Gender and Sexuality Inextricably Linked

Re: “Strange Bedfellows,” column, Oct. 18.

Ashton R. Lattimore is certainly correct that gender and sexuality are distinct categories and ought not to be conflated in academic analysis. Nor is she the first to argue for such a methodological separation. However, her claims that gender and sexuality have little to do with each other are misinformed. Can we really say, for example, that women’s suffrage has “little, if anything” to do with sexuality when arguments both for and against women’s suffrage implicated Victorian images of “womanly virtue,” derived from the notion that women were “passionless,” asexual beings? Conversely, can we really say that “same-sex marriage” is “well understood without discussion of gender issues” when arguments against same-sex marriage constantly invoke gender norms of fatherhood and motherhood (“children need a mom and a dad”), and when marriage has played such a large role in constructing these gender norms (like who goes to work and who stays home with the kids)?

While gender and sexuality may be different categories of analysis, the two concepts have been historically intertwined and continue to influence each other today—think, for example, of stereotypes of the effeminate gay man or “butch” lesbian. To study gender without thinking about sexuality, or vice versa, would miss critical points of analysis for understanding sexual and gender identities and categories.

I therefore applaud the Committee on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality for providing a forum for students to study gender, sexuality, and their intersections. When I was an undergraduate, no official committee or department existed for critical studies of sexuality. Students interested in these issues sought out individual faculty members dispersed in departments throughout the university; the Committee on Women’s Studies, while sympathetic, rarely offered courses dealing specifically with sexuality. While combining the two fields may not be a perfect solution, I am glad that sexuality studies finally has a home, and that students have a forum to analyze the critical role that sexuality and sexual identity play in society.



BETTY C. LUTHER ’03

New Haven, Conn. 

Oct. 18, 2006



The writer is a graduate student in the history department of Yale University studying gender and sexuality.