Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies

Reception to follow

Dr. Patrick Grzanka

Assistant Professor of Psychology

Core Faculty in Women, Gender & Sexuality Program

Core Faculty, American Studies Program

University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Despite the lack of scientific consensus about what sexual orientation actually is and what factors (biological, environmental, individual) affect it, arguments about the etiology of sexual orientation are central to ongoing struggles for sexual minorities’ legal rights, as well as broader social equality and acceptance in American society. This talk will chart the relatively recent rise of biogenetic explanations of sexual orientation at the end of the 20th and early 21st century and the connections between these beliefs and LGBT activism. Grzanka will also offer findings from new survey research that has attempted to capture multidimensional beliefs that individuals hold about sexual orientation, which both reflect and challenge dominant understandings of sexuality’s nature, mutability, and essence. Finally, he will discuss the implications of the “born this way” wars — political debates about whether sexual minorities are born, not made — on how we imagine the future of sexual orientation in the United States.