ABSTRACT

The traditional preoccupation with homosexuality as a separate and unusual entity hindered investigation into the structural forms which make homosexuality possible and likely. The dominant theoretical legacy in sexuality is a biological model which equates heterosexuality with reproduction and subsumes reproduction within the scope of kin and family. The naturalistic and unproblematic core of this analytic paradigm pushes other forms of sexuality into residual categories of the deviant and pathological. Yet the very intransigence of human sexuality in the face of the social coding processes which would confine it to heterosexuality and the family offers an unrealized potential for reflecting upon sexuality itself. The social geography of homosexuality should reveal clues to the problem of why sexual desire arises at certain structural points and how it is ordered and made meaningful.