Abstract
Family is the context in which meanings of sexuality are initially learned: our understandings of sexuality, as well as our attitudes and values about sexuality, are influenced by our familial experiences in childhood and across the life course. Likewise, our understandings of “family” are grounded in our ideas and beliefs about sexuality. Thus, sexuality is basic to family life; it is a multifaceted concept with intra-psychic, interpersonal, and socio-cultural meanings rooted in family. In this chapter, we review social science literature on sexuality in family life, considering the ways that sexual culture gets created and re-created in families across generations. A family life course perspective provides a guide for understanding the sexual socialization of children, adolescents, and adults in multiple family contexts. We give explicit attention to gender, culture, class, and race in our synthesis of prior work, and consider social learning theory, symbolic interaction, and queer theory as important contributors in recent decades to understanding sexuality in families. Our goal is to describe a “positive” vision of sexuality for families—a “sex education” that embraces sexuality as a natural, healthy dimension of personal development and family relationships across the life span.
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Notes
- 1.
Bisexuality refers to an identity of someone who is attracted (sexually, emotionally, and/or romantically) to both men and women (Rust, 2001).
- 2.
Asexuality refers to an identity and/or the experience of someone who does not experience sexual attraction or desire (Scherrer, 2008).
- 3.
Polyamory refers to a relationship orientation that assumes “it is possible to maintain multiple love relationships and desirable to be open and honest within these” (Barker, 2005, p. 76).
- 4.
A notable exception is research on childhood sexual abuse (e.g., see Fisher, 2004).
- 5.
Heterosexism is defined as “an ideological system that denies, denigrates, and stigmatizes any non-heterosexual form of behavior, identity, relationship, or community” (Herek, 1992, p. 89); homophobia has been defined as the negative emotions targeted at lesbian and gay individuals, their children, or their families and stems from heterosexism (Sears, 1992).
- 6.
A consequence of this inattention to childhood sexuality is a juggernaut for research: there are few empirical examples to follow, few well-documented methodologies for appropriate approaches, and persistent aversion from scientific authorities (funders; human subjects review boards) that undermine support for further research (O’Sullivan, 2003).
- 7.
Until large, population-based studies that intentionally include children of both heterosexual and same-sex parents are available, it will be impossible to draw definitive conclusions about whether lesbian/gay parents are more likely than heterosexual parents to have lesbian/gay children.
- 8.
Despite the fact that six states and the District of Columbia now allow same-sex couples to enter into legally-recognized civil marriages, the 1996 Federal Defense of Marriage Act defined marriage as between one man and one woman for federal purposes; thus, even same-sex couples who get married in one of these six states or DC are not privy to the majority of the over 1,100 federal rights, benefits, and protections that accompany marriage for heterosexual couples.
- 9.
Attitudes toward homosexuality seem to have changed significantly in recent years; according to a 2007 Pew poll (http://pewglobal.org/reports/pdf/258.pdf), 49 % of Americans said that homosexuality should be accepted, while 41 % said that it should be rejected.
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The authors would like to thank Katherine R. Allen who generously provided helpful feedback on an early outline of this chapter.
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Kuvalanka, K.A., Weiner, J.L., Russell, S.T. (2013). Sexuality in Families: The (Re-) Creation of Sexual Culture. In: Peterson, G., Bush, K. (eds) Handbook of Marriage and the Family. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3987-5_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3987-5_19
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