Sexualities

The social study of sexuality encompasses investigating sexual practices and behaviors, sexual feelings, sexual orientation, and the ways in which particular sexual identities and behaviors are reinforced or discouraged by societal institutions and culture. Sexuality studies are interdisciplinary and include work from anthropology, gender and women’s studies, history, LGBT studies, psychology, queer studies, and sociology. The social study of sexuality contrasts with biological approaches to human sexuality, which frame sexual expression as resulting from anatomy and hormones. Contemporary social approaches to studying sexualities—the focus of this article—took shape during the late 1960s and early 1970s, when sociologists, feminists, and gay liberationists argued that sexuality (desire, orientation) was not innate, but socially constructed. Thus, contemporary research and theory operates under the assumption that sexual desires, identities, and behaviors are socially constructed. Sexuality studies seek to explain how social institutions and social interaction patterns shape sexual meanings and practices. A significant portion of sexualities work focuses on inequalities between genders, between heterosexuals and nonheterosexuals (of which there are an expanding array of identities, particularly as gender identities expand), races and ethnicities, and social classes.