John Gagnon

From Wikiquote

John Gagnon is a sociologist and sexologist. He is Emeritus Professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Gagnon and William H. Simon developed the conecpt of sexual scripts. Their work is largely based on symbolic interactionism.

[edit] Sourced

• "Appropriate patterns of reproductive, gender, and sexual conduct are all products of specific cultures and all can be viewed as examples of socially scripted conduct. Western societies now have a system of gender and sexual learning in which gender differential scripts are learned prior to sexual scripts, but take their origins in part from the previously learned gender scripts... There are two important points: The first is that both gender and sexuality are learned forms of social practice, and the second is that looking to "natural differences" between women and men for lessons about sexual conduct is an error."
  • "The Explicit and Implicit Use of the Scripting Perspective in Sex Research", Annual Review of Sex Research, Vol. 1, (1990), 5

• "From the perspective of scripting theory, same-gender erotic preferences are elicited and shaped by the systems of meaning offered for conduct in a culture. What is usually construed as culture against "man" or culture against nature is thus actually conflict among differently enculturated individuals or groups.
  What is required is a constant recognition that acts of usage and explanation are acts of social control in the strong sense, that "homosexual" and "homosexuality" are names that have been imposed on some persons and their conduct by other persons - and that this imposition has carried the right of the latter to tell the former the origins, meaning, and virtue of their conduct."

[edit] External links

• Faculty home page

[edit] References

Reference: Society, Jan/Feb 1998, Vol 35, issue 2, pp. 60-67