Queer-Ing Sociology, Sociologizing Queer Theory: An Introduction

Abstract

into or accrue sexual meanings by means of discourses and institutional practices. Framing as social unavoidably makes it a political fact. Which sensations or acts are defined as sexual, what moral boundaries demarcate legitimate and illegitimate sex, and who stipulates this are political. Paralleling class or gender politics, sexual politics involve struggles around the formation of, and resistance to, a sexual social hierarchy (Rubin 1983). The current theorization of sex as a social and political fact prompts a rereading of the history of moder societies and social knowledges. Consider an interpretation of classical sociology from this perspective. We are familiar with the standard accounts of the rise of sociology. For example, sociology is described as born in the great transformation from a traditional, agrarian, corporatist hierarchical order to a moder, industrial, class-based, but formally democratic system. The so-called classic sociologists acquired their authority because it is claimed that they provided the core perspectives and themes in terms of which social scientists analyze and debate the great problems of modernity. These perspectives include Marx's theorization of capitalism as a class-divided system, Weber's thesis of the bureaucratization of the world, and Durkheim's theory of social evolution as a process of social differentiation. The classics posed the question of the meaning of modernity in terms of the debates about capitalism, secularization, social differentiation, bureaucratization, class stratification, and social solidarity. If our view of modernity derived exclusively from the sociological classics, we would not know that a central part of the great transformation consisted of efforts to define a sphere of sexuality, to organize bodies, pleasures, desires, and acts as they relate to personal and public life, and that this entailed constructing sexual (and gender) identities, producing discourses and cultural representations, enacting state policies and laws, and conducting religious and familial interventions into personal life. In short, the making of embodied sexual selves and codes has been interlaced with the making of the cultural and institutional life of Western societies. The standard histories link the rise of the modern social sciences to social modernization (e.g., industrialism, class conflict, and bureaucracy), but are silent about sexual (and