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GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10.2 (2004) 254-257



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From Gender to Sexuality and Back Again:
Notes on the Politics of Sexual Knowledge

Arlene Stein


For the past fifteen years I have taught the sociology of sexuality at different universities on the West Coast, in Britain, and now on the eastern seaboard. Spurred by this invitation from GLQ, I sat down with a bunch of my old syllabi and began to reflect on how my own conceptualization of the field has shifted. A syllabus is, after all, a snapshot of a field, an attempt to organize disciplinary knowledge for oneself and for others. I wanted to subject my own biases, interests, and predilections to self-examination. How had I understood the terrain of the sociology of sexuality? How had my understanding changed over time? What political, intellectual, and personal trends had informed my views? What did it all mean?

With the syllabi laid out before me, I could not help but note some striking patterns that had to do with how the courses I taught conceptualized gender, sexuality, and the relationship between them. Sometimes I had lumped gender and sexuality together, emphasizing their similarities and points of overlap. At other times I had split them apart, emphasizing their differences. This should not be all that surprising. Sociologists tell us that as humans we are always engaged in classifying things—deciding what ought to go together and what ought to be separate. We are always drawing conceptual distinctions between things we perceive as different (such as the Danish and Norwegian languages) and grouping together things we consider similar (such as grapefruit juice and orange juice). Since the world we live in is "essentially continuous," these cognitive distinctions are always somewhat arbitrary. Nonetheless, we are participants in "thought communities" that prompt us to carve up reality in this fashion.1

For example, today we see homosexuality and transgenderism as conceptually distinct: homosexuality is a matter of sexuality, transgenderism one of gender. But in the not-too-distant past, thanks to the efforts of sexologists and psychoanalysts, homosexuality and transgenderism were generally lumped under the rubric of gender inversion—men trapped in women's bodies, women trapped in men's bodies—which led to the popular association of male homosexuality with effeminacy and so forth. So lumping and splitting has a long history in relation to our understandings of gender and sexuality.

In the early 1980s, when I was a young graduate student at Berkeley, my studies in sexuality were heavily influenced by "difference feminism." Adrienne Rich's notion that a "lesbian continuum" connected all women was pivotal, as was Gayle Rubin's notion of a "sex-gender system," roughly defined as a set of arrangements [End Page 254] by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity.2 Cultural feminism came to dominate much of the women's movement, along with its tendency to lump together gender and sexuality, subsume the latter under the former, and view the "problem" of sexuality—compulsory heterosexuality, violence against women, and pornography, among other issues—as mainly a woman's problem, or at least one that could best be understood from a woman's standpoint.

I myself was never comfortable with this formulation—and, as it turned out, I was not alone. Sex radicals were mounting spirited assaults on feminists' sexual politics, the AIDS crisis was leading many women to reassess their feelings about gay men, and lesbian feminists were discovering that there were as many divisions among them as similarities. So when Rubin called in 1984 for a conceptual "splitting" of gender and sexuality, her words spoke to many of us. "Gender," she wrote, "affects the operation of the sexual system . . . but although sex and gender are related, they are not the same thing, and they form the basis of two distinct areas of social practice." Lesbian feminist ideology had seen "the oppression of lesbians in terms of the oppression of women," she argued. However, "lesbians are also...

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