Sex and sexuality are two topics that have been associated with anthropology since the beginnings of the discipline. This relationship is old, complex, and continually evolving. While anthropology was among the first of the social sciences to take sexuality seriously as a field of intellectual inquiry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anthropologists fell out of esteem in the field in the decades following World War II when discourses put forward by academics who favoured biological determinism gained favour. It was only with the coming of gay and lesbian anthropology and feminist scholarship, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that the study of sexuality was once again solidly placed within anthropology’s scholarly scope. At the same time, many of the earlier achievements in the study of sex and sexuality were re-examined with renewed interest. Most recently, there has been a resurgence in the study of sexuality by anthropologists, many of whom have deconstructed long-held assumptions regarding human sexuality.
Academic inquiry regarding issues of sex and sexuality flourished during the post-Enlightenment period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and corresponded with the origins of modern anthropology. A large proportion of this ‘armchair’ literature was drawn from the colonial experiment and focused on the African continent and indigenous peoples of North America. These accounts were provided mainly by explorers, scientists, and missionaries, and served to document, among other things, their encounters with unfamiliar sexual practices. This body of literature described in great detail ‘primitive’ peoples and their cultural as well as sexual traditions, but overall they showed a generalized disdain for such practices. These writings, and their subsequent utilization by some anthropologists contributed and lent support to theories that propagated the idea that such sexual practices were based on deep-seated, biologically ingrained human drives that ‘primitive’ peoples could not deny. This contempt for sexual expression within anthropology coincided closely with the social purity movements common during the Victorian era. These attempts at showing a biological basis for behaviour marked the beginnings of the medicalization of such sexualities (Foucault 1980 [1976]) and the concomitant construction of ‘healthy sexualities’ by medical doctors and sexologists. While this medicalization did, on the one hand, frame ‘primitive’ sexual practices as ‘natural’, they at the same time upheld the status of ‘primitives’ as the Other.
During the great depression and the two decades following World War II there was little written by anthropologists concerning sex per se. Instead, much of what was written regarding sex and sexuality was conceptualized within the larger social frameworks that had gained predominance during this conservative time. Volumes dealing with sexuality within the context of marriage, kinship structures, and family life predominated. This was followed by a renewed interest in framing sexual matters in terms of symbolism, but this was not without controversy. For example, Levi-Strauss (1969 [1949]) re-conceptualized the women whom he was studying as symbolic objects whose main purpose was as items of exchange among men. This erasure of women was later heavily criticized by feminist anthropologists.
The 1970s were wrought with social upheaval and gave birth to civil, women’s, and gay and lesbian rights movements in the United States. These social movements coincided with the birth of feminist studies as well as a more complete shift of focus in anthropological thinking from that of science to that of culture. Feminist anthropology arose out of an internal critique within the larger field of anthropology in that until recently, anthropology in all of its forms, whether it be theory or methodology such as ethnography, had been, for the most part, centred on White males in the West. This Euro-and andro-centric model ignored a significant portion of the population and presumed to speak for entire cultures. Feminist anthropologists began to seriously struggle with these problems and attempt to provide alternative lines of theoretical questioning as well as an accompanying methodology. During this period, feminist theorists set out to re-think the supposedly ‘natural’ divisions between men and women that were based on biology. They began using the term ‘gender’ to denote these divisions as socially constructed and to differentiate it from sex. This move went against biological determinism and challenged the hegemonic idea that biological natures — maleness and femaleness — were fixed and unchanging. Feminist anthropologists were by and large successful in challenging these notions, making it difficult if not impossible to examine ideas of sex and sexuality within the field of anthropology without concomitantly looking at ideas of gender. These anthropologies of women and gender have greatly enhanced all aspects of the anthropology of sex and sexuality, specifically through the creation of new and innovative theoretical lenses that allow for a more nuanced study of not only women, but of sexuality in general (Rosaldo 1980). Analytical frameworks utilizing gender were not without problems, however. By shifting the focus from sexuality to gender, other sites of cultural identity, namely race, class, and ethnicity, were further displaced, causing a subsequent refinement of theoretical intervention (Anzaldua and Moraga 1981).
Anthropologists have continued exploring the complicated intersections of race, class, and ethnicity by linking them up with non-normative sexual practices, especially in a non-Western context. A realization that contemporary Western theories of ‘sex’ and ‘sexuality’ did not allow for a full understanding of such practices, led to ‘queer’ theory, which collapsed boundaries between binaries while at the same time expanding notions of inclusion and difference.
