Heterosexuality, Sexuality and Gender Re-thinking the Intersections

Abstract

For most feminist, lesbian, gay, queer and other critical thinkers, it has become axiomatic that gender and sexuality are social rather than natural phenomena and that the relationship between them is a matter for analysis and investigation. Yet in wider social arenas the idea that both gender difference and the realm of sexuality are ordained by nature still has considerable purchase on commonsense reasoning. Indeed its hold may be increasing. While queer theorists were busy troubling heterosexuality, deconstructing the hetero—homo binary and emphasising the fluidity and instability of sexuality, biological determinism was gaining ground — even within gay communities and among campaigners for homosexual rights (see Whisman, 1996; Rahman and Jackson, 1997). In the form of its latest, most fashionable incarnation, evolutionary psychology, it has become ubiquitous in popular representations of science.’ We have also seen theories of female and male brains (see Fausto-Sterling, 2002), gay brains (LeVay, 1993) and the increasing medicalisation of sexuality (Marshall, 2002; Moynihan, 2003). The effect of this trend is to locate gender and sexuality ever more firmly in biology, in the realm of the natural sciences, and to sideline the social and the cultural as mere modifiers of pre-given evolutionary, genetic, neurological or physiological patterns and processes.