Postmodern Sexualities
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7078443 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ken Plummer (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2007 |
| Publication date | 2007-02-15 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | OTHER |
| Venue | The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology (JOURNAL) |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1002/9781405165518.wbeosp069 |
| OpenAlex | W4233233508 |
| ISBN | 9781405165518 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 3 |
Sexuality is often located within various epochs – classic, premodern, modern, and the like – and the most recent stage has been controversially identified as “postmodern.” Here human sexualities are not seen as well‐fashioned patterns, solid identities, grand truths, or essential natures. In contrast, new social accounts of sexualities usually offer up more modest, constructed, and fragmented narratives of sexualities. For example, those found in the modern sexological world – from Freud to sexology – try to develop scientifically a knowledge of sexuality. Such views have haunted much of the modern world's analysis of sexuality, seeing it as an autonomous sphere of reality. For postmoderns this is a deeply flawed idea: “sex” is no longer the source of a truth, as it was for the moderns with their strong belief in science. Instead, according to William Simon in Postmodern Sexualities (1996), human sexualities have become “destabilized, decentred and de‐essentialized.” Sexual life is no longer seen as harboring an essential unitary core locatable within a clear framework with an essential truth waiting to be discovered; instead it is partial and fragmented, with little grand design or form. Indeed, it is “accompanied by the problematic at every stage” (Simon 1996: 20). As he argues: “all discourses of sexuality are inherently discourses about something else; sexuality, rather than serving as a constant thread that unifies the totality of human experience, is the ultimate dependent variable, requiring explanation more often than it provides explanation
Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Human sexuality · Literature · Narrative · Postmodernism · Psychoanalysis · Sexology · Sociology · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · German Literature and Culture Studies · Philosophy · Psychology · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology
| Citations per year | 0.08 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2000 - 2005 (6) |
| Highly cited | No |