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Our aim in this text is to demonstrate that gender and sexuality can be understood through the following key issues and concepts in sociology:

 social change;

 social conflict, social cohesion and social order;

 social hierarchies, divisions and inequalities;

 social identities;

 modernity/late modernity/postmodernity.

We discuss these key issues and concepts throughout the text, but we organize the discussion into parts that cover the central sociological concepts of structure, culture, self and identity. Let us stick with our introductory example to expand and explain. In the western world, the contemporary movements for women’s rights and those of sexual minorities have developed from a period of significant social change since the post-war, mid- twentieth- century decades, affecting women’s access to educational and financial resources, changes in cultural values, religious beliefs and decline in the deference to tradition. This period saw the rise of women’s and gay liberation movements that demanded new political and social rights. These demands challenged tradition, resulting in social conflict. Social conflict thus often arises from social change. This is one way of explaining the common resistance across many cultures to the progress of lesbian and gay rights. If the social position of men and women is thought to be determined by nature – as religious and moral traditionalists believe – then lesbians and gays would inevitably be seen as a challenge to this ‘natural’ order.

Groups that are identified with traditional views on the role of women and on sexual morality often argue that social change has progressed too quickly, leaving a lack of social cohesion and social order in its wake. However, social conflict is not just the result of progress versus tradition. After all, in the case of marriage, we are talking about a relationship that has historically been seen as the foundation of family, kinship and, ultimately, society. In a period when there are widespread concerns about the decline of marriage and the stability it brings, why would traditionalists deny the extension of the right to marry to a small minority of the population? The answer lies in understanding the social significance of that minority, and its relationship to the majority. In this case of same- sex marriage, lesbians and gays represent a challenge to dominant ideas of masculinity and femininity (what we term gender) and the social, legal and cultural privilege given to traditional heterosexuality.

Underpinning the significance of gender and sexuality is the traditional ‘naturalist’ understanding of masculinity and femininity, usually based on ideas about biological reproduction and natural differences deemed to arise from it. Thus women are seen as ‘naturally’ suited to child- rearing and domesticity, historically justifying, for example, their lesser access to education and paid employment. In such naturalist explanations, lesbians, gays, transgendered people, bisexuals, are all seen to be going against the designs of nature – our genital reproductive function – and are thus subject to moral and social disapproval and often legal sanctions. If you believe that men and women are naturally designed to ‘fit’ together sexually, and that the ultimate purpose of sex is to reproduce, then lesbians and gays would inevitably be seen as perverted and/or immoral – as a result of their ‘unnatural’ desires. Such attitudes occur in western and many other cultures and are often expressed by religious groups and by political groups in favour of ‘traditional values’.

In this traditional form of thinking – common to many cultures and religions – there is a hierarchy of gender, with men regarded as naturally superior to women, particularly in the sexual realm, and homosexuals at the bottom of the hierarchy since their existence is seen as a fundamental perversion of the gender order. Thus divisions and inequalities between men and women, and heterosexuals and homosexuals, are justified as natural and inevitable. The sociological literature describes such recourse to naturalism as ‘essentialist’ or ‘nativist’ thinking, and one major achievement of sociological work on gender and sexuality has been to illuminate how essentialist thinking pervades many aspects of society, often through religion, but also in laws and policies and throughout institutions such as education, medicine and science and, most frequently, in popular culture and commonsense thinking.

The pervasiveness of essentialism often leads us to assume that social categories such as men and women, heterosexuals and homosexuals, are simply a literal reflection of natural ‘types’. However, in opposition to essentialism, sociological work on gender and sexuality has shown the social origins of the categories into which individuals are placed, both through social classification over which they may have no direct control (your ‘sex’ has to be identified on most offi - cial forms, starting with birth certificates) and through their own identification (‘I am a woman’; ‘I am gay’). Sociological research and analysis has illuminated the development of these classification processes and their influence on the construction of our individual identities. In such academic work, biological ‘sex’ has been replaced with an emphasis on socially constructed gender and sexuality: how the categories of male and female become socially meaningful; how they are organized hierarchically; what consequences this has for life chances, sexual behaviour and identity; and which social groups are served by the social ordering of gender relations. Similarly, non- heterosexual identities are not seen simply as ‘natural’ types: homosexuality is meaningful or socially significant precisely because it forms the basis of an identity which is outside the conventional gender order and, as a result, is placed at the bottom of the gender/ sexual hierarchy. Any change in its status, as over the last thirty or so years, inevitably challenges traditional gender arrangements. Hence the current controversy over same- sex marriage can also be understood as a conflict over the social meaning and status of homosexuality in relation to heterosexuality. From a sociological perspective, then, gender and sexuality are intimately intertwined: the social construction and significance of one can rarely be understood without considering the other.

Gender and sexuality have relevance for all aspects of social life and thus sociological analysis: politics and power, cultural beliefs and values, social action, self and identity, and social structures. For example, the right of lesbians and gays to marry is seen not as a personal issue, or one simply of individual political rights, but rather as one for the scrutiny of the state. Claims for such rights are indicative of wider social changes that potentially threaten or undermine previously taken- for- granted essentialist beliefs and values and social structural arrangements associated with the traditional heterosexual gender order. Therefore, issues around sexuality and gender cannot be understood as merely personal and private since they raise key sociological questions about the connection between structure, culture, the self and identity – and the operation of power across all these aspects of social life.