Performative Nature of Gendered Sexualities

The above studies discussed support the idea that gender is a performance and attempt to explain how our sexual identity is shaped by popular discourse on gendered behaviours. These studies support that sexuality is relational to others rather than a fixed identity. Furthermore, through new sexual experiences with others, men and women reshape their acceptance of discourse on sexuality in their personal lives and often resist gender norms. We can see that masculine sexuality (in both men and women) is adapted as a means of social power and is an important element to the political discourses of sexuality.

In my discussion I have focused purely on research done on experiences of heterosexual men and women. It is important to note this two-sex model has been a major element to discourses of sexuality; the sexual identifications of transgender, transsexual and homosexual individuals display that the possibility of sex and gender goes beyond the binary of male/masculine and female/feminine sexuality. Judith Butler (1990) challenges the assumption of “natural sex” being the basis on which gender is constructed, as “gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a “pre-given sex”; gender must also designate the very apparatus of production of whereby the sexes themselves are established” (p.7). Further more, sociologists question popular discourse resistance to male-to-male sexuality, childhood sexuality or the possibility of the male lesbian (through transgender) which are considered taboo in western cultures (Fredman & Potgeiter, 1996; Zita, 1996).

However gender and sexuality are combined, It has been illustrated that masculine and feminine sexualities are not universally experienced or naturally desired by the two “appropriated” sexes leaving room for post-modern interpretations. Zita (1994) says a way of detracting the influence of religious, political and social discourses of sexuality discourses on gender and sexuality is to resist categories of heterosexuality or homosexuality and identify through one’s own sexual experiences with another.