Читать книгу Gender and Sexuality - Stevi Jackson - Страница 12

The aim of this first part of the book is to introduce sociological approaches to sexuality and gender and to place them in historical context. Sexuality and gender are commonly thought of as natural and eternal qualities of human individuals – what we call naturalist or essentialist thinking. In Chapter 1, we discuss the main features of ‘essentialism’ and we show how these ideas became the focus of sociological critique. In Chapter 2, we move on to discussing how feminists and lesbian and gay theorists have contested essentialist thinking and developed analyses of gender as a social division and of sexuality as central to this division. We conclude with a brief overview of some challenges to concepts and theories of gender and sexuality raised by issues of race and nation, masculinity and the question of how we think about bodies.