“Is Heterosexuality That Bad? Questioning Some Presuppositions and Asking for a Sociological Analyses of Sexuality”

“Is heterosexuality all negative? Why is heterosexuality so dangerous or bad? Are heterosexual women all submissive, victims and passive subjects? Should people be ashamed of being heterosexual? These are some of the questions that come through my mind as I was working on my PhD dissertation and attending conferences about sexuality. Giving credit and importance to the work of feminist, as pioneers in the analyses of gender relations and sexuality, as authors that called attention for problems related with power in gender relations, male dominance and women submission, commodification of sexual female bodies, sexual double standards or sexual violence, and that brought the personal into the political agenda, I still felt that something was missing in those discourses. Notwithstanding, simultaneously I was reading the work of some social scientist that problematized “my concerns”. I felt more reassured. I have to say then that this presentation is also personal. But from a personal unease I wanted to insist on the sociological problematization of sexuality and gender, following the analytical tools given by authors like Gagnon and Simon, Weeks, Thorne, Connell, Richardson, Jackson or Bozon, as well as some other sociological authors like Archer, Mouzelis or Lahire, and using a critical realism perspective. The idea here is not to deny all the problems with living in a hetero-normative world, dominated by ideals of masculine supremacy, but to ask for a sociological approach into gender and sexuality, where categories, identities, norms and values are not taken for granted, but subjected to scrutiny, taking into consideration the multileveled and interconnected social world where they are constructed and enacted, and where individuals should be thought of as social positioned, action as conditioned and categories critically analysed as relational and contextualized.