Welcome back to the Very Short Introductions Podcast. From
public health to Buddhist ethics, soft matter to classics,
and art history to globalization, we'll showcase a
concise and original introduction to a wide range of
subjects, for wherever your curiosity may take you. So here
is today's very short introduction.
My name is Véronique Mottier. I am a fellow in Sociology at
Jesus College, Cambridge, and a professor in the Center for
Gender Studies at the University of Lausanne. I'm here to talk
about my Very Short Introduction to sexuality. What first got me
interested in this topic is that as a sociologist, I focused on
the study of social change. When I took my first baby steps in
academia as a young graduate researcher in the 1990s, it
struck me that sexuality, understood as the way in which
people experienced their bodies, their pleasures, and their
desires, was an arena of rapid and deep social change at a
time. And yet these important changes in the ways individuals
but also society as a whole was making sense of sexuality, for
example, through legal frameworks around sexual rights
or through activist movements, were still surprisingly little
studies at a time, that has completely changed since, I'm
glad to say. So that's what first got me interested in this
topic.
And I ended up writing and editing a dozen books in French,
English, and German on the history of sexual
classifications, on gender and sexuality, and feminist theories
and activism on this topic, and on state intervention on
reproductive sexuality. Throughout my work, my main
focus is not on people's sexual practices; I'm not really
interested in what they do. I focus instead on the social and
political aspects of sexuality. In my Very Short Introduction, I
make in particular, three key points that stand out.
The first point is that sexuality is not biology. People
often think of sexuality as something that's natural,
something that's the result of biological instincts and
desires, and that we are born with our sexual identities such
as lesbian, gay, or heterosexual. The sexual
categories, these sexual identities, are, in reality,
relatively recent in human history. They date mostly from
the late 19th century. I show in the book that sexuality is
therefore not natural. It is shaped by history, it is shaped
by culture, it is shaped by scientific ideas about healthy
and non healthy sexuality. It is shaped by religious ideas about
moral and immoral behaviors. And the ways in which people make
sense of their erotic experiences and desires has
varied enormously across different time periods and
across different cultures, and there are many examples in the
book where I showed it.
Now, the second key point of the book is that sexuality is about
power. Ideas about sexuality, which spread in modern times,
did not emerge in a power vacuum. I showed that if we want
to analyze modern sexual norms, for example, we need to look
sideways, we need to ask how they were intertwined with
relations of power, around gender, around social class,
around race, and around disability, in particular. To
take one example, many late 19th century Western theories of
sexuality argued that male sexuality is naturally
aggressive. They argued that it's motivated by sexual
pleasure, and that female sexuality is naturally more
passive, and focus on the instinct of children. The same
thing is also often thought that non Western people were less
civilized, closer to nature, and, therefore, more sexual than
Westerners, whether men or women. These ideas still
resonate later. They were used in the colonial era to justify
the sexual exploitation of colonized women by colonial
soldiers, for example, with ideas about aggressive, male
sexual to be unnatural, are sometimes used even today to
justify sexual violence to justify rape.
And that brings me to my third point, and that is that
sexuality is ultimately about politics. In my book, I show how
the state has tried to regulate citizens' sexualities. For
example, the colonial state in the examples I've mentioned
before, but also through other examples, such as the eugenic
policies of forced sterilization, which a number of
Western and non western countries have put into place
during the first half of the 20th century, and which aimed to
create a racially pure society, or to decide which citizens were
worthy or unworthy of reproducing If we look at
European countries such as Switzerland or Germany or the
Scandinavian countries, these countries argued or the
governments of these countries argued during the period, during
the decades in which these eugenic policies were into
place, which is roughly from the end of the 1920s, beginning of
the 1930s, to either the Second World War for Nazi Germany, or
until well into the 1960s for countries like Switzerland or
the Scandinavian countries. In the context of these eugenic
policies, citizens who were disabled, citizens who were part
of what was seen as the underclasses, were seen as
unworthy of being part of the future nation, and therefore
they could be proposed for, for sterilization. These are
examples of the ways in which the state has directly
intervened on our bodies. And these are not just historic
questions, they remain important today.
For example, with respect to current debates around
reproductive rights, abortion rights, attempts to ban
abortion, or arguments in favor of leaving the choice to
individual citizens, state concerns with higher levels of
reproduction from what is depicted as undesirable
categories of citizens have not disappeared in the post war era,
by the way. For example, deep concerns were publicly
articulated by far right politicians in countries such as
France since the 1990s, where politicians from the far right
argue that Muslim immigrants, for example, have more children
than the so called native French and that they, therefore, are at
risk of out crowding the natives. These are old
arguments, which are revived in modern times. They're, the
echoed is older worries about fertility levels in northern
Western countries, such as India and China, which drove a lot of
the earlier European eugenics in the pre Second World War era.
And one could note in all of these examples that female
reproductive sexuality continues to be usually a particular
policy concern of the state.
So to take an example of the United States in the early
1970s, there are an estimated 100 to 250,000 women on low
incomes were sterilized annually on the federally funded
programs, frequently on the discretion of withdrawal of
welfare benefits. And these were often women from Puerto Rican
origins, or from American Indian origins. So these civilizations
which were often carried out without the consent of these
women, or without a full understanding of the
consequences were justified or arguments, which were both based
on cost, because they were depicted as categories of the
population who were taking advantage of state benefits. But
they were also reviving earlier notions of racial inferiority
and to end racial defectiveness. So that's to show that these are
not just historical questions. And to conclude, it's important
to also point out that the three points that I highlight in the
book that is that sexuality is not biological, it's not
natural, it's cultural, it's political, and, therefore, we
need to approach it through a critical angle on power
relations and on politics. Of course, these three points are
closely interlinked.
To take one final example, which shows how they're interlinked
with it think of the rise of biological explanations of
sexuality in late 19th century which explained sexual
identities as being the outcome of natural instincts and which
saw, in particular, non heterosexual categories, so, for
example, the gays and lesbians as deviating from the biological
norms. Well, these these kinds of discourses are still with us
today, of course, but they have been used politically in very
many different ways in, with opposite effects. So for
example, this scientific claim, this late 19th century
scientific claim that homosexuality is somehow inborn
but defective, somehow abnormal, has been used both by pro rights
activist, so both by pro sexual rights activist who argued that
if they aren't inborn, for example, in the recent versions
of this argument, which argue that sexual orientation is
caused by genetic differences, activists have used that
argument to say, "well, that is great, if they are caused by
genetic differences, then we shouldn't be discriminated
against." So the use in the context of the pro rights
discourse. But they've also been used on the other side, so to
speak, to say that "well, it's great if we can show that sexual
orientation is caused by genetic differences, because that means
there's hope to eradicate homosexuality." So we find the
exact same claims about biological origins of
homosexuality used with totally different political effects and
with totally different political intentions. And that's a very
important point to be aware of, and also to keep scrutinizing
with critical attention, not just for researchers, but also
for us as citizens more generally.
All of these questions about power and politics are still
very much with us today and this is why sexuality is such an
important topic, and why there's so much to say about it, in
fact, much more than I was able to do in this small volume of
the Very Short Introduction, but I hope that this has given you
curiosity to read more about it. Many thanks for listening.
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