Writing Sociology

This article examines the question of how the relationship between gender and sexuality has been theorized. Five strands of argument, which draw on different epistemological concerns, are identified.These have structured the study of gender and sexuality, providing a contested understanding of both the meaning of these categories and their relationship.A challenge for future work is to elaborate frame-works that allow more complex analyses of the dynamic, historically and socially specific relationship between sexuality and gender, as well as the gendered and sexualized nature of their interconnections. To achieve this we need to consider the question of the relationship of gender and sexuality at a number of levels of social analysis.These issues are explored by drawing on three areas of research: on transsexuality/transgender, homosexuality and heterosexuality. Finally, a new metaphor for (re)imagining how we think about the interconnections between gender and sexuality is proposed