John Gagnon - Ideas and Contribution

Ideas and Contribution

John Gagnon is seen as the founder of a distinctly sociological approach to human sexuality. Michael Kimmel has called it ‘revolutionary’ and in a book devoted to articles inspired by the work of Gagnon, he claims that the book Sexual Conduct (1973) ‘heralded the new paradigm from which all subsequent readings of sexuality in the social science and humanities have sprung’ (Kimmel, 2007:pix). Gayle Rubin has also commented that Gagnon and Simon ’virtually reinvented sex research as social science’ (Rubin, 2002: 28). Often linked to symbolic interactionism, but also tempered with Durkheim, his work has inspired and shaped a whole field variously called ‘ the constructionist approach to sexuality’Social constructionism or ‘critical sexualities studies’. His ideas may also be seen as a precursor of ‘queer theory’Queer theory. He has briefly summarized his own work thus: (1) Sexual conduct is entirely historically and culturally determined; (2) the meaning of conduct does not reside in a reading of the bodily activity of individuals; (3) sexual science is historically and culturally determined in equal measure ;(4) sexuality is acquired, maintained, and unlearned in all of its aspects and is organized by social structure and culture, and (5) gender and sexuality are both learned forms of conduct and are linked differently in different cultures. (Interpretation of Desire 2004 p136). John Gagnon’s contribution lies in four key fields.

• First, he pioneered an account of human sexuality that was not to be driven by an overwhelming prominence being given to the biological. With Bill Simon, he rejected ‘the unproven assumption that "powerful" psychosexual drives are fixed biological attributes. More importantly, we reject the even more dubious assumption that sexual capacities or experiences tend to translate immediately into a kind of universal "knowing" or innate wisdom - that sexuality has a magical ability, possessed by no other capacity, that allows biological drives to be expressed directly in psychosocial and social behaviors.’ Pyschosexual Development 1969. Much followed from this, as whole new field of analysis opened up.
• Secondly, and above all, John Gagnon inspired many to think critically and seriously about human sexuality as a theoretical problem. Although he worked alongside the sexological profession, he remained very sceptical about its basic assumptions. (With Bill Simon, he developed the sociological theorization of human sexualities. Many ideas were formulated here, but the key was the significance of scripts as a metaphor for understanding human sexualities. Human sexuality far from being a simple biological drive should be seen as a socially organized script. We see sexual behavior therefore as scripted behavior, not the masked expression of a primordial drive. Psycho-sexual development 1969. Gagnon and Simon then proceeded to investigate three layers of scripting: historical and cultural, interactive and interpersonal, as well as its intra-personal or intra-psychic dimensions.
• Thirdly, having established a major social study of homosexuality at the Kinsey Institute, Gagnon challenged studies of ‘homosexuality’ to move away from the clinical and the pathological path, which dominated till the 1970s, towards the social and the political. “We have allowed the homosexual’s object choice to dominate and control our imagery of him” Formulation, 1967. A new approach was established which investigated the social and cultural situation of the homosexual. This was a little before the emergence of the Gay Liberation Front and marker events of the Stonewall resistance to police harassment.
• Finally, Gagnon was an early empirical investigator of the AIDS pandemic and his work helped shape an understanding of the role that different kinds of communities play in shaping the HIV and AIDS pandemic.