as warranting clinical attention. "Along with other forms of sexual deviance [transvestism] has been medicalised, treated as if abnormal and needing medical care" (Woodhouse p. 136). And in the classification of homosexuality, "the struggle for legitimization therefore entailed a challenge to psychiatry's authority and power to classify homosexuality as a disorder" (Bayer, p. 189). All of this makes very clear the role particular institutions in society have in classifying, constructing, and reinforcing what is deviant in society. An examination of categories of sexuality and gender also reveal close ties with important power configurations in American society. Deviance is constructed as a form of social control - to control the way people think, feel, and behave. And what quality best possesses the ability to exert this control? Power. "[W]e engage everyday in extraordinarily powerful, consequential, and often painful interpersonal negotiations about what is or is not acceptable and about what our respective places are in a world that provides us with less guidance and certainty about such matters…" (Millman, p. 98). This notion of what is or is not acceptable is an essential tool in defining what is deviant. In terms of sexuality and gender in our studies of deviance, feminist theory gives the most thorough discussion of the dichotomy of power between male and female sexes. The assignation of gender "establishes a hierarchy whereby a sexual division of labor ensures an imbalance of power and control weighted heavily in favour of male supremacy" (Woodhouse, 118). Media is a primary medium where the "powerful perpetuation of dominant power structures" (Hantzis & Lehr, p. 181) is portrayed on a regular basis. In the case of the popular culture media, they are careful not to show healthy, fully developed, and fully expressed homosexual characters so as not to give the idea that homosexuality is "normal." Th...
