Sexuality as Ethnicity: a Cultural Resource of Gendered Sexuality

Abstract

Socio-cultural context is crucial for proper understanding of what human sexuality really is. The idea of sexual scripts, functioning on cultural, interpersonal and intra-psychic levels, brings a new concept of gendered sexuality. Long before forthcoming of Modern societies, sexuality had been an intrinsic attribute of masculinity and femininity and never been treated as unattached to or different from gender. Both corporality and libidinal desire regimes had the gender perspective, and peculiar sexual practices had for a long time established some cultural standards for masculine and feminine modes of being. Resurgence of culturally, not biologically based sexuality concept nowadays allows us to discover a growing socio-historical trend towards the state as sexuality gains the qualities of ethnicity. Applicability of ethnicity concept to sexuality have been asserted since the late 1960-s due to structural analysis of gay communities in the industrial megalopolises. Having referenced to the etymology of such social category as ethnos, we are able to see this category may designate any minorities which do not fit into normative social order, including that one directed onto sexuality. If one understands sexuality as scripts of gendered corporality being performed by means of social communications, perceptions and interactions, the sexual community which emerges due to social attention and fixation on gender and sexual non-normative practices is quite able being understood like ethnic community. Considering anti-normative tendencies in modern societies, in liquid social setting any kind of sexuality existing at intra-psychic and performed at interpersonal levels commences to lose the characters which secure its false “naturalness” and dominance over other — marginal, repressed — sexualities. Hybridization, crossing the markers of dissimilar sexualities prompts some social actors to fi x the disintegrated sexual scripts by perpetual constructing/imagination of sexual communities on the base of pseudo- and sub-identities: asexual, graysexual, demisexual and so forth. To take the liberties with socio-sexual categorizations becomes the core feature of modern discursive definitions of human sexualities.