ABSTRACT
In the twentieth century, social scientists began to explore sexuality and its attendant issues of desire, pleasure, identity, norms of sexual behaviors, and intimate arrangements as fundamentally social phenomenon. In this volume, we refer to this as the new sexuality studies to mark the break with past approaches to studying sexuality that assumed it was primarily biological, arising from internal drives and reproductive imperatives. In this chapter, Seidman describes how lesbian and gay activists and feminists contributed to understanding sexuality in more social, less stigmatizing, and more sex-positive ways. In turn, social scientists posed new questions and pursued new paths of inquiry based on this profoundly sociological view of sexuality.
