Table Of Content

SEXUALITY Sexuality is the ffth revised and updated edition of a classic text for understanding human sexuality. This new edition brings the arguments and evidence fully up to date and explores their implication for many topical controversies, around LGBTQ+ rights, the trans experience and gender fuidity, same-sex marriage, sexual autonomy and consent, and the meanings of sexual choice. Since it was frst published in the 1980s, Sexuality has been at the cutting edge of the study of the social and historical meanings of sexuality. Blending deep empirical knowledge with theoretical sophistication and an acute sensitivity to the politics of sexuality, the book ofers an informed framework for understanding the complexities of sexual life. A key insight of the book is that the ways we think and speak about sexuality make a major contribution to the ways we live it. Sexuality may be rooted in biological possibilities, but it is shaped and experienced through languages and meanings which are inevitably historical and social in nature. The book explores with clarity and precision the invention and re-invention of sexual meanings, the question of what constitutes a true sex and the biological and social roots of sexual diference, the challenges of diversity, the re-making of sexuality as a highly divisive political subject and the implications of the transformation of intimate life in the past few generations. These are seen in the context of profound changes that are re-fashioning the world, especially globalisation, cyber-sex, and the rise of new forms of agency, including among women and LGBTQ+ people, which have fed into new claims for sexual human rights. This new edition of Sexuality will be an indispensable guide for students in the social sciences with an interest in the ever-changing worlds of sexuality. Jefrey Weeks is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at London South Bank University, UK. He is a renowned historian and sociologist of human sexuality and a pioneering writer on LGBTQ+ identities and ways of life. He is the author of numerous books including Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths, and Modern Sexualities (Routledge, 1985), The World We Have Won: The Remaking of Erotic and Intimate Life (Routledge, 2007), The Languages of Sexuality (Routledge, 2011), and Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (Fourth Edition, Routledge, 2017). His work has been widely recognised internationally and translated into various languages. He is the recipient of the Gold Medal of the World Association for Sexual Health and was awarded an OBE in 2012 for his contribution to social science. KEY IDEAS Series Editor: Anthony Elliott Designed to complement the successful Key Sociologists, this series covers the main concepts, issues, debates, and controversies in sociology and the social sciences. The series aims to provide authoritative essays on central topics of social science, such as community, power, work, sexuality, inequality, benefts and ideology, class, family, etc. Books adopt a strong ‘individual’ line, as critical essays rather than literature surveys, ofering lively and original treatments of their subject mat- ter. The books will be useful to students and teachers of sociology, political science, economics, psychology, philosophy, and geography. PATRIARCHY PAVLA MILLER POPULISM: AN INTRODUCTION MANUEL ANSELMI COMMUNITY (3RD EDITION) GERARD DELANTY WELFARE CONDITIONALITY BETH WATTS AND SUZANNE FITZPATRICK THE STRANGER SHAUN BEST SECULARIZATION CHARLES TURNER UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME BRIAN MCDONOUGH AND JESSIE BUSTILLOS MORALES REFUGIA: RADICAL SOLUTIONS TO MASS DISPLACEMENT ROBIN COHEN AND NICHOLAS VAN HEAR POSTCOLONIAL EUROPE LARS JENSEN EXCEPTIONALISM LARS JENSEN AND KRISTÍN LOFTSDÓTTIR CONSUMPTION JOHN STOREY SEXUALITY (5TH EDITION) JEFFREY WEEKS For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/Key-Ideas/book-series/SE0058 SEXUALITY Fifth Edition Jeffrey Weeks Designed cover image: © Shutterstock Fifth edition published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Jeffrey Weeks The right of Jeffrey Weeks to be identifed as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Routledge 1986 Fourth edition published by Routledge 2016 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-10532-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-10534-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-21575-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003215752 Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC CONTENTS Preface to the ffth edition: writing Sexuality vii Acknowledgements xiv 1 Introduction: languages of sex 1 The signifcance of sexuality 1 Words and meanings 3 Sexualities in history and society 8 2 The invention of sexuality 13 A brief history of the history of sexuality 13 A subject in constant fux 16 The ‘social construction’ of sexuality 19 The organisation of sexuality 24 Why sexuality is important 34 Intersections 40 3 The meanings of sexual difference 52 A true sex? 52 The biological imperative 53 Evolutionary diversions 56 Biological modes of argument 60 Sexuality and social relations 65 Multiple realities and diverse social worlds 67 Performing identities 70 Sexuality and the unconscious 72 Affect and the structuring of emotions 76 Phobias and norms 78 vi CONTENTS 4 The challenge of diversity 83 The language of perversity 83 Categorising sexualities 89 The discourse of diversity 90 Deconstructing the categories 100 Making choices 112 5 Sexuality, intimacy and politics 119 Sexuality on the front line 119 Beyond tradition 123 Living with uncertainty: HIV/AIDS 131 Sexual and intimate citizenship 136 Globalisation and human sexual rights 144 6 Private pleasures and public policies 158 The limits of science 158 The ethical dilemma 161 Towards sexual democracy 164 The human gesture 168 Suggestions for further reading 173 Index 197 PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION: WRITING SEXUALITY It’s a great pleasure to welcome readers once again to a new edition of Sexuality. My aim is, as it has been since the frst edition in 1986, to ensure that the book continues to be at the cutting edge of the subject, providing an indispensable, accessible guide to the intricacies and complexities of the social world of sexuality. I have spent many years now writing, in various publications, about sexuality: its history, sociology, shifting meanings, its politics, endless controversies and the difering experiences and identities associated with it. The book has provided me with an opportunity to share my research and conceptualisations on the various themes outlined here in an accessible, digested but comprehensive way. The result has often been described as a classic, and I am fattered by, and grateful for, that honour. But a classic cannot be allowed to become a frozen memorial to things past. It has to be sustained by constant refreshing to ensure that it remains a signifcant contribution to scholarship and an up-to-date guide for teaching and research. That I hope is what you will fnd in this new edition. Like every other book, Sexuality cannot help but refect the con- cerns and preoccupations of the time, or times, in which it was written. This Preface to the new edition ofers me a useful opportunity to describe how I came to write Sexuality, what its own history through successive editions tells us about the dramatic changes that have shaped and reshaped the sexual world and how we conceptual- ise and understand it. This book, in fact, has very specifc conditions of existence that only in the perspective of time have become clear, not least to its author himself. As I argue throughout the book, the viii PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION: WRITING SEXUALITY ways in which sexuality is thought, discussed, narrated and written about help shape it. A book now in its fourth decade has therefore not only recorded remarkable changes in attitudes and behaviour but has also in its own way inevitably contributed to shaping them. By an extraordinary quirk of history, this book has lived its life between and in the course of two pandemics, an unusual and unprecedented concatenation of events that has become so much part of our lives globally that it has become taken for granted. Yet it surely deserves some comment. Sexuality was conceived and originally delivered in the midst of one unprecedented global health crisis, caused by HIV, which gave rise to the AIDS pandemic, and is now being updated in the depths of another, generated by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which has led to the Covid-19 pandemic. In the 1960s and 1970s, people would confdently look forward to the end of epidemics and the fnal mastery of human science and inge- nuity over Nature. I heard it said many times that the fear of sexually transmitted infections was a relic of the past now that a few doses of antibiotics could solve the problems. Accompanying this optimism was the hope that somehow we could look forward to a new world where sexuality could be liberated from an oppressive culture and become the healthy focus of a more tolerant society. Instead, we have seen the eruption of numerous health threats and two mega pandemics in the past half-century, which have inevitably darkened hopes and had an incalculable impact on sexual norms, values and behaviour. Only one of these, AIDS, is obviously intimately linked to human sexual behaviour, and I discuss some of the implications of this in some detail in the book. Covid-19 demonstrates however the diverse ways in which sexual life is inexorably shaped by apparently non-sexual forces. Both illuminate the main argument of the book that far from being a simple product of Nature, we can only understand the full meaning and power of sexuality if we grasp that it is a deeply social and historical phenomenon. As I emphasise in the main text of the book through our understanding of sexuality, we can begin to understand a society and culture. Simultaneously, through understanding a culture, we can begin to understand sexuality. The erotic has always been burdened by a torrent of writing and discourse, but a striking feature of the literature of sexuality over the past few decades, of which this book in its original form was a pioneering example, is its interrogation of the ways in which sexuality PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION: WRITING SEXUALITY ix is shaped, contoured, fashioned, constructed and re-invented both by global forces and by specifc events and contingencies. Few events are more dramatic, dynamic and forceful and yet contingent in their impact on human life than pandemics. Yet a curious feature of the early Covid-19 pandemic in Europe and America in 2020 was the regular habit of calling it the greatest health threat since the Spanish fu epidemic of 1918–1919 as if the AIDS pandemic had ceased to exist. Somehow the collective historic memory had seemingly forgotten the HIV/AIDS pandemic and which, despite tremen- dous medical advances since the 1980s, still afects millions of people worldwide. Globally there have been over 75 million cases, and 32 million people have died. By comparison, to date something over 6 million people have died of Covid-19. These are of course devastating fgures, more than commensurate with the human trag- edy they reveal, but the interesting fact from the point of view of this book is that the new pandemic has become a shared experience across the globe, while the other global disaster still carries a weight of obloquy and shame, a crisis it might be better to forget. As discussed later in this book, the problem from the frst warn- ings of an impending crisis in the USA in the summer of 1981 was that what became known as HIV or AIDS was seen as the disease of marginalised people, and especially gay men. In a climate of height- ened political, cultural and moral confict, and growing reaction to the advances made by LGBTQ+ people, those most afected by HIV were in efect blamed for it: ‘they brought it on themselves’. Covid-19 on the other hand was immediately seen as a universal threat, potentially afecting young and old, rich and poor, the respectable and the unrespectable, the moral and immoral, though in disproportionate ways. Potentially everyone was at risk. Whole societies went into lockdown. Only as the epidemic spread was it belatedly recognised that in fact it diferentially afected varying groups of people. In the case of HIV, it was the other way around. Originally classed as the ‘gay plague’, and then a threat only to the three Hs – Homosexuals, Haitians and Haemophiliacs – it was only when it became seen as a universal threat to the population, that is, the heterosexual population, that governments began to respond in a serious way. And in becoming a universal threat, there was soon a real possibility that the particular needs of marginalised groups would be ignored again.