SEXUALITY

Sexuality as a “Fictional Unity”

Sexuality as a “Fictional Unity”

Introduction

A brief history of the concept in English shows how meanings of sexuality continue to evolve. The earliest usage of the term sex in the sixteenth century referred to the division of humanity into the male section and the female section; and the quality of being male or female. The subsequent meaning, however, and one current since the early eighteenth century, refers to physical relations between the sexes, (Joane, 2000, 107) "to have sex." What we know as masculinity and femininity, and what came to be labeled from the late nineteenth century as heterosexuality, with homosexuality as the aberrant "other," are thus inscribed into the meanings of sex from the start. Sexual, a word that can be traced back to the mid-seventeenth century, carries similar connotations—pertaining to sex, or the attributes of being male or female, is one given meaning. This paper discusses the statement “Sexuality is a ''fictional unity'', that once did not exist and at some time in the future may not exist again. It is an invention of the human mind”. (Weeks, 1986, p.15).

Sexuality: A ''Fictional Unity'

Sexuality as a term meaning "the quality of being sexual" emerged early in the nineteenth century, and it is this meaning that is carried forward and developed by the sexologists, sexual theorists, and researchers who emerged as a distinct category of specialists in the late nineteenth century, and became increasingly influential in the twentieth century. Luminaries included not only Freud, who is now best remembered, but also the Austrian pioneer, Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902), who can lay claim to being the founding father of sexology; the Briton, Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), and the German, Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935), who was also a pioneer of homosexual rights, among many others. (Joane, 2000, 107)

Sexologists sought to discover the "laws of nature," the true meaning of sexuality, by exploring its various guises and manifestations. They often disagreed with one another; they frequently contradicted themselves. But all concurred that sexuality was in some way a quality or essence that underlay a range of activities and psychic dispensations. Thus Krafft-Ebing became a pioneer in seeing sexuality as something that differentiated different categories of beings—so opening the way to theorizing sexual identities. (Joane, 2000, 107)

Dozens of individuals wrote to him with their case histories, and in the process of studying them Krafft-Ebing came to understand that there were many types of sexualities that could not easily be reduced to the traditional assumption of heterosexual, reproductive sex. Freud went further. His Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) began with a discussion of homosexuality, thus severing the expected connections between sexuality and heterosexual object choice, and continued with a discussion of the perversions, so breaking the expected link between pleasure and genital activity. In the psychoanalytic tradition, sexuality was seen as central to the workings of the unconscious. More broadly, sexuality was becoming a distinct continent of knowledge, with its own specialist explorers. When people spoke of "my sexuality," they increasingly ...