"Social Construction Theory: Problems in the History of Sexuality", Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality?"

Social construction theory in the field of sexuality suggested that one of the last remaining outposts of the “natural” in our thinking was fluid and changeable, the product of human action and history rather than the invariant result of the body, biology or an innate sex drive.Social construction theory has become the influential, some charge orthodox, framework in the new sex history. It has generated enthusiasm, which make it all the more necessary to identify and explore current problems in social construction(160)

For all of us, essentialism was our first way of thinking about sexuality and still remains the hegemonic one in the culture. Only those who depart from the dominant system have cause to label themselves; those who work within it remain more unselfconscious.Construction theory is committed to asking the questions and to challenging assumptions which impair our ability to even imagine these questions. Construction theory is against premature closure, and its price is tolerating ambiguity. (161)

Social construction approaches call attention to the paradox between the historically variable ways in which culture and society construct seemingly stable reality and experience: here, the ways in which the prevailing sexual system seems natural and inevitable to its natives, and for many individuals the expression of some deeply felt essence.(161)

Sexuality is constructed at the level of culture and history through complex interactions which we are now trying to understand does not mean that individuals have an open-ended ability to construct themselves, or to reconstruct themselves multiple times in adulthood.(162) At minimum, all social construction approaches adopt the view that physically identical sexual acts may have varying social significance and subjective meaning depending on how they are defined and understood in different cultures and historical periods. Some social construction theory posits that even the direction sexual desire itself.(163)

The most radical form of constructionist theory is willing to entertain the idea that there is no essential, undifferentiated sexual impulse, “sex drive” or “lust”, which resides the body due to physiological functioning and sensation.(163)

The intellectual history of social construction is a complex one, The point of briefly noting a few moments in its history here is simply to illustrate that social construction theorists and writers differ in their willingness to imagine what was constructed.(164)Many other social constructionists assume that specific, core behaviors and physical relations are reliably understood as sexual, even though they occur in diverse cultures or historical periods. The often implicit assumptions about the sexual nature of physical acts or relations depend in turn on deeply embedded cultural frameworks that we use to think about the body. Social construction’s greatest strength lies in its violation  of our folk knowledge and scientific ideologies that would frame sexuality as “natural”, determined by biology and the body.(165)

Social constructionists do not grapple with theoretical issues about degrees of social construction, the object of study, or the meaning of the body in a vacuum. The new sex history is indebted to feminism and gay liberation for many of its insights, for non-academic settings which nurtured this work during the early states of its development when the university disapproved, and for its intellectual urgency. Variability, subjectivity, negotiation and change often violated the wish for a continuous history.(167)

In contrast, the social constructionist framework common in lesbian and gay history has become disseminated to a larger lesbian and gay public. (168)All movements of sexual liberation, including lesbian and gay, are built on imagining:imagining that things could be different, other, better than they are. Social construction shares that imaginative impulse and thus is not a threat to the lesbian and gay movement, but very much of it(169)