Social Constructionism of Sexuality According to Jeffrey Weeks
Social Constructionism of Sexuality According to Jeffrey Weeks (Please Click Link For Weeks’s “The Sexual Citizen”.)
Social Constructionism of Sexuality According to Jeffrey Weeks
I created the diagram above to represent what I thought sociologist Jeffrey Weeks meant when he described the manifestations of social constructionism of sexuality in our society. Weeks succeeds in working according to Foucault by presenting sexuality in a modern discourse. He provides excellent context to demonstrate our current rehashed deployment of human sex. For example, he identifies that the “regulation of adolescent courtship” as a mainstay in modern as well as pre-Industrial eras because “it is difficult to break with the consensus of one’s village or one’s peer group in school” (Weeks, 8). Meaning, I could’ve lived three hundred years ago and still suffered the pain of being in high school as an angsty teen, much in the same way that Lindsay Lohan moped around in the opening scenes of Mean Girls.
Nevertheless, after reading Foucault and Weeks, I’m reminded that I shouldn’t worry so much about who’s popular. If I’m so inclined, I can try and figure out why they’re popular right here and right now. (Isn’t what what we all do, anyway?) That’s what led me to this diagram. Weeks identifies that cultures of resistance (hipsters, beatniks, OWS) as well as sexuality as a discourse are constantly redefined. Weeks identifies that familial relations, for one “are not natural links of blood but are social relations between groups” (Weeks, 7). How we organize our families are socially created, meaning every other facet of the creation of a culture of a resistance subsequently affects kinship, while simultaneously being informed by it. Although he disobeys Foucault’s interest in moving “less toward a ‘theory’ of power than toward and ‘analytics’ of power”, Weeks properly equivocates Foucault by emphasizing that context informs the ever-changing structure of power relations in our society (Foucault, 82).
Power relations are indeed interrelated. Who I choose as my family depends on my culture, which may be partly a culture of resistance. At the same time, political interruptions–say a prohibition of single-homosexual parent adoptions–can limit who I can include in my family and may motivate me to actively participate in a culture of resistance because I am gay. I could continue this web further, but I just want to emphasize power relations are grounded in application, example and empirical evidence. These spheres of power manifest themselves so pervasively, and as Weeks put it, unmasked that we cannot possibly be conscious of every sphere at play in our field. They never remain constant.
Here’s another reason why Weeks worked for my reading and understanding of Foucault. Weeks briefly touched on his concept of “sexual minorities” as a relatively modern deployment of sexuality (Weeks, 3). I appreciate this reference to what I can call the gay or LGBT community because it accounts for the fact that what is a “sexual minority” is constantly redefined. For example, a sexually precocious child prone to onanism can be included as a sexual minority, if the power relations of kinship, economic and social organization, societal regulation, political interventions and finally cultures of resistance, claim it to be one. He elaborated on the sexual minority later in his 1998 work “The Sexual Citizen”. There, he sarcastically acknowledges that sexuality is an inevitable discourse that “we are now conscious of” (Weeks, 1998). Of course, we are attracted to the novelty of reinvented discourses of sexuality. However, Weeks takes his construct one step further by elaborating that in many contexts and histories, sexual minorities undergo “the moment of citizenship: the equal claim to protection of the law, to equal rights in employment…even marriage for same-sex couples” (Weeks, 1998). This, I feel, is important to understanding Weeks stance on cultures of resistance because each culture contorts morality to fuel its claims. However, in the identification that there exists a minority that demands to be enfranchised, Weeks succeeds in challenging the absolutes of every aspect of our lives without “falling into the trap of saying no values are possible” (Weeks, 9). Here, he demonstrates that I can identify through this understanding of power relations and sexuality that certain discourses are indeed repressed. From there, it is my choice whether I’d want to manipulate that power relation as I see fit through non-participation or social change or just simple realization.
February 17th, 2013 at 5:35 pm
Hi Kwame,
Thank you for including the Weeks essay on your insightful and well-rendered diagram. I see that within the sphere of power relations depicted there, one can be a star! I think that may link to the high school search for popularity. I would offer a caveat on thinking that 300 years ago, there was a form of adolescence as we know it. Weeks’ uses the term from our perspective to point out that post puberty people of the pre-industrial time had regulated lives. But the regulations were quite different from the Mean Girls variety of our time. The regulation back then included bundling boards and, as you will see in the William Bradford piece regarding Thomas Granger, public execution for bestiality. The concept of adolescence in terms of teenage years in relatively recent, emerging largely in the late 19th and early 20th century in conjunction with the nuclear family and restrictions on child labor. Interestingly, in our own era, the years of “adolescence” have been extended into the 20s.
There are many astute points in your post but I want to echo in particular the point you make about the search for values. In the Sexual Citizen essay, he point to Foucault on this as well, in regard to what Foucault termed an “aesthetics of existence” or “art of life” (Weeks, p. 45 or 12 of 19 online). I will comment on this further in a general post.