社会建构主义是由20世纪著名的思想家米歇尔·福柯在其《性史》第一卷中提出的。

社会建构主义认为，性并不是一种独立于外界条件的观念，而是文化建构的结果，而这种建构会随着时代和社会的改变而不同。福柯认为，我们现在所说的同性恋和异性恋，只是在近代才被建构起来的概念。

社会建构主义相信，之所以会有同性恋和异性恋之分，是被历史和文化创造出来的，而不是由生理和心理上的自然属性决定的。19世纪，同性恋这个群体，在文化及环境的影响下，被创造而“变成”了一种人。从根本上来说，社会建构倾向于同性恋后天说和境遇说，即倾向于认为同性恋是受环境的影响而产生的。

Social constructivism maintains that human development is socially situated and knowledge is constructed through interaction with others. It is a sociological theory of knowledge that applies the general philosophical constructivism into the social. The concept has a long history in sociological and philosophical thought, but the term has been coined by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann with their book The Social Construction of Reality. Based on a combination of Alfred Schutz' Sociology of Knowledge and Durkheim's concept of institution, they develop a theory that aims at answering the question of how subjective meaning becomes a social fact. The concept uses George Herbert Mead's Ideas of Socialisation and Interaction and in this respect some aspects resemble ideas in Russian cultural psychology, wherein groups construct knowledge for one another, collaboratively creating a "small" culture of shared artifacts with shared meanings. When one is immersed within a culture of this sort, one is learning all the time about how to be a part of that culture on many levels. It is emphasised that culture plays a large role in the cognitive development of a person. Its origins are largely attributed to Lev Vygotsky.