What’s sex got to do with society? Or with sociology?
In this lecture, I’ll raise a number of questions about how sexuality’s been thought about in sociology,
to draw attention to some neglected aspects of the role of sexuality in society and in social change.
There’s a common view in sociology, that sociologists have ignored the study of sexuality throughout most of their discipline’s history.
In this account, a sociology of sexuality first developed only in the post-war period, from the 1960s onwards.
The usual explanation for this is that sexual repression discouraged or prevented sociologists from studying human sexuality.
Sexuality was supposedly a taboo topic, and strong social sanctions against its use were said
to have discouraged sociologists from studying sexuality, and reduced their opportunities for doing so.
In this view, the sociology of sexuality finally developed in the 1960s because society had become less repressive.
The loosening of sexual mores in the 1950s, and sexual rebellion in the 1960s, is said to have sparked sociologists’ interest in
studying and writing about sexuality, and to have made it easier for them to do so.
The reality, though, is that sexuality was very much part of what people in Western societies from the eighteenth century onwards
thought and argued about, including in sociology.
Early figures associated with the development of sociology, such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Auguste Comte, and Herbert Spencer,
all addressed themselves, in part, and in varying ways, to topics of a sexual nature.
Marx, for example, wrote about the alienated sexuality of bourgeois marriage,
and the way that sex, as what he called a ‘natural species power’, could become humanised and socialised.
Comte wrote that the main goal of marriage was to morally educate people towards universal love,
and that marriage was the place to discipline and satisfy the sexual instinct.
Spencer sought to analyse the irresistible power of ‘the passion which unites the sexes’.
These early sociological figures were writing about sex in the mid-nineteenth century or earlier,
well before it was supposed to have been ‘liberated’ in the 1960s.
The insitutionalisation of sociology in the universities in Europe and the US mainly occurred in the period from 1880-1910.
This was also a period of major European and US imperial expansion.
Raewyn Connell argues that his broader context profoundly affected sociology as a discipline,
giving it its main theoretical frameworks, methods, problems, and data.
She argues that imperialism gave European and North American sociologists access to a vast range of information about
their countries’ colonies, and this encouraged them to think about society in terms of comparing and contrasting different societies and cultures.
Sociologists became focused on how the differences between these societies could be explained.
The dominant theoretical framework for doing this between the 1860s and the 1920s was organized around the concept of ‘evolution’.
Sociologists wanted to understand the differences between their own ‘civilised’ societies, and other ‘primitive’ societies,
and also how ‘primitive’ societies became more ‘advanced’.
Debate centred on whether evolution from ‘primitive’ societies could be explained in terms of physical, mental, or institutional evolution.
In this context, many sociologists in Europe and the US wrote about sexuality in the period between the 1880s and the 1920s.
Connell argues that at this time in the discipline’s history, race, gender and sexuality were all central concerns,
under the broader conceptual umbrella of ‘evolution’.
But, the brutality of the First World War *undermined* notions of constant progress,
and of a continual increase in rational conduct and civilisation, and in turn the concept of evolution itself.
In the US, an alternative form of academic sociology emerged around the 1920s.
Instead of engaging with the question of comparison,
US sociologists became committed to studying social problems in the sociologists’ own societies via quantitative methods,
supported by generous government and corporate research funding.
When sociologists did study sexuality in this period, they tended towards using social surveys,
and with understanding and solving ‘problems’ of sexuality.
Such problems included the increasing premarital sexual activity of young people,
and the ‘problems’ of couples sexually adjusting to each other in marriage.
Members of the Chicago School of sociology also wrote about sexuality in their studies of urban social problems.
W. I. Thomas, for example, wrote about female prostitution in The Unadjusted Girl,
and Graham Taylor wrote about how the lack of sex education made young people vulnerable to the temptations of illicit sexuality.
Another change took place in the 1930s, when the atheoretical nature of much US sociology was seen as a weakness of the discipline.
There were cuts to research funding, and bitter in-fighting at the American Sociological Association.
The solution to this problem was seen as a reconstruction of the discipline around a ‘canon’:
a set of privileged texts which embodied ‘classical sociology’, and whose interpretation and reinterpretation would define the discipline.
The development of a mass higher education system in the United States after the Second World War
facilitated the spread and influence of the classical canon.
However, those core theorists were interpreted in a very particular way,
so as to exclude or severely constrain the analysis of sexuality in human social relations.
In the post-war period in the US, two main sociological traditions were initially prominent.
The FIRST was the continuation of the social survey tradition, which was concerned with who has sex with who, when, where and how.
This included the famous reports on US sexual behaviour by Alfred Kinsey and colleagues in 1948 and 1953.
The SECOND tradition which emerged alongside the sex survey was that of functionalism,
which often drew on psychoanalytic theory to explain sexuality.
The latter examined sexuality within the context of the nuclear family.
This tradition focused on the *function* of sex for society, such as reproduction, and the function of the social control of sexuality for society,
such as avoiding social disorder from the unregulated competition for sexual favours.
But, by the early 1970s, mounting criticisms against functionalism meant that it was being replaced by a new approach to the sociology of
sexuality, based on a broad theoretical perspective that came to be known as ‘social constructionism.’
By paying attention to these background steps in the development of sociological approaches to sexuality,
it becomes possible to throw light on some important aspects of how sexuality should be understood sociologically.
FIRST, the way in which the canonical view of the discipline’s history ignores how sociology developed within the social relations of
imperialism, means that the role of sexuality in imperialism and colonialism is also overlooked.
As the discourse of imperialism was deleted from sociology, so were the core issues of gender, race and sexuality which were once central
topics to evolutionary sociology.
Indeed, if the early sociological writers discussed these topics in their texts, then these texts were
the least likely to be canonised or used in teaching students.
SECOND, the classical canon altered sociologists’ conceptions of sociology.
Before the rise of the classical canon there were many different kinds of sociology.
However, with the rise of the canon, a narrower conception of sociology and sociological theory developed.
Work which was once regarded as sociological, such as that done by early sociologists, such as W. I. Thomas, Edward Westermarck,
and William Graham Sumner, was redefined as belonging to other disciplines, such as anthropology and psychology.
This redefinition of earlier sociological work by later sociologists, using the canon as their touchstone, makes the history of the sociology of
sexuality seem much more meagre and homogeneous than it actually was.
THIRD, the rise of the classical canon affected many sociologists’ conceptions of the kind of topics or problems that
sociology should be concerned with as a discipline.
When the classical canon gave sociology a new history and conception of the discipline,
it led sociologists to believe that topics like gender, race and sexuality were not important, or not worthy of study,
because they appeared to be missing from the canonical texts.
By the 1960s, when the canon had become hegemonic in US and British sociology,
there is clear evidence that few sociologists in those countries were researching or showing much interest in sexuality as a topic.
As late as 1994, a supposedly authoritative source on sociology, The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology,
claiming to be a ‘statement of what the discipline is,’ did not even have a major entry on ‘sex’ or ‘sexuality’ within its pages.
Things have changed a lot since then!