John Gagnon


John H. Gagnon was a pioneering sociologist of human sexuality who wrote and edited 15 books and over 100 articles. His key work is Sexual Conduct: The Social Sources of Human Sexuality, which he co-authored with William Simon. He was Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook where he taught and researched from 1968 to 1998.

Life

Gagnon was born on November 22, 1931 in Fall River, Massachusetts. He became an undergraduate and graduate student at the University of Chicago in the 1950s gaining his BA in 1955 and his PhD in 1969. After working as assistant to the Sheriff of Cook County Jail, he became the Senior Research Sociologist and Trustee at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana from 1959 to 1968.
At the Kinsey Institute, Gagnon worked with his friend from his graduate student days at the University of Chicago, William Simon, and they started a short but highly productive collaboration. Their key work, Sexual Conduct, was developed during this period. Kinsey had been dead a few years and there was a sense of 'winding down' at the Institute. Prior to the arrival of William Simon, Gagnon worked primarily on the Sex Offenders legacy project, the computerization of the original Kinsey sex histories and the maintenance of the Kinsey Archives and Library. After the arrival of Simon in 1965, in addition to the essays that made up Sexual Conduct, they started two major projects: a national study of sexual development among a national sample of college students and a major project on homosexuality. This was his induction into mainstream survey research, but it also set up a permanent tension in his work between conventional empirical research and the problem of theorizing sexuality adequately and taking seriously how social the sexual was. These ideas haunted him for the rest of his life.
Subsequently, Gagnon's major academic post was to be held at the University of New York at Stony Brook between 1968–1998, where he became Distinguished Professor of sociology. During this time he chaired and sat on many committees and held many visiting positions at The Laboratory of Human Development at Harvard University; at Churchill College, Cambridge; at the University of Copenhagen; and at the Universities of Essex, Princeton and Chicago. He worked on many leading projects connected with sexuality including the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography; chaired the SSRC-Ford Foundation committee on Sexuality Fellowships; and was a member of the National Research Council’s CBASSE committee on the HIV-AIDS epidemic.
In his retirement, he moved with his wife, Cathy Greenblat, the sociologist and photographer, first to Nice and latterly to Palm Springs. Most recently he held a consultancy with the Laboratory of Robert Grant, Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology, San Francisco, California. Gagnon died on Thursday, February 11, 2016 from pancreatic cancer. Gagnon's autobiographical reflections on his life until 1973 can be found in Authors of Our Own Lives, edited by Bennett Berger.

Ideas and contribution

Gagnon is seen as the founder of a distinctly sociological approach to human sexuality. Michael Kimmel has called it 'revolutionary' and in a book devoted to articles inspired by the work of Gagnon, he claims that the book Sexual Conduct 'heralded the new paradigm from which all subsequent readings of sexuality in the social science and humanities have sprung'. Gayle Rubin has also commented that Gagnon and Simon ’virtually reinvented sex research as social science’. Often linked to symbolic interactionism, but also tempered with Durkheim, his work has inspired and shaped a whole field variously called ‘the constructionist approach to sexuality’ Social constructionism or ‘critical sexualities studies’. His ideas may also be seen as a precursor of ‘queer theory’ Queer theory. He has briefly summarized his own work thus:
Sexual conduct is entirely historically and culturally determined; the meaning of conduct does not reside in a reading of the bodily activity of individuals; sexual science is historically and culturally determined in equal measure ; sexuality is acquired, maintained, and unlearned in all of its aspects and is organized by social structure and culture, and gender and sexuality are both learned forms of conduct and are linked differently in different cultures. .
Gagnon’s contribution lies in four key fields.
Gagnon was an NIMH Post Doctoral Fellow in 1972–3, was made a fellow of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex and subsequently received the SSSS lifetime achievement award for research into sexuality in 1981 and was President of the International Academy of Sex Research 1987–8. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters in 2006 from the Glasgow Caledonian University. He has been on the board of many professional and scientific committees connected with the study of human sexual conduct including the Presidents Commission on Pornography.
The Sexualities section of the American Sociological Association named its distinguished prize in sexualities studies as The John H Gagnon and William Simon award and it has been awarded annually since 2001. A Fetschrift in his honor was published in 2007.

Selected publications