Jennifer Harding Sex Essentialism Summary

Response to ‘Jennifer Harding. Investigating Sex: Essentialism and Constructionism.’ In this piece of writing, the author discusses the topic of sex from the point of views of the essentialism and the constructionism approaches. From ancient times to the present days, it has always been a difficult and controversial task to discuss and argue about sex due to the complexity of this topic. In this case, Jennifer Harding focused on these two perceptions and on the way that these came up with their judgments. On one side, essentialism “entails the belief that sexuality is purely a natural phenomenon, outside of culture and society, made up of fixed and inherent drives, and that nature and these drives dictate our sexual identities” (qtd. in Harding, 7). Therefore, it is within this tendency where “the perception that sexuality is a ‘biological’ phenomenon” (6) fix better. Hence, from this observation we could say that …show more content…
It is from this time until early in the twentieth century that sexologists took action to prove wrong the idea of seeing sexuality as something “repressive and restrictive doctrines” (7), then it was seen “by the radicals and the reformers of the time as liberating” (7); his era, “dating from 1890 to 1980 is described as the ‘sexological period’” (7). Also, sexologists of this movement conducted multiples process that allowed them to support their point of view. Within the methods applied we find “clinical interview and life history up to the 1930s, survey questionnaires and field studies of the 1940s to 1960s, laboratory observation and experimentation, in the 1960s and 1970s and ethnographic approaches in the 1970s” (qtd. in Harding 7). It is good to point out that justas many other investigations, the scientists of this tendency faced multiple challenges, and we could say that the complexity of the topic itself, made it even more difficult to