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Feminism – particularly radical feminism – was concerned with sexuality,

predominantly in terms of how dominant heterosexuality and male violence acted to control women. Work on homosexuality, lesbian and gay sexuality, and subsequently queer theory has developed to some extent separately from feminist scholarship, despite some parallels, as will be shown. Following Jackson (2006: 42), I define sexuality as referring to erotic aspects of social life and social being. Thus “sexuality is not, therefore, reducible to the heterosexual-homosexual binary – although this is an

important aspect of its social organization – but in the multitude of desires and practices that exist across that divide”.

It was not until the 1950s and 60s that sociologists turned their attention to sexuality, as a ‘speciality area’, and in the 1970s and 1980s interest in the study of homosexuality grew, influenced by the lesbian and gay political movements of the time (Seidman, 1996). During this time, social constructionist theories began to suggest that

“homosexuality” was not a uniform, identical phenomenon, but that its meaning varied historically. Mary McIntosh ([1968] 1996) was one of the first to challenge the

naturalness of homosexuality in an article in 1968 that presented homosexuality as a social role. She drew on functionalist sociology to argue that societies create a homosexual role to distinguish acceptable from unacceptable forms of behaviour: defining homosexuality as impure or polluted allows heterosexuality to be viewed as pure and desirable. McIntosh’s work was developed by Jeffrey Weeks (1990: x) who showed how a homosexual identity was created in the nineteenth century:

“The idea of ‘the homosexual’ as a distinct sort of being has not always existed. It is an invention of the modern world. It is historically and socially constructed.” Weeks notes that at the same time he as was developing this argument, Foucault wrote his highly influential History of Sexuality (1980) which argued similarly that the homosexual as a distinctive type of social identity is unique to modern Western societies, and Foucault’s ideas have remained central to much theorising on sexuality. Lesbian feminist writers, however, had a different emphasis, and were focusing on heterosexuality as a social institution. Adrienne Rich’s important work, Compulsory

Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence ([1980] 1996) argued that women are offered no

choice but heterosexuality. She outlined the different ways in which male power is used to control women’s sexuality, one of which she says is “the rendering invisible of the

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lesbian possibility” (ibid: 135). Rich also put forward an idea of a “lesbian continuum” to signify a range of “woman-identified experience” that was not solely expressed through sexual acts, and included many forms of intense primary relationships between women. This idea was highly significant in reconsidering the relationship between gender and sexuality and blurring the boundaries between lesbians and heterosexual women, and therefore suggesting greater common cause. Thus not only did the notion of a “lesbian continuum” disrupt binary notions of heterosexuality and homosexuality (prefiguring queer theory, as we see below), it also broadened the conceptualisation of lesbianism from simply a sexual preference to a broad social category (Richardson, 2006). Rich’s work remains important in the challenge that it issued to feminist researchers and theorists in particular to examine heterosexuality as an institution that controlled all women (and, we would now argue, men, albeit in different ways) and to question the extent to which it is really a choice or a preference for all women.

However, the notion of a lesbian continuum with its assumptions of a “common

womanliness” can be accused of “traces of essentialism” for implying that lesbianism is an innate propensity common to all women (Jackson, 2006: 46).

Reflecting the divides within feminism, in lesbian and gay politics too differences emerged over issues of race, gender and class, with challenges to the concept of a lesbian and gay identity, and arguments that it reflected a white, middle-class

experience (Seidman, 1996: 10). Steven Seidman notes that lesbian feminism was also challenged by both lesbians and feminists who felt that they were stigmatised as deviant or male-identified for not conforming to the notion of lesbianism espoused by feminists. He says:

“In the course of the feminist ‘sex wars’, a virtual parade of female and lesbian sexualities entered the public life of lesbian culture, e.g., butch-fems,

sadomasochists, sexualities of all kinds mocking the idea of a unified lesbian sexual identity.” (Seidman, 1996: 10-11)

These challenges to the assumption of a unified homosexual – or lesbian – identity contributed to the development of queer politics and queer theory in the 1980s, occurring at the same time as postmodernist ideas were influencing feminist thought (see above). Queer politics was a confrontational type of activism that grew up in response to the lesbian and gay identity politics of the time, challenging its supposed universality outlined above, initially in the United States, although later in the UK. Related to these political developments, queer theory emerged in prestigious US

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universities in the late 1980s to challenge the existing dominance of ‘lesbian and gay studies’ and ideas of lesbian and gay identity politics (Stein and Plummer, [1994] 1996). It was developed mainly in the humanities, although Seidman is among those who have sought to integrate its ideas into the social sciences. While queer theory has acquired multiple meanings, Seidman (1996: 11) notes that its challenge to the assumption of a unified homosexual identity is central.

“Queer theorists argue that identities are always multiple or at best composites with literally an infinite number of ways in which ‘identity- components’ (e.g. sexual orientation, race, class, nationality, gender, age, able-ness) can intersect or combine.” Four characteristics of queer theory are delineated by Stein and Plummer ([1994] 1996: 134): a conceptualisation of sexual power as “embodied in different levels of social life, expressed discursively and enforced through boundaries and binary divides”; the

problematisation of sexual and gender categories, and identities in general, as

highlighted above; a rejection of civil rights (or identity) politics in favour of “a politics of carnival, transgression, and parody”; and the interrogation of areas not normally seen as belonging to sexuality and a rereading of ostensibly heterosexual texts or those assumed not to be sexualised. I find value in aspects of queer theory, such as the

problematisation of sexual and gender categories and in particular the challenge to fixed or developmental notions of sexual identity formation (as seen in theories of coming out that result in stable gay identities in 2.5.2), just as some postmodern ideas provide useful challenges to feminist thinking. However, I am unconvinced that prioritising texts offers the most useful focus for analysis, as will be discussed below.

Seidman emphasises the significance of the shift in focus by queer theorists from “the oppression and liberation of the homosexual subject” to analysing institutional practices and discourses. Thus queer theory is no longer the study of a minority, but a study of knowledges and practices that organise society by “sexualising – heterosexualizing or homosexualizing – bodies, desires, acts, identities, social relations, knowledges, culture and social institutions” (1996: 13).

These ideas, however, are not unfamiliar to those engaged in the study of gender and sexuality of organisation, who, as will be shown later, were in the 1980s and 1990s identifying the ways in which sexuality – and particularly heterosexuality – construct and produce organisations and the individuals within them. As we have seen, Rich had also turned attention to the ways in which heterosexuality controlled women some years

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earlier. A recognition of the importance of heterosexuality for structuring social relations, identities and institutions is therefore not new or unique to queer theory (Richardson, 2006: 32). However, the difference lies in queer theory’s problematisation of heterosexuality, its challenge to it as a category and breaking down of oppositions between hetero- and homosexuality – in contrast to theories that instead try to explain the ways in which heterosexuality – as an institution, or through organisational processes – produces inequalities of gender and sexual orientation. It is possible to observe a parallel here with McCall’s (2005) distinction between anticategorical and intercategorical approaches to intersectionality (see 3.3). The risk, though, in the rejection of categorisation is the loss of attention to relations of domination and subordination that continue to circumscribe these categories (Erel et al., 2011).

A related problem with queer theory is its focus on ‘texts’ as the site of analysis and an interest in how mass culture is involved in shaping sexuality. But this can also be seen as one of its failings by those interested in the study of society. Stein and Plummer ([1994] 1996: 137-8) argue that one of the weaknesses of queer theorists is that:

“They rarely, if ever, move beyond the text. There is a dangerous tendency for the new queer theorists to ignore ‘real’ queer life as it is materially experienced across the world, while they play with the free-floating signifiers of texts.”

This is a significant shortcoming of queer theory, particularly when it produces claims that heterosexuality is “perpetually at risk, that is, that it ‘knows’ its own possibility of being undone” (Butler 1991, cited in Stein and Plummer, [1994] 1996: 135). The idea that heterosexuality is a highly unstable system, perpetually at risk is not borne out by its remarkable persistence as the dominant form of sexuality, and is at odds with the experience of people in workplaces in the UK where heterosexuality appears alive and well as the dominant norm (as my empirical evidence in Chapter 7 will demonstrate). Indeed queer theory’s lack of empirical investigation of lived experience connects to its avoidance of analysis of asymmetrical power and the privileges associated with those categories that have been deconstructed (Taylor et al., 2011).

Postmodernism and queer theory have also been criticised by feminist writers on the grounds that the gender hierarchy is replaced by heterosexuality as the primary

regulatory system. Jackson (1995: 18), for example, argues that it essential to consider heterosexuality and gender together in order to understand the material conditions produced by heterosexuality:

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“It is vitally important for feminism that we see heterosexuality as a gendered hierarchy and not just as a normative construction of cross-sex desire…

heterosexuality is founded not only on the linkage between gender and sexuality, but on the appropriation of women’s bodies and labour.”

Jackson’s approach thus responds to both the criticism of queer theory that it loses sight of gender, as well as the lack of attention to lesbian and gay sexuality in feminist

scholarship or mainstream sociology, described as “theoretical heterosexism” by Dunne (2000a) (see 2.9).