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According to classical essentialism, there are underlying true forms or essences, there is discontinuity between different forms rather than continuous variation, and these true forms are constant over time. Modern essentialism consists of a belief that certain phenomena are natural, inevitable, and biologically determined. We consider sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, genetic research, brain research, and endocrine research as examples of essentialist approaches, focusing particularly on how these research approaches treat sexual orientation and sexual attraction. Social constructionism, in contrast, rests on the belief that reality is socially constructed and emphasizes language as an important means by which we interpret experience. We briefly review social constructionist research on sexual orientation and sexual attraction. Finally, we review examples of conjoint or interactionist research, uniting biological and social influences. We conclude that, although there may be theories and research that conjoin biological and social influences, there can be no true conjoining of essentialism and social constructionism.
mong sex researchers today, few debates are more intense than the one between essentialism on the one hand and social constructionism on the other. Yet often these terms remain undefined or ill defined. In this article we carefully specify these theoretical positions. We focus our discussion on this debate in the social and biological sciences; a parallel debate exists in the humanities, but it is beyond the scope of this article. To illustrate the particular content of the debate, we consider two classic issues in sex research-sexual attraction and sexual orientation-and how they have been addressed by essentialist and social constructionist researchers. Finally, we consider the possibility of a conjoint essentialist/social constructionist approach in sex research.
Essentialism
Defining Essentialism The concept of essentialism originated in the work of Plato (428-348 B.C.) (Mayr, 1982). He argued that, for example, a triangle, no matter what the length of the sides or the combination of angles, always had the form of a triangle and thus was discontinuously different from a circle or rectangle. For Plato, the phenomena of the natural world were simply a reflection of a finite number of fixed and unchanging forms, or eide, as he called them. The eide were renamed essences by the Thomists of the Middle Ages. Constancy and discontinuity were the crucial properties of essences. That is, an essence...