Gay Brains, Gay Genes and Feminist Science Theory

Abstract

Foucault’s argument in The History of Sexuality (1978) that until Westphal’s (1870) article on ‘contrary sexual sensations’, ‘The sodomite had been a temporary aberration: the homosexual was now a species’ has been hailed by many as the defining social constructionist account of sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular. While most contemporary sociologists would flinch at the fixity of the metaphor of ‘species’, for many discussing sexualities in a social context Michel Foucault hovers above as a gay intellectual father; others will be also conscious of Mary McIntosh (1968) as an intellectual mother who made rather earlier social constructionist claims. It was eight years before the French version of The History that McIntosh wrote her groundbreaking analysis of ‘The Homosexual Role’, in which she directed attention to the historical emergence of the (usually male) homosexual whose social role defines acceptable and unacceptable sexual behaviours.