The sociology of sexualities: queer and beyond.

INTRODUCTION

Over the past decade, the sociology of sexualities has experienced growth that is at once queer and phenomenal. In its infancy and early childhood, the sociology of sexualities was mainly the province of scholars interested in "deviance" of one sort or another, and especially of the homosexual sort: the coping mechanisms of discredited and discreditable sexual beings (e.g., Leznoff & Westley 1956, Reiss 1961) and the "deviant sexual underworld of hustlers, prostitutes, prisons, tearooms, baths, and bars" (Seidman 1996, p. 7; see, e.g., Humphreys 1970). As it came of age with sexual liberation movements in the 1970s and 1980s and a budding interdisciplinary field of gay and lesbian studies, the sociology of sexualities became more interested in sexuality as a basis of community and political life. Ethnographers documented life in gay and lesbian communities (e.g., Krieger 1983, Levine 1979, Newton 1972), political sociologists pulled lessons from lesbian and gay movements (e.g., Adam 1987, Altman 1982, Ponse 1978, Taylor & Whittier 1992) and studied the form and impact of sexuality-based discrimination (e.g., Herek 1989, Jenness & Broad 1994, Schneider 1987), and survey researchers continued to demonstrate the prevalence of both antigay sentiment and non-normative sexual practices (e.g., Klassen et al. 1989, Laumann et al. 1994, Reiss & Miller 1979).

At the same time, many sociologists drew heavily on the social constructionism donated by symbolic interactionists, phenomenologists, and labeling theorists (e.g., Gagnon & Simon 1973, McIntosh 1981, Plummer 1981a), and by theorists outside sociology such as Foucault (1978). The sociology of sexuality became tightly linked to a denaturalizing project, demonstrating, as Epstein put it, that "sexual meanings, identities, and categories were intersubjectively negotiated social and historical products--that sexuality was, in a word, constructed" (Epstein 1996b, p. 145; see, e.g., Greenberg 1988, Weeks 1985). Sociologists demonstrated the variability of sexual meanings, identities, and categories; many shifted their focal point from "the homosexual" as a fixed, natural, universal sort of being to "homosexual" as a social category that "should itself be analyzed and its relative historical, economic, and political base be scrutinized" (Nardi & Schneider 1998, p. 4). (Work in the social construction of sexualities--including heterosexualities--is still going strong; see, for example, Carpenter 2002, Dellinger & Williams 2002, Frank 1998, 2002; Gonzalez-Lopez 2003, Murray 2000, Schalet 2000, Schalet et al. 2003, Seidman 2002, Seidman et al. 1999).

By the mid-1990s, "queer theory" began to make its mark on academic studies of sexuality. Its poststructuralist roots were revealed in its claims that sexual and other identities are "arbitrary, unstable, and exclusionary," and in its interest in "those knowledges and social practices that organize 'society' as a whole by sexualizing" (Seidman 1996, pp. 11, 13; see also Jagose 1997). Sociology was a bit slow on the draw and then somewhat resistant to what had initially been a humanities-based intellectual enterprise; complaints abounded about queer theory's tendency to understate the role of institutions in sexual regulation, to overstate the benefits of category-deconstruction, transgression, and textual analysis, and to be written in obfuscatory language (Edwards 1998, Gamson 1995). Since the late 1990s, however, there has been something of a reconciliation between the sociology of sexuality and poststructuralist queer theory as sociologists began more assertively to make their own contributions to a "queer sociology" (see Seidman 1996). As Green (2002) has recently written, rather than conceiving of heterosexual and homosexual identity and community as "monolithic empirical units of analysis--as points of arrival for our research agendas--sociologists have been challenged to sharpen their analytical lenses, to grow sensitized to the discursive production of sexual identities, and to be mindful of the insidious force of heteronormativity as a fundamental organizing principle throughout the social order" (Green 2002, p. 521). Indeed, as we discuss below, over the past decade queer theory has helped set a different sort of agenda for sociological research in sexualities: to operationalize and then investigate the claims that sexual identities are "discursively produced" and unstable and that the social order rests on "heteronormativity."

Although it has been perhaps the most visible influence, queer theory has been only one of several important influences on the field over the past decade. In this chapter, we detail the new directions in the sociology of sexualities set in motion by challenges in two other areas, as well. In taking up theory and research on "intersectionality," sociologists have begun to specify more concretely the ways in which sexuality is intertwined with the cultural creation of other categories of inequality (race, class, and gender). In taking up the political economy tradition, sociologists have expanded the investigation of the material aspects of sexual identities, values, and exchanges. Running across these themes, as well, is the impact of "globalization," as sociologists have started to look more closely at the global aspects of queerness, intersectionality, and the political economy of sexuality.

QUEER THEORY, FLUIDITY, AND HETERONORMATIVITY

In their essay in Queer Theory/Sociology, Stein & Plummer suggest four "hallmarks" of queer theory: (a) a notion that sexual power runs throughout social life, and is enforced through "boundaries and binary divides;" (b) a "problematization" of sexual and gender categories as "always on uncertain ground;" (c) a rejection of civil rights strategies in favor of "deconstruction, decentering, revisionist readings, and antiassimilationist politics;" and (d) a "willingness to interrogate areas which normally would not be seen as the terrain of sexuality" (Stein & Plummer 1996, p. 134). Although sociologists have not taken up each of these four hallmarks with equal vigor, the past several years have seen them translated into research at both the microsociological and macrosociological levels.