ABSTRACT
Intercourse is often taken to be a purely natural act. Yet social beliefs and practices not only shape the meanings that surround sexual intercourse, but even the definition of intercourse itself (for example, historically the preferred term was not intercourse but coitus, which had a somewhat different set of connotations). Sexuality is a related term that arose at about the same time that intercourse replaced coitus. The following essay briefly examines the history and politics of intercourse and sexuality, looking at ways in which the concepts help to implicitly establish and reinforce assumptions about pleasure, bodies, psychic development, and relationships that shape our lives. Intercourse reveals itself to have a politics and a history, one that has often worked to strengthen socially dominant modes of interaction and notions of social value. Yet, to the extent that intercourse helps to fix a normative social order, its “perversion” might also help to subvert that order, generating consequences that extend beyond the mere act of “sex.” Realizing these possibilities requires that we begin to denaturalize intercourse, revealing the complex construction that lies behind its apparent obviousness.
