Your Mum’s an Oxymoron: Sexuality and Reproductivity

Abstract

The socio-cultural construction of gender and of the erotic within the hegemonic bloc depends upon and is interwoven with discourses of reproductive heterosexuality. This is perhaps inevitable, since each one of us owes our existence to an event at once insignificant and momentous - the successful merging of two gametes, sperm and ovum. Since it is the testes which produce sperm and the ovaries which produce ova, it is unsurprising that the reproductive potential of certain behaviours dominates the socio-cultural construction of sexualities, nor that the erotic tends to be perceived as an innately (‘naturally’) gendered arena of human social behaviour. Whether the reproductive imperative is understood to be primarily biological, primarily socio-cultural or produced by some interaction between the two, the implications are that the construction and policing of sexualities will, themselves, be gendered and, importantly, that the policing of gender norms will be sexualised.

The womb is an animal which longs to generate children. When it remains barren for too long after puberty, it is distressed and sorely disturbed, and straying about in the body and cutting off the passages of the breath, it impedes respiration and brings the sufferer into extreme anguish and provokes all manner of disease besides.

Plato Timaeus (cited in Ussher 1997, p. 331)

If someone had said to me, you are going to be falling in love with this woman that you know and you have known since you were at toddlers together, I would never have believed it in a million years, because you don’t expect to find a lesbian in a toddler group.

(May 39)