a global scale. We remain locked in relationships of superiority and subordination at various levels. Violence and abuse still police the boundaries. What has genuinely shifted, however, are the fundamental terms of the debate. The story is not so much that men and women are now equal or treated equally. The real achievement is that inequality has lost all its moral justification.
As the heterosexual nexus linking the gender order, family and sexual reproduction has changed, so homosexuality has come out of the shadows. The sharp binary schism between heterosexuality and homosexuality that defined and distorted the western sexual regime for the past couple of centuries, and perhaps reached a peak in the determined reassertion of the domestic ideology of the 1950s, has been fundamentally undermined as millions of gays and lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people have not so much subverted the established order as lived as if their sexual difference did not matter (Adam et al. 1999; Altman 2001). Perhaps the most significant evidence of this is the growing toleration of same-sex relationships in most western countries: no longer a sin or a sickness, barely a transgression, with same- sex marriage apparently the key issue in many jurisdictions, LGBT lives are in danger of seeming ordinary (Weeks 2007).
That is not, of course, the end of the story. Homosexuality may have come out into the open, it may have made institutionalised heterosexuality porous, but even in the advanced cultures of the west is still subjected to the minoritising forces that excluded it in the first place. In other parts of the world social obloquy, imprisonment, even death (by stoning or beheading) remains the fate of many homosexuals (Bamforth 2005). For far too many, that face of Otherness remains shrouded in mystery and fear, and the result is a terror that makes homosexuality as a way of life impossible. But in large parts of the world the question of same-sex personhood is no longer at issue. The challenge remains to work out the full implications of this in terms of policy and practice, and of equity and social justice.
The gender revolution and the challenge to heteronormativity are underpinned, and accelerated, by a profound change in the ways in which men and women, men and men and women and women relate to one other, by a transformation of intimate life. The transformation, Giddens (1992) argues, is towards egalitarian, open and disclosive relationships, marked by the ‘pure relationship’. Same-sex relationships have been seen as especially important to this transformation, as leading the way to more egalitarian forms of relationships and creative life experiments (Weeks et al. 2001). There are many critics of this position (see Jamieson 1998, 1999), but behind the controversies there is a longer term trend at work, towards an informalisation and democratisation of intimate life, which has yet unrealised and unsettling implications for the relationship between private passions and public life (Wouters 2004, 2007; Weeks 2007).
Gayle Rubin (1984) famously spoke of the advance of the perverse sexualities out of the pages of Krafft-Ebing onto the stage of history. Today the very category of the perverse has all but disappeared from the diagnostic standards. People proudly proclaim not only their gayness, bisexuality, sado-masochisms, trans-identities, fetishisms and fantasies in all their infinite variety, they can satisfy them through the infinite possibilities of e-media and the internet. We dwell in a world of polymorphous non-perversities (Giddens 1992). But this is only a part of the radical diversity that characterises contemporary life. There are different ways of life, shaped by ‘race’ and ethnicity, class and geography, age, (dis)ability and so on. There are also, as Gilroy (2004: xi) has argued, new forms of ‘conviviality’, which defy such simple categorisations and can be said to represent the fraying of difference if not yet the disappearance of divisions.
As this suggests, we can now tell our sexual stories in a huge variety of different ways. Michel Foucault (1978) wrote of the discursive explosion since the eighteenth century which produced sexual modernity. But that was defined by rules on who could speak, in what circumstances and on whose authority. Now we can hear everyone who wants and is able to speak – in talk shows and home movies, in parliaments and in the media, on the streets and in personal blogs. Through stories – of desire and love, of hope and mundane reality, of excitement and disappointment – told to willing listeners in communities of meaning, people imagine and reimagine who and what they are, what they want to become (Plummer 1995, 2003). Now there are many would-be authorities competing cacophonously, especially in the anarchic democracy of cyberspace. By no means all of these voices are progressive by any definition of the word – there are evangelical Christian or radical Islamicist voices as loud as any liberal or libertarian voices. There are threats as well as opportunities in the hypermarket of speech. But we can no longer doubt the power of narratives and the ways in which we can make and remake ourselves through them in the new age of globalisation (Altman 2001; Plummer 2003).
If we can see the globalisation of sexuality as a reordering of risk, then at the heart of the risks facing the world today is the inexorable presence and spread of HIV (see the chapters by Altman, Dowsett and Kippax elsewhere in this volume). Twenty years ago it was possible to write about it largely as a threat to the gay populations of North America, Europe and Australasia. Today the wealthy countries have found ways of managing the progression of the virus. But globally, the statistics, and behind them the realities of everyday life, remain sobering. Here sexuality has become entwined in the nexus of poverty, ignorance, fear and prejudice on a massive scale. The pandemic reveals as nothing else the impossibility of separating the sexual and the intimate from other social forces, and the inevitable flows, in an increasingly globalised world, of sexual experiences and tragedies from nation to nation, continent to continent. AIDS has become the symbol, if not the only example, of the risks of rapid sexual change in a world uncertain of its values and responses.
Uncertainty breeds conflict, the danger of culture wars and the rise of fundamentalisms, both secular and religious. Fundamentalisms especially can be seen as a response to uncertainty, confronting the ambiguities and ambivalences of the world with an absolute certainty about truth, history and tradition (Ruthven 2004). The various forms of fundamentalism, whether Islamic, Christian, Hindu or Jewish, are very much products of late modernity, utilising its technologies and global linkages brilliantly (Bhatt 1997). At their heart is the wish to restore fraying demarcations between men and women, reaffirm heterosexual relationships and extirpate perversity. In their most extreme manifestations, they enforce their will through the bullet, the knife and the hangman’s noose. But though the tone and the tenor might be different, the religious and socially conservative movements of the USA and elsewhere, in their affirmation of traditional values and opposition to abortion, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, sex education, evolutionism and the like, share some common assumptions with them: a belief that there is an essential truth to sexuality that they alone know the key to. ‘Culture wars’ are the inevitable result.
It is in this context that new discourses about sexual or intimate citizenship have emerged (Plummer 1995). Citizenship is about belonging, about being recognised, about reciprocal entitlements and responsibilities. Historically, it has been restricted – racially, xenophobically, by gender and by sexuality (Brandzel 2005). We forget how recent has been the achievement of full citizenship rights for women, to what extent our prized welfare states have been built on assumptions about the right way to live, and on the exclusion of minorities and deviants from the rights and obligations of full citizenship. Sexual or intimate citizenship is about the recognition of these exclusions and about moves to inclusion (Weeks 1998; Bell and Binnie 2000; Richardson 2000a, 2000b; Plummer 2003). The steps in the process have been erratic, and in many jurisdictions, including the most wealthy and most powerful, not yet fully realised. Yet without the idea of full citizenship, we cannot measure how far we have come; and without the ideal of equal citizenship, we have no measure of how far we have yet to go.
This becomes especially challenging in the context of globalisation and ‘global sex’ (Altman 2001; Corrêa et al. 2008). Sexuality has a ‘central significance within global regimes of power’ (Hemmings et al. 2006: 1), and this is manifest in persistent inequities between cultures and in continuing sexual injustices, especially against women, children and lesbian, gay or transgendered identified peoples. At the same time, we see the emergence of global standards of what constitutes justice. We can learn to accept difference and human variety, various ways of being sexual, and this has become a new imperative as we get to know more and more about other cultures. We can understand the power differentials that underpin difference. But, increasingly, in a world not just of different but of conflicting values, many people are also seeking common standards by which to measure behaviours. We have become aware of sufferings across the world where ‘before they might have gone unnoticed’ (Baird 2004: 8). We can no longer easily fail to notice when the survivors of injustices can tell us of their sufferings across the globalised media, from the internet to television, and when waves of people begin to appear at our own doorsteps, seeking refuge from persecution. Globalisation has made us aware of sexual wrongs across the world, and has awakened us to the significance of sexual rights.
It has become a cliché that sexuality has a history, indeed many histories. But it is easy to forget as we live our own sexual history, that alongside us people are living theirs’, and their experience might be quite different from ours. What a historical approach to sexuality can do is make us aware of our commonalities and differences. It should alert us to the ways in which the erotic is shaped in complex relations of power. But it should also make us aware of our contingency.
No one in the 1950s and 1960s, within the lifetime of the postwar baby-boomers who have helped define the era we live in, could have foreseen the world we now inhabit and have helped to remake. We live in a different world. But if we forget our history we are in danger of having to relive it. Perhaps one of the greatest achievements of the long revolution is that it has made us reflexive, sensitive to our own historicity and to the profoundly challenging notion that if we have made our own history we can remake it. There lies the true importance of being historical.
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