4 - The refusal of sexual difference: queering sociology

Summary

If we follow the recent history and theory of sexuality, we are asked to assume that sexuality is a social fact. What is imagined as sexuality, its personal and social meaning and form, varies historically and between social groups. Indeed, if we are to take seriously Foucault's The History of Sexuality (1980), the very idea of sexuality as a unity composed of discrete desires, acts, developmental patterns, and sexual and psychological types, is itself a recent and uniquely “modern” Western event. For example, the ancient Greeks imagined a sphere of pleasures (aphrodisia) which included eating, athletics, man/boy love, and marriage, not a realm of sexuality (Foucault 1985). This new theorizing figures sex as thoroughly social: bodies, sensations, pleasures, acts, and interactions are made into “sex” or accrue sexual meanings by individuals, groups, discourses, and institutional practices. Framing “sex” as social unavoidably makes it a political fact. Which sensations or acts are denned as sexual and what moral boundaries demarcate legitimate and illegitimate sex and who stipulates this is political. Paralleling class or gender politics, sexual politics involves struggles around the formation of, and resistance to, a sexual social hierarchy (Rubin 1982).

The current theorization of sex as a social and political fact prompts a rereading of the history of modern societies and social knowledges. In this chapter, I offer a sketch of a critical reinterpretation of classical and current sociology from the vantage point of recent Western queer studies.