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Sexual meanings are the meanings that are attributed, by a particular cultural-social-historical context, to sexual acts and broadly to all the aspects of the erotic dimension of human sexual experience. Human sexual behavior or different human sexual practices encompass a wide range of activities such as strategies to find or attract partners ( Mating and display Generally speaking human sexuality is how people experience and express themselves as sexual beings [1] This also include the beliefs on what is considered sexual and what is not. Sexual meanings are social and cultural constructs, and they are metabolized and subjectivized by the individual only after cultural and social mediation. A social construction or social construct is any phenomenon "invented" or "constructed" by participants in a particular Culture or Society [1]

In the first systematic study on this issue, Michel Foucault, with his 1976 History of Sexuality, was the first to study this issue with a systematic approach. Michel Foucault ( (15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984 was a French philosopher, Historian, Intellectual, Critic and Sociologist. The History of Sexuality is the title of a three-volume series of Books by French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault written between 1976 He argued that the concept of what activities and sensations are "sexual" is historically determined, and it is therefore part of a changing "discourse". [2][3][4][5]

Being the main force conditioning human relationship, sex is essentially political. Politics Politics is the process by which groups of people make decisions In any social context, the construction of a "sexual universe" is fundamentally linked to the structures of power. [1][2][6][7] The construction of sexual meanings, is an instrument by which social institutions (religion, marketing, the educational system, psychiatry, etc. ) control and shape human relationships. [4][3]

According to Foucault, sexuality began to be regarded as a concept part of human nature since the 19th century; so sexuality began to be used as a mean to define normality and its boundaries, and to conceive everything outside those boundaries in the realm of psychopathology. Psychopathology is a term which refers to either the study of Mental illness or mental distress or the manifestation of behaviours and experiences which may be indicative In the 20th century, with the theories of Freud and of sexology, the "not-normal" was seen more as a "discontent of civilization". Sexology is the study of sexual interests behavior and function [8][3]

References

  1. ^ a b c Parker, Richard G. [Bodies and Pleasures: On the Construction of Erotic Meanings in Contemporary Brazil] Anthropology & Humanism Quarterly. June 1989, Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 58-64
  2. ^ a b Ellen Ross, Rayna Rapp Sex and Society: A Research Note from Social History and Anthropology Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Jan. , 1981), pp. 51-72
  3. ^ a b c Foucault, M. (1976) The History of Sexuality, Vol I: The Will to Knowledge
  4. ^ a b Weeks, Jeffrey. Michel Foucault ( (15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984 was a French philosopher, Historian, Intellectual, Critic and Sociologist. The History of Sexuality is the title of a three-volume series of Books by French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault written between 1976 The History of Sexuality is the title of a three-volume series of Books by French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault written between 1976 Jeffrey Weeks (Born 1945 in Rhondda, Wales) is a historian and sociologist specialising in work on sexuality and is also a gay activist Sexuality and its Discontents; Meanings, Myths, and Modern Sexualities. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-04503-7.   pp. 176-8
  5. ^ (Rathus et al. McKenzie, pp.  21)
  6. ^ Gayle Rubin (1984) Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality
  7. ^ Toward a Conversation about Sex in Feminism: A Modest Proposal Vance, Carole S. [Pleasure and danger: Toward a politics of sexuality]
  8. ^ Cáceres The production of knowledge on sexuality in the AIDS era. Gayle S Rubin (born 1949 is a cultural anthropologist best known as an activist and influential theorist of sex and gender politics in Aggleton, Peter; Parker, Richard Bordeaux; Barbosa, Regina Maria (2000). Framing the sexual subject: the politics of gender, sexuality, and power. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-21838-8.   pp. 242-3
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