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)
