CONSTRUCTION OF SEXUAL IDENTITY

Theoretical and Historical Construction of Sexual Identity: An Illustrate With Reference To the Role of Race in the Construction of Sexual Identity and Sexual Roles



Theoretical and Historical Construction of Sexual Identity: An Illustrate With Reference To the Role of Race in the Construction of Sexual Identity and Sexual Roles

Introduction

Sexuality, along with race and gender, is an aspect of identity that historians paid relatively little attention to before 1975. Since then, however, it has become a very important topic for historical investigation, albeit one around which considerable theoretical debate swirls. Perhaps more than any other area of historical scholarship, the history of sexuality necessarily involves not only historians but anthropologists, literary critics, classicists, and philosophers. It is impossible to describe sexuality as a topic for historical inquiry in the United States without attending more than usual to historiographical debates, and to larger theoretical questions that encompass multiple disciplines. Regardless of whether one agrees that sexuality itself has a history, the history of sexuality as a topic for inquiry and debate in the late twentieth century is undoubtedly a major event in the intellectual and cultural history of the period. Recent research has demonstrated considerable variation in sexual practices and identities among different racial, ethnic, regional, and class groups even as it has demonstrated the centrality of sexuality to definitions of American national identity. This paper discusses theoretical and historical construction of sexual identity and presents an illustrate with reference to the role of race in the construction of sexual identity and sexual roles in a concise and comprehensive way.

Theoretical and Historical Construction of Sexual Identity: An Illustrate With Reference To the Role of Race in the Construction of Sexual Identity and Sexual Roles

European conquerors and colonists saw sexual practice as distinguishing them from indigenous Americans starting with Columbus's first landing. About 1516, Vasco Nunez de Balboa, an early Spanish explorer of Central America, discovered men dressed as women and fed forty of them to his dogs. In North America and the United States, sexuality has consistently served since the beginning of European colonization as a basis for differentiating among racial and ethnic groups. This is so in the empirical sense that observers noted significant differences among the sexual practices and identity categories available to indigenous Americans, Africans and their descendents, and Europeans and their descendents in America. It is also the case in the sense that Europeans and their descendents have consistently relied on attributions of sexual immorality as justifications for discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities. Thus, sexuality has been a key to American national identity, and a major site for establishing and negotiating differences of power along lines of gender, race, and class, since 1607. The accounts of European observers throughout the Americas from the sixteenth century forward make clear that they could not separate their observations of indigenous sexuality from their European worldview, in which Christian prescriptions for proper gender roles and prohibitions on sodomy played a prominent ...