ABSTRACT
In the 1990s sexuality emerged as a defining aspect of Women’s Studies, although there were clear calls from the feminist movement for exploring the subject before that. Since then, sexuality has remained at the forefront of issues that we study and debate, expanding to encompass the broad category of embodiment. Sexuality can mean behaviors and desires; for many it can also refer to an individual’s announced identity as straight, gay, or bi. Women’s Studies classrooms engage in debates over “identity politics,” with sexual identity featuring prominently among the other identities under consideration. Whereas once sexual identity and sexual behaviors motivated political activism to gain equal rights and to protect each individual’s sexuality from discrimination, today sexual identity can generate activism stressing pride and the cultural assertion of that identity. Embracing the term “queer”—once a scornful and negative word-is one example of the far more positive and more complex understanding of sexual identity including the right to have no sexual identity whatsoever. Since Adrienne Rich’s coinage of the term “compulsory hetero-
sexuality” appeared in 1980, courses have developed with sexuality as their exclusive theme, as in “sexuality studies.” Rich’s characterization of heterosexuality as compulsory and forced challenged the
field to rethink all sexual practices and norms. Later, queer theory also added to the richness of sexuality studies and can even be said to surpass normative investigations of sexuality. Queer Studies has come to constitute the subject for entire courses rather than a supplement to investigation of sexuality more generally. Queer theory undoes some of the older rights-based activism and some of the earlier insights of sexuality theory. It provides a fresh, more fluid, and some say more generous vision for discussions because it tends to deny the existence of a “normal” sexuality and normal embodiment of any kind against which everything else stands as abnormal. It also throws Women’s Studies into question in very fruitful ways-even leading to the idea that we are in a “postfeminist” era (a concept that we will consider at the end of this work). Sexuality joins a focus on the body more generally-whether it
is a reproductive body, a heterosexual body, a trans body, or a nonnormate-often called “disabled”—body. In speaking of the body, the tendency is toward simplicity and matter-of-factness. People will often see the body as determining one’s gender, sexuality, and the pattern of one’s life. Others, in contrast, will see the body as a “construct,” lacking a determining materiality or physicality. That is, our bodies in all their aspects do not determine us; rather, we act out bodily rules and follow representations in our dress, demeanor, work life, and other behaviors. The study of embodiment in Women’s Studies is thus full of complexity, even though people may think of it as exceedingly simple and self-evident. Disability Studies offers still another, though far less glamorized,
way to approach investigation of the body, as it calls into question the implicit domination of the “normative” body studied earlier in Women’s Studies scholarship. Our lived world is built to favor certain body types and every social practice and value privileges the fully able-bodied. The disabled are regularly aborted or if not they often live impoverished and discriminated against in a variety of ways. Thus, sexuality and the body pose issues central to political interests and scholarly ones. Although students are still concerned with reproductive rights, with which much of the work on sexuality began, we now have a wide range of new terms and new subject matter to cover-all of them encompassed under the rubric of sexuality and embodiment.
