The Sociology Book

58

published in the 1930s, but were

more openly considered by a post-

war generation that was addressing

previously taboo subjects—such

as promiscuity and extramarital

sex—as social phenomena rather

than deviant behavior.

Challenging convention

At the forefront of this examination

of sexual conventions in Western

society was Michel Foucault, who

tackled the subject head-on in

1976 in The History of Sexuality.

Running through this text was

his central theory of the way that

masculine) paved the way for a

reappraisal of the role of gender

in society. It also kick-started

the women’s liberation movement

of the following decades.

Attitudes toward sex in

Western society were also

being reshaped by the work of

anthropologists, such as Margaret

Mead. Her studies of tribes in the

South Pacific and Southeast Asia

showed that many behavioral

differences between males and

females were culturally, rather than

biologically, determined. These

findings were shocking when

I

t was not until after World
War II that gender and
sexuality were recognized
as issues for sociological study. The
so-called “second-wave” feminism
of the 1960s to 1980s snowballed
from the insight of the French
feminist Simone de Beauvoir in
The Second Sex (1949) that “one
is not born a woman: one becomes
one.” Her idea that there is a
difference between sex (what
determines whether one is
biologically female or male) and
gender (the social forces that
act upon one to be feminine or

JUDITH BUTLER

Gender is what you do, rather than

a universal notion of who you are.

Gender is a kind of imitation

for which there is no original.

People perform

in ways that are

expected of them

by their culture.

Traditional

expectations

of gender are based

on how most people

behave in their

culture.

IN CONTEXT

FOCUS

Gender performativity

KEY DATES

1905 Austrian psychoanalyst

Sigmund Freud describes the

formation of infantile sexuality

in Three Essays on the Theory

of Sexuality.

1951 French psychoanalyst

Jacques Lacan begins his

weekly seminars in Paris,

further developing Freud’s

idea of “sexual drives”

and sexuality.

mid-1970s Michel Foucault

talks about regulatory regimes

in Discipline and Punish, and

about sex, power, and the

social construction of sexuality

in The History of Sexuality.

1996 Steven Seidman

examines the sociological

implications of the emergence

of queer theory in Queer

Theory/Sociology.