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Scholarly investigations into male and female sexuality over the life course have long occupied two separate "camps": One focused on the biological aspects of sexuality and one focused on the sociocultural/political aspects. This bifurcated approach has been particularly ill suited for the study of sexual desire, a topic that has been generally undertheorized by sex researchers. A modern reappraisal of gender and sexual desire is proposed that takes into coordinated account both the biological and sociocultural/political factors that produce and shape subjective sexual desires over the life course. The specific relevance of this approach for three particular topic areas, adolescent sexual maturation, same-sex sexuality, and sexual dysfunction, is addressed. Methodological approaches to the study of gender and sexuality capable of investigating how cultural and biological factors intersect to shape the subjective quality of men's and women's desires at different points in the life course and within different sociocultural and interpersonal contexts are advocated.
Key Words: adolesence, gender, hormones, qualitative, sexual dysfunction, sexual orientation, sexuality.
Interactionism Revisited
Debates about the basic nature of sexual desire and about the forms of desire that should be considered normal, healthy, and/or moral have raged throughout history, and have been perennial topics of both biomedical and social scientific research on sexuality: At what age do sexual desires develop? Are men's and women's desires different? What causes same-sex desires, and can they be altered? These questions have always been infused with sociopolitical undercurrents. The very fact that some individuals' sexual experiences are deemed "normal," investigated, tabulated, and worried about, whereas other individuals' experiences are ignored or considered deviant lays bare the inherently political nature of questions about sexuality and sexual desire (Foucault, 1980; Weeks, 1986).
Some have attempted to avoid these tangled sociopolitical factors by focusing exclusively on the biology of desire--typically operationalized in terms of genes and hormones. Others have taken the opposite approach, focusing entirely on sociopolitical factors to the total exclusion of bodies and biology. The resulting dualism has suffused and fractured the study of sexuality. We maintain that neither a purely biological nor a purely sociocultural approach can encompass the complexity of sexual desire and thus neither is fully satisfying on its own. Sexual desires are always embedded in particular sociocultural contexts (i.e., relationships nested within...