Sex Acts: Practices of Femininity and Masculinity.

Sex Acts: Practices of Femininity and Masculinity. By Jennifer Harding. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998, 154 pages. Paperback, $22.95.

Harding asks, "Why another book on sexuality?" (p. 2). She provides two answers: first, to reflect critically on how and why sexuality is studied by scholars, and second, to consider issues in the contemporary sexuality literature that warrant further discussion. In this rather short book, Harding critically examines various aspects of contemporary discourse on sexuality. Due to its brevity (154 pages), and its focus on reviewing major ideas from various sexuality discourses, the book is appropriate for advanced undergraduates and graduate students.

The first three chapters set the theoretical/political scene for the remainder of the book. These are also the best chapters. Harding concentrates on power and the construction of subjectivity at the level of discourse. This is a straightforward review written in an approachable manner (especially when compared to the writing styles of Foucault [1979, 1986] and Butler [1990]). Harding's theoretical analysis, based on Foucault's conceptualization of power and discourse, explores how sexuality straddles public and private domains and the implications of this dual positioning. In particular, Foucault's notions that discourses are practices that are lived, acted out, and spoken by individuals which produce power/knowledge, and that power/knowledge can be positive, productive, and creative are further amplified. Two related key arguments, also based on Foucault's writings (1979, 1986), include (a) discourses transmit, and are indistinguishable from, knowledge and power relations, and (b) subjects of discourse are constructed within power relations which also constitute the frameworks in which individuals act. Harding also examines Butler's analysis of cultural politics and the processes of representation, including the idea that identities must be made and remade in history and discourse. Of key importance to Harding is that all discourses (dominant and alternative) bring into being and characterize the subjects for whom and to whom they speak, and delimit the parameters in which they may act.

In Chapter Two, Harding reviews debates on essentialism and constructionism in sex research, contrasting their assumptions about how the sexual is constituted. She examines the essentialist view that sexuality is a natural phenomenon comprised of fixed and inherent drives which determine sexual identities, and notes that early sexologists viewed male and female sexuality as fundamentally opposite. Harding emphasizes how sexologists have attempted to bring sexuality under the control of science. Science's focus on impartiality and objectivity was seen to make the study of sex respectable.

Harding points out that the impartiality and objectivity claims have been challenged by assertions that these definitions are themselves political. Moreover, many of the categories used in sexology to describe sexual life have been shown not to be universal but highly localized.

Harding further explores the constructionist approach to sexuality, emphasizing that sex/sexuality has no inherent essence but must be understood as culturally and historically constituted within power relations. Culture is seen as responding to, rather than shaping, the sexual impulse.

In Chapter Three, Harding examines the connection between sexuality and the nineteenth century distinction between the private and the public spheres and the political effects of transgressing the border dividing them. Building on Foucault's (1979, 1986) concept of bio-power, Harding examines contemporary public health discourse on risk and sexual health. Sexual discourses in the late nineteenth century linked the private and the public spheres via public health. In particular, public health depended on regulating individual behavior and moral reform (e.g., prostitution). Moreover, scientific discourse further distinguished between male and female bodies, whereas prior to the eighteenth century male and female bodies were viewed as structurally similar. These gendered explanations of sex/sexuality legitimized the doctrine of two spheres--men as workers in the public, wage-earning sphere, and women as wives and mothers in the private sphere of family and morality.

Harding asserts that the private and the public are interdependent; neither has meaning without the other. Moreover, many meanings of sexuality are constituted in relation to changing definitions of public and private, and a shifting border between them. Transgressions of the border help to constitute categories of sexual experience and perform a normative function, because representations of private sex made public are accompanied by an indication of whether they should be tolerated.

Harding also discusses the various ways in which power, since the Enlightenment, has been coupled with vision. New technologies shape how and when public and private spaces are constituted as separate entities. The use of visual technology (i.e., early photography to video cameras) brings aspects of individual bodies and experiences into view and makes them subject to knowledge and control. Hence, private experiences become public property. According to Harding, vision is political; moreover, visual metaphors are an important part of scientific knowledge. Scientific knowledge develops through data based on sensory perception. Thus, vision is associated with objectification.

But Harding argues that images lack objective meanings. Constructing meanings for images is an interactive process, which draws on previous experience and the prominent discourses.

To amplify this she points to the 1970s social movements which were based, in part, on visibility and identity politics. These social movements sought to erode the separation of the public and private spheres by drawing attention to the exclusion from politics of women, African-Americans, gays, and disabled individuals. According to Harding, "Making `visible' past and current oppressions and the relations of power which produced them and kept them hidden, helped to forge new identities which brought individuals into public view and made connections between personal experience and public performances" (p. 33). She also notes, however, that visibility confers power but also renders those newly visible to techniques of control.

In Chapter Four, Harding discusses the role of the media in defining the sexual and constituting the private and the public as distinctive spaces. As examples, Harding looks at how acts of coming out are manufactured by the mass media, and considers the implications of this for gays and lesbians. For example, gay and lesbian sexualities are increasingly portrayed as glamorous in the media. Given that visibility is power, what happens when formally invisible groups gain visibility? According to Harding, they are represented in ways that reflect the interest of the elite (white, middle-aged, male, upper-class, and heterosexual), who define the public agenda. Consequently, the media stories of gays are told from the perspective of a straight audience struggling to understand.

Harding acknowledges that some changes in media portrayals of gays and lesbians in the 1990s are more positive and affirmative than past portrayals. But the assumptions made about what identity is and how representation works are still problematic according to Harding. The identities described are essentialized, because they are portrayed as pre-existing facts about individuals. Additionally, it is assumed that gays/lesbians speak with a common voice. Such portrayals ignore other categories of experience (e.g., class, gender, race, and age) which intersect with sexual identities.

An alternative view holds that representation is a constructive act and constitutive of the phenomena which it appears to describe. Based on Hall (1997), Harding discusses the idea that the media are not vehicles for meanings and identities which already exist, but a process through which they are produced. To amplify this point, Harding highlights Butler's (1990) theory of gender performance, which is based on the idea that gender is an act rather than an attribute--a doing rather than a being.

In contemporary society, sexuality is seen as confirmation of a gendered identity via popular discourses. Sexuality is either heterosexual or homosexual, and these categories are mutually exclusive. Distinguishing between sex and gender is important to a number of discourses. Sex is viewed as the real, material base in which gender operates. Biomedical discourse promotes this but so does feminist discourse--gender is culturally constructed and is not inevitable. Although this view challenges the notion that biology is destiny, it does assume the essential notion that the body is either anatomically male or female. According to Harding, this does not take into account the ways in which a body is produced. Harding notes that many feminist approaches criticize this essentialist argument and do not subscribe to a sex/gender distinction (e.g., Butler, 1990).

The second half of this book uses case studies to investigate specific performances of sexuality and practices of femininity and masculinity. Harding develops her earlier analyses of the construction of the categories women and the female body in medical and feminist discourse and the representation of lesbians in popular culture. She also examines the production of male bodies, masculinity, and heterosexuality. She considers how the meanings of sexuality are compelled, constrained, and contested through performances of sexuality. The remainder of this book examines the intervention of sexual identities in and through various forms of representation (scientific, political, and popular culture) and the possible implications of these for subjectivity.

In Chapters Five and Six Harding examines discourses, including scientific, feminist, and popular culture on sex hormones that construct and contest a hormonally controlled body, and make sex hormones the cause of sex-gender sexuality. Specifically, Chapter Five reviews the early history of sex hormone research. The hormonal body is viewed as a political way of conceptualizing the body and the biological basis of sexual difference in all its manifestations. She argues that hormonal explanations of behavior and feelings are brought into play as corrective strategies, which depoliticize events. The development of technologies to measure and adjust hormones has meant that deviant characteristics can be corrected at the level of the body, precluding a political account of events in favor of a biological explanation. The chapter examines the tendency of biomedical and feminist discourses to produce the idea of "natural" (hence immutable) sex as the foundation of various manifestations of gender. In Chapter Six Harding reviews concerns about the adverse effects on the male body of environmental estrogens which, it is claimed, are feminizing men. She examines how and when men become embodied and the body is constituted male.

In Chapter Seven Harding examines motherhood and fatherhood as gendered performances. Chapter Seven considers the ways in which contemporary reproductive bodies are constituted with the help of specific new reproductive technologies. She discusses the medicalization of the maternal body and the limits of the medicalization critique in feminist critiques. Based on Clarke (1995), Harding distinguishes between modern and postmodern approaches to reproduction, in which postmodern approaches emphasize consumer choice, difference, and customization. Also examined is the use of donated ova from aborted fetuses and cadavers.

Chapters Eight and Nine highlight diversity on the margins, including lesbian mothers, single teenage mothers and fathers, and the ways in which these are represented as problematic sexualities in the media. Similarly, Chapter Nine examines the representations of lesbians in popular culture and attempts to illustrate the persuasiveness of compulsory heterosexuality.

My evaluation of the book is mixed. As stated earlier, the first half of the book is better than the second. Critiqued as a book designed for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, it provides a good account of many theoretical ideas in sexuality literature, especially from the constructionist perspective. Yet, the essays (Chapters Five through Nine), which have compelling titles such as "Chemical Sex and Social Control," "Queer Families," and "Sexual Parody-Lesbians in Popular Culture," were not persuasive. I kept wondering "Why the choice of these topics versus some other topics?" Perhaps, the problem is that I am too much of an essentialist to fully appreciate the significance of these case studies. More importantly, especially for a book written to be accessible, I would have preferred greater correspondence with the first half of the book.

REFERENCES

Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.

Clark, A. (1995). Modernity, postmodernity, and reproductive processes, ca. 1890-1990, or "Mommy, where do cyborgs come from anyway?" In H. Gray (Ed.), The cyborg handbook. New York: Routledge.

Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punishment: The birth of the prison. New York: Vintage Books.

Foucault, M. (1986). The archaeology of knowledge. London: Tavistock.

Hall, S. (1997). Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Monica A. Longmore, Ph.D., Bowling Green State University, Department of Sociology, Bowling Green, OH 43403.