Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The debate over constructionism and essentialism is a longstanding philosophical argument, from Plato and Aristotle to contemporary debates over deconstruction in literary theory. Broadly and simply, essentialism suggests that qualities are inherent in objects of study, with little reference to contexts, ambiguities, and relativities. It is a “belief in the real, true essence of things” ( Fuss 1989 : xi). By contrast, constructionism (and its allied concept deconstruction, as put forward by Derrida) suggests qualities are always bound up with historically produced, contextually bound meanings or discourses. They are always open to change and never fixed. Many terms are allied antimonies such as absolutism and relativism, realism and interpretivism, and holism and methodological individualism. Other terms, such as humanism, can be used by either camp. These ideas came to be applied to the field of sexuality during the late 1960s and 1970s and for two decades it was the primary debate in the newer groups studying sexuality. Drawing initially from the work of symbolic interactionists (Blumer's Symbolic Interactionism , 1969; Gagnon and Simon's Sexual Conduct , 1973), the highly influential work of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality (1967), of feminism, and of the later Foucault (in The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 , 1977), the core idea emerged ... log in or subscribe to read full text