sexuality

n.

1. The condition of being characterized and distinguished by sex.
2. Concern with or interest in sexual activity.
3. Sexual character or potency.

Definition

Sexuality can be defined as the quality or state of being sexual. Quite often it is an aspect of one's need for closeness, caring, and touch.

Cancer and Sexuality

Faced with a disease such as cancer most people initially lose interest in sex. Sexual desire is overshadowed by concern for one's health. Certain cancers directly affect sexual organs making sexual activity impossible or painful. Chemotherapy, radiation and surgical treatments of cancer can affect sexual activity making it difficult or undesirable. The side effects of cancer treatments such as nausea and pain can lessen sexual desire. Cancer treatments that disturb the normal hormone balance can also lessen desire. Many cancer patients are also worried that their partner may feel negatively about them because of the changes in their body and the fact that they have cancer.

Sexuality can be expressed in many different ways. It is possible to continue a healthy and satisfying relationship and maintain a healthy sexual image even after any changes brought about by cancer. Sexual intimacy can be a source of comfort during treatment and recovery from cancer. This may require some adaptation and change of the patient's current sexual patterns but with the right support groups and encouragement from the partner it should be possible to maintain healthy sexual activity.

Cancer and Female Sexuality

Women undergoing chemotherapy, radiation therapy, or pelvic surgery may experience pain during intercouse. This could be caused by changes in the size and moistness of the vagina, or infection of the bladder or vagina. Sometimes the pain is so severe that it sets off an involuntary contraction of the vagina called vaginismus. This contraction makes intercourse impossible. Extra lubrication is necessary to make intercourse comfortable. Vaginisimus can be treated by counseling and special relaxation training.

Radical surgery that will drastically change the physical aspects of the vagina and vulva pose an additional challenge for the affected woman and her partner. The woman may be affected psychologically by the change in appearance and also by the fear of pain or bleeding. The genitals may be physically altered so that sexual intercourse is difficult or impossible. Sex therapy, reconstructive surgery, or altering habits so that sexual needs are met without intercourse all may be options after surgery that radically affects the genitals.

Another common effect of cancer treatment is premature menopause. This may follow removal of ovaries by surgery, suppression of ovaries by chemotherapy or radiation therapy of the pelvis. The symptoms are much more severe than normal menopause causing vaginal dryness and tightness, hot flashes and sometimes low androgen levels which can also reduce sexual desire. Women who do not have hormone-sensitive tumors may want to consider hormone replacement therapy, after consultation with their doctor. Radiation treatment of the pelvis, cervix or vagina may cause scarring of the vagina. This makes it tighter and difficult to penetrate. Series of vaginal dilators of different sizes can help to relieve this problem. It is important to use these early to prevent vaginal shrinkage. Counseling may also be beneficial for the affected woman and her partner.

Cancer and Male Sexuality

Radiation therapy of the pelvis can impair sexual function. Circulating testosterone levels may come down temporarily and during this time men may have a loss of sexual desire. But this does not seem to be a permanent effect in all cases. It may be possible to get aroused by taking more time and experimenting with different kinds of caressing and love making. If erection does not occur after a significant period of time the doctor may suggest tests to check for sleep erections. Some are take-home tests and if they suggest that erection occurs normally during sleep, it is clear the physiological mechanism is intact and sexual counseling may relieve the problem. Sexual counseling may also be helpful to allow enjoyment with sexual caressing in the absence of erections. Men with medical impotence may also be helped by the use of Viagra. Men need replacement with hormones in only very rare cases. In fact, extra testosterone can cause undetected prostate cancer to grow.

Surgery for various cancers can cause sexual problems. Surgery for bladder cancer can lead to decreased sexual desire, lowered ability to obtain an erection, and less frequent or less intense orgasms. Surgery for penile cancer and testicular cancer can result in decreased fertility and desire, difficulties with erections and orgasms, and decreased volume of semen. In treating prostate cancer, the biopsy obtained to confirm diagnosis may decrease semen levels, and, after a man has had his prostate gland removed (prostatectomy), he may be unable to obtain an erection. However, new surgical advances and new chemotherapy options may help reduce these effects.

If, during surgery, the blood supply to the penis is affected, the surgeon may take an abdominal artery and try to connect it the penis. This operation is only successful in a quarter of the patients. Penile injection therapy and vacuum devices have been used to produce erections in the absence of sufficient blood flow. Medications that produce erections are risky and may lead to the formation of scar tissue. Vacuum erection devices are safer but intrude in the lovemaking. Medical erection problems may also be treated by penile prosthesis. This is one of the best ways to treat a permanent erection problem.

Sexual Problems of Specific Cancer Treatments

Urostomy or Colostomy

Before sexual activity one must ensure that the urostomy fits correctly. The appliance should be emptied to reduce the chance of a leak. A patterned pouch can be worn over it to cover it. Sexual activity with a colostomy can be performed with the same precautions. One can plan sexual activity at a time when the colostomy is not active and avoid gas-producing foods that day. Direct communication and reassurances from a loving partner can be extremely helpful.

Mastectomy

The breast symbolizes sexuality and when the treatment of breast cancer involves mastectomy, psychological counseling is helpful to regain desire and sexual enjoyment. There may be fewer problems when a lumpectomy is done. Women who feel awkward about the change after surgery may consider using a prosthesis covered with a nightgown or bra, or they may consider reconstruction either with or without implantation.

Limb Amputation

Treatment mainly of primary tumors of bone often includes amputating a limb. If the partners can openly communicate they can decide whether the prosthesis needs to be worn during lovemaking. Prosthesis can help with movement and balance but the straps that attach it can get in the way. If the prosthesis is not used, pillows could be used instead for balance.

Treatment of Facial Cancer

Some cancers of the head and neck may be treated by partial removal of the facial bony structure. This can be psychologically very damaging as the scar is so public and affects the face, a vital part of the human personality. Following such surgery, speech may also be affected. Recent advances in facial prosthesis and plastic surgery may help regain a more natural appearance and speech.

Professional Help for Sexual Problems

The first step is to discuss sexual problems with one's doctor. Sometimes doctors themselves may not be at ease discussing sexual issues. Cancer centers may have sexual rehabilitation centers with experts on staff comfortable dealing with these issues. Medical schools and some private practice groups run sexual dysfunction clinics that provide comprehensive care to treat sexual problems. Sex therapists can provide sexual counseling. It is important that the sex therapist be a psychiatrist, social worker or psychologist with special training in treating sexual problems. Professional societies such as American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy can give information about these specialists. It is important to avoid untrained people who provide useless and sometimes harmful therapy.

Resources

Organizations

The American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy. 1133 15th Street NW, Suite 300, Washington D.C. 20005. Telephone: (202) 452-0109 Web site: .

American Cancer Society. Telephone: 1-800-ACS-2345. Web site: .

Other

The American Cancer Society. Sexuality and Cancer: For the Man Who Has Cancer and His Partner. Sexuality and Cancer: For the Woman Who Has Cancer and Her Partner. Other publications also available free from the American Cancer Society. Telephone: 1-800-ACS-2345. Also available through the web site: .

"For Women:Body Image Issues." Gillette Women's Cancer Connection..

—Malini Vashishtha, Ph.D.

This word initially denoted organisms capable of reproducing sexually (thus plants had sexuality), and was applied to things rather than people (humans had sex, a man's spermatozoa had sexuality). Then, early in the nineteenth century, it began to be used to denote a whole nexus of concepts around sexual expression, sexual activity, and sexual powers, detached from the original connotation. In spite of this, it took some time to develop as a concept: for example, the pioneer British sexologist Havelock Ellis entitled his series of investigations Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897-1928), rather than Studies in Sexuality, which might now seem a more appropriate title.

Freud and Foucault

It was perhaps Freud who gave it its particular modern meaning as a term describing not only the sexual drive as such but the direction which it takes in a particular individual. He distinguished the sexual instinct from the sexual object, arguing that the very numerous instances in which the instinct was not attached to something appropriate — a suitable member of the opposite sex — suggested that the instinct was initially independent of any object. The sexual instinct permitted much variation in the choice of objects it was directed towards, and often also, he pointed out, a considerable lack of discrimination — he cited bestiality as an example. These vagaries, however, were not to be confused with insanity. Sexuality was thus not coterminous with the sexual instinct. Freud was accused of making sexuality too important, allocating it a central place in human motivation and extending its ramifications into areas that many had not previously thought to be sexual. It could, conversely, be argued that he was making explicit an obsession with the importance of sex that characterized his times.

Michel Foucault has famously described sexuality, in A History of Sexuality; Volume I, Introduction (1976), as a system of discourses rather than a ‘given’, that came into existence during the nineteenth century — created, he argued, by the desire to regulate sex, and to define and prohibit certain kinds of behaviour. While Foucault's conclusions are supported by perhaps over-broad and sometimes unsubstantiated generalizations, and the establishment of elegant antitheses with which one might want to contend, he has certainly drawn our attention to the rise of a particular way of looking at and defining sexual matters. Sexuality, in the sense of a personal and idiosyncratic amalgam of drive and direction, central to a person's individuality, was generated out of a perception of sex as a problem, or a series of problems.

Foucault has also forced us to think differently about existing naïve concepts of what sexuality is and does. It is not a force of nature which was repressed during the course of the nineteenth century and then liberated through the breaching of the taboo of silence which had prevented it being spoken about. Rather, it is a nexus of concepts and relationships brought into being through a complex process of naming the forbidden, in order to control and regulate it. And through that process, forbidden desire and behaviours were given names by which they could be discussed and spoken. In fact it was a product of the great nineteenth-century urge to catalogue and classify, mediated by a sense that there was something peculiar, slippery, elusive, and dangerous about the subject. The ‘hydraulic’ view of sexuality as something that can either be dammed up, liberated, or channelled, is thus seen to be just one way of looking at the phenomenon of sex, and one which is, moreover (though Foucault does not make this point) open to the criticism of being heavily dependent upon a male model of sexual functioning.

Towards a plurality of sexualities

With this delineation of ‘sexuality’, as a particular way of looking at or talking about sex created by a particular kind of society during a particular historical epoch, often goes an assumption that previously there was no such thing as ‘sexuality’. There was the sexual instinct, there was lust, there was sin or crime or insanity, but there was not ‘sexuality’ in the sense of the individual's personal and centrally-defining blend of drive and desire. This assumption has been much contested, in particular the corollary that prior to the definition of the homosexual as an individual of innately inverted sexuality, in the late nineteenth century, there was no such thing as the ‘homosexual’ but merely individuals convicted of acts which were defined by the law as sodomy. Historians had demonstrated a strong case for the emergence of something like a ‘homosexual identity’ well before the writings of the sexologists created the category, and in fact these writers based their conclusions on contacts with individuals who already had the sense of their own difference from a norm.

With the rise of feminism and feminist analyses of sex in society, and with the contemporaneous rise of gay studies and theory, the idea of ‘sexuality’ meaning a particular association of sexual desire and its object (hetero or homo) is itself seen as too coarse a definition; it tends to conflate very different kinds of preference and behaviour. Recent feminist, gay, and ‘queer theory’ writers have preferred to talk about ‘sexualities’ rather than sexuality as such. These sexualities may be defined as constructed partly through social means (the provision of roles or scripts for sexual identity and behaviour) and partly on the basis of personal psychological factors.

It thus follows that the notion of some biological basis for ‘sexuality’ is an over-simplistic concept. While there may be (as a current example) some predisposition in biochemistry or brain structure to same-sex attraction, it will be manifested in various ways because of the ways society defines ‘sexuality’. The same predisposing factor at different times and in different cultures, and according to other elements of personal psychology, will be expressed in very different ways — a furtive (married) cottager, a drag queen, an AIDs activist. ‘Sexuality’ is a bundle or a container rather than a reified thing in itself.

— Lesley A. Hall

noun

The quality or condition of being sensual: sensuality, sexiness, suggestiveness, voluptuousness. See sex/asexual.

1. The innate attributes of an individual, including sexual desires, roles, and identities, which find expression in sexual relationships and sexual activities with others.

2. An individual's preferences for specific forms of sexual expression; an individual's sexual orientation.

Sexuality, along with race and gender, is an aspect of identity that historians paid relatively little attention to before 1975. Since then, however, it has become a very important topic for historical investigation, albeit one around which considerable theoretical debate swirls. Perhaps more than any other area of historical scholarship, the history of sexuality necessarily involves not only historians but anthropologists, literary critics, classicists, and philosophers. It is impossible to describe sexuality as a topic for historical inquiry in the United States without attending more than usual to historiographical debates, and to larger theoretical questions that encompass multiple disciplines. Regardless of whether one agrees that sexuality itself has a history, the history of sexuality as a topic for inquiry and debate in the late twentieth century is undoubtedly a major event in the intellectual and cultural history of the period. Recent research has demonstrated considerable variation in sexual practices and identities among different racial, ethnic, regional, and class groups even as it has demonstrated the centrality of sexuality to definitions of American national identity.

Indigenous Americans and Europeans

European conquerors and colonists saw sexual practice as distinguishing them from indigenous Americans starting with Columbus's first landing. About 1516, Vasco Nunez de Balboa, an early Spanish explorer of Central America, discovered men dressed as women and fed forty of them to his dogs. In North America and the United States, sexuality has consistently served since the beginning of European colonization as a basis for differentiating among racial and ethnic groups. This is so in the empirical sense that observers noted significant differences among the sexual practices and identity categories available to indigenous Americans, Africans and their descendents, and Europeans and their descendents in America. It is also the case in the sense that Europeans and their descendents have consistently relied on attributions of sexual immorality as justifications for discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities. Thus, sexuality has been a key to American national identity, and a major site for establishing and negotiating differences of power along lines of gender, race, and class, since 1607. The accounts of European observers throughout the Americas from the sixteenth century forward make clear that they could not separate their observations of indigenous sexuality from their European worldview, in which Christian prescriptions for proper gender roles and prohibitions on sodomy played a prominent role.

Consequently, understanding of indigenous and African sexual practices and identities in early America will always remain more partial and provisional than most historical understanding because the vast majority of the sources are highly moralizing or voyeuristic accounts by Europeans that tell us more about the European observers than about those they observed. However, most, if not all, of the indigenous peoples of North America had some institutionalized identity and role for males who wished to adopt a female role, and for females who wished to adopt a male role. Contemporary anthropologists and historians use "berdache" to describe this phenomenon. The specifics of the identity and role that these third-gendered natives assumed varied among tribes. In some instances parallel identities existed both for males who lived as females and females who lived as males, while others only institutionalized males living as females. In some cases berdaches had clearly defined social roles, such as undertaking and other funereal services in the Chu-mash and neighboring cultures around what is now Santa Barbara, California.

Sexual practice served not only to differentiate Europeans from native and African Americans, but as a vehicle for establishing and perpetuating European control over conquered peoples. Troops accompanying Columbus and later Spanish conquerors routinely used rape as one tactic for subjugating native populations. Venereal diseases, along with more well known infections, may have contributed to European dominance of the Americas. The Catholic Church as well as the Spanish and French governments tried to prohibit sexual contact between settlers and natives, but to little avail. French missionaries in Quebec complained that marriages between fur traders and Native women typically produced nativized Frenchmen rather than Frenchified Native women.

British North America

Slave owners routinely assumed sexual exploitation as a lagniappe of ownership. Beginning with the expectations of British planters in the Caribbean, however, North American planters started out relying primarily on male slaves and were slow to recognize the profit potential in slave women's reproduction. Slave sex ratios began to even out in North America during the middle of the eighteenth century primarily because of the fertility of those slave women whom traders brought over. The presence of wives and children helped solidify owners' control over male slaves by creating the threat of retribution against loved ones for the slave's misconduct, even as owners' sexual exploitation of slave women served as further demonstration of male slaves' powerlessness.

Europeans' voyeuristic attitudes toward images of naked, virile Native Americans and Africans as contrasted to supposedly more civilized Europeans, combined with the other deeply entrenched power differentials of slavery, made attributions of sexual prowess and immorality key parts of the racist stereotypes that white Americans consistently used to justify and perpetuate discrimination against black Americans. After slavery, the charge that a black man had raped a white woman was the most reliable way to initiate a lynching. In some senses, black women could enjoy greater sexual freedom than white women, as reflected in the songs and other self-representations of black singers from Bessie Smith to Aretha Franklin. On the other hand, the overwhelming desire for respectability as an avenue to equal opportunity and treatment led many African American leaders to deny black sexuality altogether, creating difficulties for African American lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons and for efforts to reduce the spread of HIV starting in the late twentieth century.

Puritans strove to confine sexual activity within marriage, but encouraged it there. Changes in sexual practices and expectations contributed to the new sense of American identity in religious and political matters that emerged with the great awakening of the early eighteenth century. Times of political and social upheaval tend generally to reduce the effectiveness of restraints on sexual activity; the American Revolution was no exception. Judged by reports of children born too soon after marriage, premarital sex increased significantly in British North America during the late eighteenth century even as a longer-term shift from a general perception of women as morally weaker than men to a perception that women were sources of moral uplift and instruction for men generally, and especially for sons, took hold during the early national period. Regional variations became more pronounced as the growing distinction between public and private in the commercial north allowed women a measure of power in their homes that predominantly rural women of the south continued to lack.

Birth rates among European Americans remained unusually high in North America and the United States until 1800, at which point they began to drop steadily. In 1900, the birth rate was half its 1800 level, and it continued to fall, dropping below the replacement rate during the Great Depression and rebounding only during the Baby Boom from 1946 to 1964. Although historian Nancy Cott described a nineteenth-century ideal of "passionlessness" for middle-class white women, this notion can easily be overblown. One should emphasize its specificity in terms of race and class. The earliest explorations in the history of sexuality relied primarily on the elite discourse of magazines and marriage manuals. Subsequent research has revealed much greater variation in practice, with significant populations that either disregarded or remained largely unaware of white, middle-class ideals in matters of sexuality.

Birth rates consistently remained higher in the South than in the North and for black than white women. The birth rate decline long preceded significant declines in infant mortality. At the frontier, the birth rate was very low because almost all inhabitants were men. Recently settled areas just behind the frontier tended to have very high birth rates while urban commercial areas had low rates. Thus, race, class, and geography helped to determine the spread of sexual practices that reflected women's demands for increased autonomy, as in the burned-over district of New York and New England, and/or the calculation for middle-class urbanites that children were becoming a long-term cost rather than an asset because of their educational needs. This attitude contrasted with that of farmers, for whom children could provide labor at the earliest possible age.

The late nineteenth century produced both the largest cohort of never-married women in U.S. history and the idea of "voluntary motherhood," according to which women should control sexual activity in marriage as a means of controlling fertility. Although reforming middle-class women's efforts to "rescue" prostitutes dated to the antebellum period, some evidence indicates that voluntary motherhood carried with it a tacit acceptance that men who respected their wives' periodic demands for celibacy in the name of birth control would turn to prostitutes. While it is impossible to establish any clear links, the correlation between never-married women and the reform movements of the Progressive Era suggests that women's sexual relationships with men have political consequences at numerous levels. Whether they had sexual relationships with each other or not, many of the prominent women reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries drew strength and inspiration from networks of close women friends. Changes in women's expectations and in men's roles in the new industrial, managerial economy contributed to the development of companionate marriage, more egalitarian and based on the expectation of love and fidelity, as the ideal for middle-class white couples beginning in the late nineteenth century. For many working-class white, immigrant, and African American couples, however, marriage remained as much an economic as an emotional and psychological arrangement.

The Administration of Sexuality

Sexual practice and identity attracted growing attention from the researchers and clinicians of the emerging biological, psychological, and social sciences and related professions during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Concerns about women's increased autonomy, combined with fears for the implications of absorbing an enormous number of immigrants, contributed to the pathologizing of intense romantic friendships between women as part of a larger move to connect deviant sexual activity with psychiatric diagnoses. Modern terminology for describing persons in terms of their sexual practices and presumed identities, such as "homosexual" and "heterosexual," emerged after 1870 as part of this new sexological dis-course. Concerns and discussions about the relationship between sexual practice and national identity spread rapidly among professional and political elites. In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt expressed concerns about "race suicide," because he noted that native-born middle-and upper-class white women typically had far fewer children than immigrant women. He did not notice that the children of immigrants usually adopted the fertility patterns of their new land. In 1917, Congress created for the first time a category to exclude aliens with "abnormal sexual instincts," which would remain in immigration law in varying forms until 1990.

Mirroring Roosevelt, pioneering birth control advocate Margaret Sanger initially linked contraception to radical politics with her newspaper, The Woman Rebel, which she published briefly in 1914. Sanger learned of contraception after working with "Big Bill" Haywood of the Industrial Workers of the World and anarchist Emma Goldman in the early years of the twentieth century. She traveled to France, where she discovered that women routinely practiced contraception. She initially characterized contraception as a form of class warfare in which workers would deprive capitalists of wage slaves. Sanger's agitation accompanied a significant shift in sexual mores in the United States, at least in the major cities, beginning around 1910. Sexual experimentation outside of marriage increased, and popularized discussions of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theories provided a new vocabulary of sexual repression as an omnipresent motivation in human action. Sanger's own career paralleled a general increase in the spread of knowledge about sexuality as both gradually lost their radical associations and the field became more professionalized from World War I on.

World War I precipitated further French surprises for Americans, as military leaders resisted the French solution to venereal disease—inspecting and licensing prostitutes. The large-scale population movements, such as African Americans moving from south to north, and workers generally moving to cities, contributed to the social disruption that created new opportunities for sexual experimentation among many Americans, especially young adults. In this respect as in many others, World War I anticipated trends that would occur on an even larger scale during World War II. The 1920s typically have a reputation as a decade of sexual permissiveness, with women smoking in public and wearing shorter skirts, but the same decade saw the recrudescence of a Ku Klux Klan that policed illicit sexual relationships, especially across racial and ethnic lines, as part of its culturally conservative program to sustain its ideal of American identity. With the onset of the Great Depression, employers including the federal government fired married women in order to create jobs for men. Virtually all couples began to count more closely the cost of each child, driving the birth rate to its lowest point in U.S. history.

World War II

World War II demanded long work hours from parents, leaving them less time to supervise their children. It also inspired some female adolescents to demonstrate their patriotism by bestowing sexual favors on soldiers. The war put large numbers of young adults, mostly men, but many women as well, into sex-segregated military environments and perhaps in large cities, away from parental supervision, for the first time. These changes contributed substantially to increased sexual activity among opposite-sex couples, but also among same-sex couples. At the same time, World War II saw the first use by the U.S. military of psychological tests and diagnoses in order to determine soldiers' aptitude as well as to exclude undesirables, especially lesbians and gay men. The effort largely failed, but it did result in significant punishments for many soldiers who got caught in same-sex activity, which in turn contributed to the growth of postwar lesbian and gay civil rights movements by creating a self-conscious group of veterans who saw their dishonorable discharges as an injustice.

Post World War II

The post–World War II period has seen an explosion of interest in and discussion about sexuality in the United States. The publication of the Kinsey reports on the sexual behavior of males (1948) and of females (1953), with claims that many women engaged in premarital inter-course and many men had at least some same-sex activity, touched off a frenzy of debate and revealed the capacity of the American public to find fascination in information about its own sexual practices. During the red scare of the 1950s, political leaders equated the foreign threat of communism with the domestic threat of homosexuality as part of a general effort to restore "normality" to American life via domesticity. The federal government fired more work-ers for suspicion of homosexuality than for suspicion of communist activity. One fired federal worker, Franklin Kameny, would spend the next thirty-five years fighting discrimination in federal employment and security clearances. The early 1950s also saw the formation of the first two "homophile" organizations, the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, which approached lesbian and gay civil rights as a reformist campaign for respectability through cooperation with psychiatrists and other influential professionals.

Most observers identify the 1960s as a key decade for changes in Americans' sexual attitudes. The anovulent pill became available as a means of contraception, protest on college campuses included resistance to curfews and restrictions on visitation, and theorists such as Herbert Marcuse linked sexual repression to other political problems. Feminists and lesbian and gay rights activists drew inspiration from the civil rights movement to make their demands and their tactics more militant. On the other hand, federal policymakers, lacking historical information about Africans' adaptation of their family forms under slavery and refusing to acknowledge the ongoing effects of racism, claimed that overly powerful black women were responsible for the widespread breakdown of black families.

Late Twentieth Century

From the 1970s onward, sexual practices and identities became major topics of cultural and political debate in the United States. The conservative movement that had coalesced around opposition to communism and support for Barry Goldwater took up lesbian and gay civil rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, and abortion as causes that, in their view, undermined long-standing moral principles that buttressed the American way of life. They pointed to the rising divorce rate, widespread use of sexual imagery in advertising and television programs, and the increasing visibility of lesbians and gay men as indicators of a nation in moral decline. Conservative President Ronald Reagan routinely made statements supporting "traditional" ideals of gender and sexuality, cut off the access to the White House that lesbian/gay civil rights activists had enjoyed during the Carter administration, and steadfastly ignored the new epidemic of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) that emerged during his first year in office, 1981, because the vast majority of victims in the United States were gay men who transmitted the AIDS virus via anal intercourse.

During the closing years of the twentieth century, technological advance spread debates over sexuality into new areas. In vitro fertilization and surrogate motherhood raised legal issues that American institutions proved ill prepared for. The U.S. government granted an asylum request to a woman who feared she would suffer genital mutilation if she returned to her home country. Trans-gender activists, including transsexuals but also others who defied gender norms, struggled for recognition even from the lesbian and gay civil rights movement, much less conventional political and legal institutions. Intersexed persons, born with ambiguous genitalia, began to speak publicly against the medical practice of surgically assigning a sex to such babies at birth.

Sexuality As a Topic for History and Theory

Amidst such political confusion, major scholarly work on the history of sexuality began to emerge. Carroll Smith Rosenberg, Jonathan Ned Katz, Lillian Faderman, Jeffrey Weeks, and John D'Emilio all published important articles and books that explored sexual practice and identity as historical topics between 1975 and 1983. Much the way the African American and women's movements sparked increased interest in African American and women's history, so the increased visibility of the lesbian and gay civil rights movement after 1969 led a growing number of scholars to wonder about the history of sexual minorities. Historical study of sexuality depended on the belief that sexual minorities merited study and that sexuality was as much a historical as a medical or psychological topic. Both the politics of the scholars who conducted the re-search, and the evidence they found, contributed to the conclusion that definitions of sexuality varied not only on their own terms and with respect to gender, but in relation to race and class as well. The Radical History Review published a special issue on the history of sexuality in 1979.

Because of his status as an established scholar in France and his willingness to make provocative claims, Michel Foucault came to overshadow most American scholars during the 1980s and to define the field with volume one of The History of Sexuality, which appeared in English in 1978. Foucault's work has proven more valuable for the conceptual framework it provides than for the empirical claims it makes. It has also provoked considerable intellectual and political debate, with important scholars such as John Boswell dissenting vigorously from the claim for the recent provenance of "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" as identity categories. Regardless, sexuality as a matter of individual, cultural, and national identity will continue to motivate considerable historical research for the foreseeable future.

Bibliography

Abelove, Henry, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, eds. The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. New York: Rout-ledge, 1993.

Bailey, Beth. Sex in the Heartland. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Berube, Allan. Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women during World War II. New York: Free Press, 1990.

Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994.

D'Emilio, John, and Estelle B. Freedman. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.

D'Emilio, John, William B. Turner, and Urvashi Vaid, eds. Creating Change: Sexuality, Public Policy, and Civil Rights. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.

Duberman, Martin Bauml, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past. New York: New American Library, 1989.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Volume 1. New York: Random House, 1978.

Gordon, Linda. Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America. New York: Penguin Books, 1977.

Howard, John, ed. Carryin' on in the Lesbian and Gay South. New York: New York University Press, 1997.

Katz, Jonathan Ned. Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A., a Documentary History. New York: Meridian, 1976; rev. ed., 1992.

———. The Invention of Heterosexuality. New York: Dutton, 1995.

Peiss, Kathy, and Christina Simmons, eds., with Robert A. Padgug. Passion and Power: Sexuality in History. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989.

Roscoe, Will. Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1998.

Smith, Merril D., ed. Sex and Sexuality in Early America. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

Turner, William B. A Genealogy of Queer Theory. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000.

Sexuality as understood by Sigmund Freud is "psycho-sexuality," and should be taken "in the same comprehensive sense as that in which the German language uses the word 'lieben' (to love)." (1910k, pp. 222-23)

In his clinical work during the closing years of the nineteenth century, Freud noticed how significant a role sexuality played in the mental conflicts of his patients, eventually concluding that it was invariably one of the poles of any symptom-generating conflict. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), he evoked the importance of childhood sexuality solely in connection with neurotics, but beginning with the first edition of the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d) he asserted its presence and its essential role in all children. Thereafter Freud conceived of human sexuality in a broadened sense that included childhood and perverse sexuality. Childhood sexuality had three main characteristics: it was autoerotic, subject to the primacy of erotogenic zones and component instincts, and anaclitically dependent on the self-preservation instincts or ego-instincts.

It would take twenty or so years for Freud to arrive at the theory of the four stages of psychosexual development that we now find in the manuals. Each stage was characterized by the dominance of a different erotogenic zone: oral, anal, phallic, genital. The child was polymorphously perverse in that the primacy of the genital zone and of the relationship to the object was not yet established. The pervert remained fixated in, or regressed to, a subordination to one or other of the non-genital zones, ruled by component instincts. Despite this broadening of the concept of sexuality, Freud continued to define a so-called normal sexuality, reached at the end-point of development and characterized by the primacy of the genital zone and of the relationship to the object. But he had trouble completely detaching normal sexuality from the goal of procreation, something he had been able to do in the cases of infantile and perverse sexuality (see the twentieth of the Introductory Lectures [1916-17a]).

Another point, often insufficiently stressed, is the distinction Freud drew between two currents, the affectionate and the sensual, "whose union is necessary to ensure a completely normal attitude in love" (1912d, p. 180).

The whole of childhood sexuality falls under the rubric of the "Oedipus complex," a term first used by Freud in "A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men" (1910h, p. 171), even though he had referred to Sophocles' Oedipus Rex as early as 1897 in a letter to Fliess. The Oedipus complex was at first presented by Freud from the young boy's point of view, and in a simplified form: the little boy is in love with his mother and so becomes his father's rival. In the complete form, bisexuality came into play: the boy also wants to take his mother's place vis-à-vis his father (inverted Oedipus complex). The Oedipus complex of the girl was not in Freud's view symmetrical with that of the boy, for the girl did not experience the tragic conjunction of love for the mother and a rivalry with the father provoking murderous wishes.

A sexuality that could be called perverse inasmuch it activated erotogenic zones other than the genital nevertheless had a place in normal sexuality in the shape of "fore-pleasure." What characterized perverse sexuality proper was the rigidity and exclusiveness of the manner of achieving orgasm.

Until 1920 Freud described mental conflict as a clash between the sexual instincts and the self-preservative instincts, also known as ego-instincts. Beginning with Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g), however, a new opposition came to the fore in Freud's thinking, though without eradicating the earlier: that between Eros (life instincts or sexual instincts) and Thanatos (death instincts). This was yet another broadening of the concept of sexuality: Eros—love—sought to hold things together, while Thanatos—death—strove to tear them apart and destroy them. As noted above, Freud gave sexuality the same extension as the verb "to love"; since one side of the conflict is always sexuality, it may reasonably be deduced that all mental disturbance has a connection with sexuality conceived as love, as a tie to an object.

Freud was accused by some of "pansexualism." It is true that sexuality was present everywhere in his theory, yet it was always seen as in conflict with other instinctual forces, so that Freud was surely right to defend himself against this charge.

On the other hand, the issue of the relationship between sexual disturbances and psychopathology is not simple. It is quite possible to encounter dysfunctional sexuality in the strict sense in a person who presents no particular mental symptoms in other areas, while a perfectly satisfactory orgasm may occur in otherwise deeply disturbed individuals. But the libidinal tie and the relationship to the object are always implicated in the organization of the personality and in mental pathology. In psychoanalytic treatment, the transference instates a relationship of libidinal dependence with the analyst that repeats the relationship with parental figures. The transference—the motor of psychoanalysis—may become an obstacle to treatment if it takes a totally eroticized form.

For Freud, then, human sexuality was psychosexual, and individual and cultural ideas played an important role therein; yet in his view it was also biological, and he was certainly not mistaken in this. The object of the instinct is not given with the instinct itself. The history of the individual, which is to say the history of that individual's relationships with his mother, father, and other key people in the entourage, contributes to the constitution of his particular sexuality. Freud wrote that the infant's relationship with the mother who gave it the breast supplied the prototype for the adult's later love relationships. Weaning brought about the loss of the breast as libidinal object, and thereafter the individual would seek to rediscover that lost object. But some infants are not breast-fed, in which case weaning will not have the same character, and may not be so late. The breast has become a metaphor for all bodily attentions from the mother (Donald W. Winnicott), or else as a part-object (Melanie Klein). In language, and for the infant—even an infant which has not been breast-fed—the breast symbolizes the mother, and is an object of desire. Freud seems never to have heard little boys crying because they cannot have breasts like their mother, and he retained only the little girl's penis envy as a mark of the child's confrontation with the anatomical difference between the sexes. Freud's patriarchal and phallocentric assumptions echo his culture, and he was unaware of them. Only rarely do we now see the typical neuroses and disturbances of sexuality that Freud described in his "Contributions to the Psychology of Love" (1910h, 1912d); and when we do, patients usually come from families where they have received a traditional patriarchal upbringing.

Freud never suggested that unbridled sexual activity could remedy sexual and mental problems. Certainly, he at first emphasized the conflict between sexual wishes and the external world, and made "civilized sexual morality" responsible for "modern nervous illness." (1908d). But later on he located the essential conflict—that between the forces of binding and the forces of unbinding—within the psyche. A strong superego, constituted by means of identification with the father as prohibitor of incest—and also (as something of an afterthought on Freud's part) by the mother—he judged necessary not only to morality but also to creativity, to sublimation, that is to say to the inhibition and diversion of strictly sexual instinctual aims. Libido seemed to Freud to be masculine in essence, and he considered the woman's superego—and hence her moral sense and creativity—to be weaker than the man's. Women were destined to passivity, or at least to activities with passive aims. Freud rejected feminist aspirations to equality between men and women.

Bibliography

Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE, 4-5.

——. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE,7.

——. (1908d). "Civilized" sexual morality and modern nervous illness. SE,9.

——. (1910h). A special type of choice of object made by men (contributions to the psychology of love I). SE, 11.

——. (1910k). "Wild" psycho-analysis. SE, 11.

——. (1912d). On the universal tendency to debasement in the sphere of love (contributions to the psychology of love II). SE, 11.

——. (1916-17a). Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. SE, 15-16.

——. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18.

Further Reading

Chodorow, Nancy. (1989). Feminism and psychoanalytic theory. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Friedman, Robert. (2001). Psychoanalysis and human sexuality. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 49, 1115-1132.

Kulish, Nancy. (2002). Female sexuality: Pleasure of secrets and the secret of pleasure. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 57, 151-176.

—COLETTE CHILAND

Quotes:

"The American ideal of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This idea has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden -- as an unpatriotic act -- that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood." - James Baldwin

"Sexual liberation, as a slogan, turns out to be another kind of bondage. For a woman it offers orgasm as her ultimate and major fulfillment; it's better than motherhood." - Victoria Billings

"Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that matter. In fact, both homo -- and heterosexual experimental subjects have been conditioned to react sexually to an old boot, and you can save a lot of money that way." - William S. Burroughs

"It is essential that we realize once and for all that man is much more of a sex creature than a moral creature. The former is inherent, the other is grafted on." - Emma Goldman

"Understand that sexuality is as wide as the sea. Understand that your morality is not law. Understand that we are you. Understand that if we decide to have sex whether safe, safer, or unsafe, it is our decision and you have no rights in our lovemaking." - Derek Jarman

"Back in the days when men were hunters and chest beaters and women spent their whole lives worrying about pregnancy or dying in childbirth, they often had to be taken against their will. Men complained that women were cold, unresponsive, frigid. They wanted their women wanton. They wanted their women wild. Now women were finally learning to be wanton and wild -- and what happened? The men wilted." - Erica Jong

See more famous quotes about Sexuality

Dansk (Danish)
n. - seksualitet

Nederlands (Dutch)
seksualiteit

Français (French)
n. - sexualité

Deutsch (German)
n. - Sexualität, Geschlechtlichkeit

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - σεξουαλικότητα, φυλετικότητα

Italiano (Italian)
sessualità

Português (Portuguese)
n. - sexualidade (f)

Русский (Russian)
сексуальность, чувственность, различие полов, половая жизнь

Español (Spanish)
n. - sexualidad

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - sexualitet

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
性特征, 性方面的事情, 性欲

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 性特徵, 性方面的事情, 性欲

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 성별 , 성의 강조, (특히 지나친) 성행위

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 男女の別, 性行為

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) ألنشاط ألجنسي, ألجنسانيه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮מיניות‬

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