Sexuality: Orientation and Attitudes Across Societies
Every society takes the same raw human material — desire, bodies, pairings — and cuts it into categories, then attaches rules, honor, and law to the pieces. The cuts are not the same everywhere, and they do not stay still. Take orientation apart, compare societies, and watch the categories move.
One word, three different things
Three lenses on sexuality
Sexualitypick a way of looking
C. Wright Mills, on the whole exercise: whether one person is comfortable in their own desire is a personal trouble. Whether a society writes that desire into its marriage law, its criminal code, its hiring practices, and its dinner-table silences is a public issue of social structure — and no amount of private courage settles it. Holding the two apart, and seeing how each produces the other, is the sociological imagination at work.