Sexuality as a Historical Category

One of the most counter-intuitive claims in the sociology of sexuality is that sexuality itself is a historical invention. The claim does not mean, obviously, that human beings began engaging in sexual behavior in the nineteenth century. It means something more specific: that the modern idea of sexuality as an identity — a stable, classifying feature of persons that organizes desire into types of people — is a relatively recent cultural formation, not a universal feature of human societies.

The argument was most influentially developed by Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (Foucault 1976/1978). Foucault's opening gambit was to attack what he called the repressive hypothesis — the common story that Victorian society repressed a natural sexuality that later generations have progressively liberated. Against this, Foucault argued that the Victorian period was not a time of silence about sex but a period of unprecedented proliferation of discourses on sex. Medicine, psychiatry, pedagogy, demography, law, and the confessional all produced enormous quantities of talk, writing, and classification around sex, and in doing so they constituted sex as an object of knowledge and intervention (Foucault 1976/1978, pp. 17-35).

The critical move for sociology is Foucault's distinction between sexual acts and sexual identities. Before roughly the late nineteenth century, same-sex sexual activity was certainly known, discussed, regulated, and in many jurisdictions prosecuted. But it was understood as an act — sodomy was something one did, a sin or crime one committed, rather than an identity one had. Foucault's often-quoted line is that 'the sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species' (Foucault 1976/1978, p. 43). The word homosexual itself was coined in 1869 by the Hungarian writer Karoly Maria Kertbeny and entered medical usage through figures like Richard von Krafft-Ebing (Psychopathia Sexualis, 1886) and Havelock Ellis. In the space of a few decades, a novel category — the homosexual person, with a distinctive psyche, biography, and pathology — was produced through medical and legal discourse.

The British historian Jeffrey Weeks developed the same argument empirically, tracing the emergence of sexual categories in Britain across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Sex, Politics and Society (Weeks 1981). Weeks documented how specific legal changes — the 1885 Labouchere Amendment criminalizing 'gross indecency' between men — combined with medical classification and the emerging homophile movement to produce the modern category of the homosexual. A similar argument applies to categories like the heterosexual (which, strikingly, was coined after the homosexual and partly in reaction to it), the pedophile, the pervert, and others.

For sociology, the implications are substantial. Sexuality is not a biological invariant that different societies simply interpret differently; it is a cultural and institutional formation that varies historically in its very categories. What counts as a sexual orientation, what behaviors are grouped together under a single identity, and how sexuality relates to selfhood are all features of a particular historical moment — our moment — rather than timeless features of human experience. This does not deny the reality of sexual desire or the biological dimensions of sexual response. It claims something narrower and more precise: that the organization of desire into kinds of persons is culturally specific.

The historical-category argument is sometimes misread as dismissive of LGBTQ+ identity. It is not. Foucault, Weeks, and later queer theorists were themselves writing from within the movements for sexual liberation. The point is analytical: identities that feel natural and inevitable often have traceable histories, and understanding those histories is part of understanding the present. The gay identity that crystallized in the late nineteenth century, was medicalized and criminalized through most of the twentieth, and became the basis of political mobilization and legal recognition by the end of that century, is a specific historical trajectory — not the simple unveiling of a pre-existing truth about certain persons.