ABSTRACT
While essentialist ideas have continued to dominate much thinking about sexual life, they constitute a perspective that came under increasing attack during the latter part of the twentieth century. By the mid-to late 1960s, it was becoming apparent to many that the ‘sexological paradigm’ had started to disintegrate. Whether in structuralist thought, Marxist theory, or certain streams of psychoanalysis, the 1970s and 1980s were characterized by a new willingness to call into question the ‘naturalness’ of all human experience. Since much of the power of sex seemed linked to biological being and the experience of the body, sexuality was perhaps more resistant to such interrogation than many other areas of human life, but even here, important doubts began to be raised from a number of different theoretical vantage points. The primary challenge came from social theorists and researchers working on issues related to gender and sexuality and from activists, particularly from the feminist and emerging gay and lesbian movements, who questioned key elements of the sexological paradigm that they viewed as antithetical to their most important interests (Gagnon and Parker 1995).
