Gender and Sexuality. Stevi Jackson. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Stevi Jackson
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
Серия:
Жанр произведения: Управление, подбор персонала
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781509555253
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women is thought to be determined by nature – as religious and moral traditionalists believe – then lesbians and gays would inevitably be seen as a challenge to this ‘natural’ order.

      Underpinning the significance of gender and sexuality is the traditional ‘naturalist’ understanding of masculinity and femininity, usually based on ideas about biological reproduction and natural differences deemed to arise from it. Thus women are seen as ‘naturally’ suited to child- rearing and domesticity, historically justifying, for example, their lesser access to education and paid employment. In such naturalist explanations, lesbians, gays, transgendered people, bisexuals, are all seen to be going against the designs of nature – our genital reproductive function – and are thus subject to moral and social disapproval and often legal sanctions. If you believe that men and women are naturally designed to ‘fit’ together sexually, and that the ultimate purpose of sex is to reproduce, then lesbians and gays would inevitably be seen as perverted and/or immoral – as a result of their ‘unnatural’ desires. Such attitudes occur in western and many other cultures and are often expressed by religious groups and by political groups in favour of ‘traditional values’.

      In this traditional form of thinking – common to many cultures and religions – there is a hierarchy of gender, with men regarded as naturally superior to women, particularly in the sexual realm, and homosexuals at the bottom of the hierarchy since their existence is seen as a fundamental perversion of the gender order. Thus divisions and inequalities between men and women, and heterosexuals and homosexuals, are justified as natural and inevitable. The sociological literature describes such recourse to naturalism as ‘essentialist’ or ‘nativist’ thinking, and one major achievement of sociological work on gender and sexuality has been to illuminate how essentialist thinking pervades many aspects of society, often through religion, but also in laws and policies and throughout institutions such as education, medicine and science and, most frequently, in popular culture and commonsense thinking.

      Gender and sexuality have relevance for all aspects of social life and thus sociological analysis: politics and power, cultural beliefs and values, social action, self and identity, and social structures. For example, the right of lesbians and gays to marry is seen not as a personal issue, or one simply of individual political rights, but rather as one for the scrutiny of the state. Claims for such rights are indicative of wider social changes that potentially threaten or undermine previously taken- for- granted essentialist beliefs and values and social structural arrangements associated with the traditional heterosexual gender order. Therefore, issues around sexuality and gender cannot be understood as merely personal and private since they raise key sociological questions about the connection between structure, culture, the self and identity – and the operation of power across all these aspects of social life.