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This chapter examines whether the women’s movement is pro-sex. To those who believe that an understanding of sexuality is crucial to a feminist analysis, what is especially disconcerting is that feminists are as confused, divided, and dogmatic about sex as everyone else. If feminist theory is to be truly based in the reality of women’s lives, feminists must examine their professed beliefs and feelings with as much skepticism as they apply to male pronouncements. Otherwise they risk simply replacing male prejudices and rationalizations with their own. In one form or another, sexual conservatism still permeates the feminist movement. Ethel Spector Person, a psychoanalyst, argues that sexual activity and orgasm are indispensable to men’s mental health, but not to women’s; specifically, men need sex to feel like men, while in women “gender identity and self-worth can be consolidated by other means.” This chapter considers the issue of sexuality within the context of feminism by focusing on two anthologies: Women—Sex and Sexuality and Heresies.

This chapter examines whether the women’s movement is pro-sex. To those who believe that an understanding of sexuality is crucial to a feminist analysis, what is especially disconcerting is that feminists are as confused, divided, and dogmatic about sex as everyone else. If feminist theory is to be truly based in the reality of women’s lives, feminists must examine their professed beliefs and feelings with as much skepticism as they apply to male pronouncements. Otherwise they risk simply replacing male prejudices and rationalizations with their own. In one form or another, sexual conservatism still permeates the feminist movement. Ethel Spector Person, a psychoanalyst, argues that sexual activity and orgasm are indispensable to men’s mental health, but not to women’s; specifically, men need sex to feel like men, while in women “gender identity and self-worth can be consolidated by other means.” This chapter considers the issue of sexuality within the context of feminism by focusing on two anthologies: Women—Sex and Sexuality and Heresies.

This chapter presents conversations on berdache as spaces that produced queer modernities for Native and non-Native people in close relationship in the late twentieth century. The popularity of berdache was heightened when gay and lesbian politics expressed progressive legacies of U.S. anthropology. Gay and lesbian and allied anthropologists in the 1970s began to evaluate sexual conservatism in anthropology and U.S. society by creating the Anthropological Research Group on Homosexuality (ARGOH), later renamed the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists (SOLGA). The twentieth-century scholars linked the anthropology of homosexuality to the pursuit of sexual minority politics within anthropology. U.S. anthropology of homosexuality correlated research on homosexuality to the activist defense of gay and lesbian anthropologists. ARGOH made sexual minority politics a basis for anthropological knowledge production by promoting research on homosexuality and defending gay and lesbian anthropologists.