BUILDING A LESBIAN COMMUNITY IN EDMONTON, ALBERTA ...

Americans than commonly believed. 15 Constructionists understand that rigid gender and sexual
roles serve to reinforce prescribed cultural norms. Social constructionist theory emphasizes the
shifting, fluid character ofsexual orientation.
Supporters ofsocial construction claim that the origins ofthe modem lesbian identity
originate in the work ofthe sexologists and psychologists. Medical and psychological discourses
first identified and labeled the sexual behaviour ofhomosexuals as different from heterosexuals.
Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, psychologists located lesbians within developmental
models ofpathology. Medical models assumed a model ofnormality from which lesbians
deviated. 16 Sexologists defined sexual identities in relation to dominant sexual codes. Relatively
narrow social meanings ascribed to lesbianism have subjected female homosexuals to unwarranted
restrictive characterizations. Few women publically declared themselves lesbians because ofthe
negative social meanings attached to same-sex desire.
As writer Tasmin Wilton notes:
Lesbian-ness is a product ofthe shifting relationships among individual
subjectivity;> the body and the social (including kinship;> sub-cultural groups, etc.)
And ofmeanings constituted by/within those relationships.17
In other words;> lesbians do not fulfill normative gender role expectations.
Gay historian Jeffrey Weeks writes: "Sexology;> then;> is not simply descriptive. It is at
times profoundly prescriptive;> telling us [individuals] what we ought to be like, what makes us
15 See Alfred C. Kinsey, et al.;> Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia and
London: W.B. Saunders;> 1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Philadelphia:
W.B.Saunders;> 1953).
16 Wilton;> 31.
17 Ibid., 30.
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