Nichole Suzanne Prescott. Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History in America. Editor: Marc Stein. Volume 1. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004.
In the last three decades, two theoretical positions, essentialism and constructionism, have come to the fore in discussions of sex, gender, and sexuality in the United States. Essentialism (often referred to as biological essentialism) regards desires, behavioral predilections, and identities as the products of natural, fixed, and innate human characteristics. In contrast, constructionism (often referred to as social constructionism) emphasizes the social, cultural, political, and historical factors that produce and shape desires, acts, and identities.
Most people presume that most persons can be classified as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual and, furthermore, that a person’s sexual desires neatly correspond with matching sexual behaviors, and that their desires and behaviors neatly correspond with a matching sexual identity. For example, a person who desires people of the same sex will engage in homosexual sex acts and will adopt a gay or lesbian identity. This conceptual model is essentialist. Essentialism also argues that today’s sexual desires, behaviors, and identities have existed in the same basic form in all times and places. So, in this vein, an American gay man in the twenty-first century is virtually the same as a man who engaged in same-sex sexual acts in Greece thousands of years ago. Essentialists might recognize that the ability to act on one’s desires and the ability to claim a sexual identity are affected by external circumstances, but they believe that there is a relatively fixed percentage of people (a minority) in all cultural contexts who are essentially LGB and that they can be clearly distinguished from people (a majority) who are essentially heterosexual. Sexuality, for the essentialist, is an unchangeable reality.
Constructionism argues that sexual desires, acts, and identities are bound by particular social, cultural, political, and historical contexts, and that these contexts produce, shape, and limit our experiences of sexuality. For example, socialization (the process of learning the rules of a particular social group), social control (the rewards and punishments associated with acceptable social behavior), and culture (a social group’s set of established beliefs and practices) all influence sexuality. Constructionists emphasize that while some cultures classify people as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual, others do not. For example, in ancient Greece, the sex of one’s partner was not of the utmost importance; whether one took the active or passive role in the sex act was. Cultural classification systems, constructionism argues, shape not only sexual identities but also sexual desires and acts, and so it can be anachronistic and a historical to refer to homosexual and heterosexual people in contexts in which these concepts did not exist. Constructionism also recognizes that desires, acts, and identities do not always line up as one might expect and highlights the differences, rather than the similarities, between sexual actors in the present and sexual actors in the past. Rather than assume that every culture has relatively fixed percentages of homosexual and heterosexual people, constructionists believe that sexual desires, acts, and identities are constantly changing.
Sexuality, Sex, Gender, and Gender Identity
The constructionist position so widely taken up in LGBT studies is frequently attributed to the work of the French theorist Michel Foucault. Foucault viewed sexuality as a discourse that was an expression of complex, dynamic power relations in society. In what has become a canonical text in LGBT studies, The History of Sexuality, Foucault set out to analyze the history of sexuality from ancient Greece to the modern era, and in so doing ended up providing a historical narrative about the formation of a modern homosexual identity. Taking a constructionist line, Foucault argued that homosexuality is necessarily a modern formation because, while there were previously same-sex sex acts, there was no corresponding category of identification based on these acts. The modern homosexual was fundamentally different from the earlier sodomite, according to Foucault, because the latter term referred to the sex act, while the former referred to a type of person with an identity defined by their desire for people of the same sex.
Feminist, queer, and transgender theory and scholarship necessitate the conceptualization of essentialism and constructionism, not only in terms of sexual orientation, but also in terms of sex, gender, and gender identity. For some essentialists, sex (male/female) and gender (masculinity/femininity) are both the products of innate biological factors. Those who argue for innate differences between lesbians and gay men often favor this model. A modified essentialist position posits that while males and females can be distinguished on the basis of sex in terms of essential biological traits, gender is socially constructed. This position has been used to interpret, for example, the history of butch lesbians and effeminate gay men. More radical constructionists, influenced by the existence of intersexed people and by the failure of biological frameworks to deal with people whose anatomy, DNA, hormones, and reproductive capacity do not correspond to normative expectations, argue that both sex and gender are socially constructed, or, put another way, that sex itself is gendered. Further elaborating on the complex relation between gender and sex, the historian Joanne Meyerowitz argues that for many transsexual people, gender identity (the sense of being male or female) is innate and essential, while bodies can be constructed. To capture this dimension of complexity and others, some scholars argue that it would be preferable to speak of sexes, genders, and sexualities in the plural rather than the singular.
Although essentialists and constructionists are often viewed as being at odds, the relationship between the two positions is more complicated than such a dichotomy would suggest. Most people hold some combination of essentialist and constructionist views. Constructionists cannot deny the popularity and influence of essentialist conceptions, and essentialists cannot deny that some aspects of sex, gender, and sexuality change over time.
Homophobic and Antihomophobic Strategies
Debates about sexual identity, and homosexuality in particular, tend to be acutely polarized. This is due, in part, to the fact that such discussions often involve the crafting and implementation of laws and public policies and matters of religion and morality. Often central to these political, social, and intellectual disputes is the question of whether sexual orientation is socially constructed or biologically determined. However, both homophobic and antihomophobic advocates have employed essentialist and constructionist strategies and arguments.
A good example of this is illustrated in the debate over gay marriage. Arguments against gay marriage sometimes employ essentialist tactics in the contention that gay men are promiscuous by nature and therefore virtually incapable of monogamous relationships, a primary characteristic of marriage. The essentialist claim that homosexuality is an innate biological predisposition is also often used in the fight for gay and lesbian civil rights, including the fight for equal marriage rights. The crux of the LGB essentialist argument is that if homosexuality is not chosen but is assigned by nature, then homosexuals should be extended the rights and protections accorded to everyone.
Essentialist positions can also be found in both homophobic and antihomophobic arguments about the biological basis of homosexuality. Homophobic doctors have used essentialist arguments to justify surgery and hormonal treatment to “cure” people of their homosexuality, while antihomophobic scientists have used essentialist rhetoric to argue against attempts to cure homosexuals through psychotherapy. Meanwhile, constructionist arguments have also been used both for and against LGB interests. Homophobes sometimes argue that if homosexuality is a freely chosen sexual orientation (a notion that is sometimes conflated with constructionism), it is a vice that can and should be corrected. LGB constructionists counter that, given great historical and cross-cultural variability in sexual attitudes and practices, what needs correcting is not homosexuality but homophobia.
The Instability of Sexual Constructs
Since most anti-LGBT arguments rely upon the alleged naturalness of heterosexuality and dominant gender norms, feminist, queer, and transgender scholars have attempted to show that dominant categories are themselves social constructs. A primary constructionist argument, for example, is that heterosexuality is also a historically contingent construction, although it is often believed to be an unproblematic, self-evident, and stable category that requires no explanation. Reflecting this notion, Jonathan Ned Katz has titled one of his books The Invention of Heterosexuality, which considers, among other subjects, the invention of the term “heterosexuality” in the late nineteenth century.
Although most queer scholars agree that heterosexuality is not, in fact, a stable, coherent category, one writer has been in the vanguard of arguing that homosexuality as a category is also unstable and incoherent. Critiquing the tendency to represent contemporary homosexuality as somehow self-evident and unproblematic, as opposed to its earlier configuration by scholars as fragmented and incoherent, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Epistemology of the Closet draws attention to logical contradictions in the current conceptual models that constitute modern homosexuality. Sedgwick argues that the crisis of both defining homosexuality and heterosexuality is due in part to the contradictions between what she terms “minoritizing” and “universalizing” views and between what she calls “gender liminal” and “gender separatist” perspectives. According to Sedgwick, homosexuality is conceptualized as both an essential minority trait and as a universal human potential, and is simultaneously viewed both as a matter of gender transgression and gender differentiation. Sedgwick thus argues that there are fundamental contradictions at the heart of homosexuality and heterosexuality, and that there is no solid ground on which to choose between essentialist and constructionist models.
Criticism of Constructionism and Essentialism
Constructionism has been criticized for being an academic theory not supported by most LGBT people in the United States in the early 2000s, who tend to believe that they were born LGBT. Critics also claim that constructionism, by raising questions about the coherence and legitimacy of LGBT categories, threatens effective LGBT foundations for political action, risks the infinite fragmentation of LGBT communities, and prevents effective coalition-building between LGBT constituencies. To counter this, the postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak suggests the deployment of “strategic essentialism.” In effect, this refers to provisional and temporary uses of essentialism by those who do not necessarily accept the basic tenets of essentialism. Essentialism, meanwhile, has been criticized for policing the boundaries of LGBT communities, for failing to deal with historical, cross-cultural, and individual variability and fluidity, and for universalizing experiences, identities, and practices that differ on the basis of race, class, and other categories.
Even among constructionists, who held the dominant scholarly position in the early years of the twenty-first century (at least within the humanities and social sciences), there are major disagreements. Although most scholars argue that modern homosexual and heterosexual identities were initially constructed in the late nineteenth century, others believe that this occurred earlier or later. There is also general agreement among scholars that sexual identities are constructed, but there is less agreement about whether sexual desires and acts are influenced by society, culture, politics, and history. Scholars also disagree about whether sexualities have been constructed primarily by social elites (including scientific experts, religious leaders, and political authorities) or by ordinary people, and about the relative influence of straight and LGBT people in constructing sexes, genders, and sexualities. They also disagree about which social processes (capitalism, urbanization, commercialization, class relations, race relations, or gender relations, for example) have played the greatest roles in constructing sexualities.
At stake in many of these debates are not only the historical question of whether sexes, genders, and sexualities in the past were socially constructed, but the future question of whether today’s sexes, genders, and sexualities should be reconstructed or deconstructed.