Sexual Fields: Toward a Sociology of Collective Sexual Life

In the late modern period, an unprecedented expansion of specialized erotic worlds has transformed the domain of intimate life. Organized by appetites and dispositions related to race, ethnicity, class, gender, and age, these erotic worlds are arenas of sexual exploration but, also, sites of stratification and dominion wherein actors vie for partners, social significance, and esteem. These are what Adam Isaiah Green calls sexual fields, which represent a semblance of social life for which he offers a groundbreaking new framework.

To build on the sexual fields framework, Green has gathered a distinguished group of scholars who together make a strong case for sexual field theory as the first systematic theoretical innovation since queer theory in the sociology of sexuality. Expanding on the work of Bourdieu, Green and contributors develop this distinctively sociological approach for analyzing collective sexual life, where much of the sexual life of our society resides today. Coupling field theory with the ethnographic and theoretical expertise of some of the most important scholars of sexual life at work today, Sexual Fields offers a game-changing approach that will revolutionize how sociologists analyze and make sense of contemporary sexual life for years to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9780226085043

Book preview

ADAM ISAIAH GREEN is associate professor of sociology at the University of Toronto.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2014 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2014.

23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14      1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-08485-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-08499-2 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-08504-3 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226085043.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-publication Data

Sexual fields : toward a sociology of collective sexual life / edited by Adam Isaiah Green.

pages      cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-08485-5 (hardcover : alkaline paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-08499-2 (paperback : alkaline paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-08504-3 (e-book)   1. Sex—Social aspects.   2. Social structure.   3. Sex customs.   I. Green, Adam Isaiah, editor.

HQ16.S472 2014

306.7—dc23

2013025189

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Sexual Fields

Toward a Sociology of Collective Sexual Life

EDITED BY ADAM ISAIAH GREEN

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

Contents

Foreword by Omar Lizardo

Preface by Verta Taylor

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION Toward a Sociology of Collective Sexual Life

Adam Isaiah Green

CHAPTER 1. The Sexual Fields Framework

Adam Isaiah Green

CHAPTER 2. Sexual Field, Erotic Habitus, and Embodiment at a Transgender Bar

Martin S. Weinberg and Colin J. Williams

CHAPTER 3. Sexual Field Theory: Some Theoretical Questions and Empirical Complications

Peter Hennen

CHAPTER 4. Rejecting the Specifically Sexual: Locating the Sexual Field in the Work of Pierre Bourdieu

Matt George

CHAPTER 5. Circuits and the Social Organization of Sexual Fields

Barry D. Adam and Adam Isaiah Green

CHAPTER 6. Sexless in Shanghai: Gendered Mobility Strategies in a Transnational Sexual Field

James Farrer and Sonja Dale

CHAPTER 7. The Crucial Place of Sexual Judgment for Field Theoretic Inquiries

John Levi Martin

References

Author Index

Subject Index

Foreword

The book that you hold in your hands is presumably about sex and sexuality. However, to read this book as one that is exclusively about sex, narrowly conceived as a subject matter of social scientific investigation, would be a grave mistake. For in many ways this book is about sexuality only insofar as the social organization of sexual desire provides a strategic microcosm within which to address some of the most fundamental questions in social theory. In the parlance of ethnomethodology, in what follows sexuality and sexual desire are not only a topic for analysis but also a resource through which the various contributors attempt to address (and maybe provide a resolution to) some of the central problems in the theory of action today. Therefore, yes, this is a book about the social organization of sexual fields precisely because the social organization of sexual fields allows us to begin to conceptualize in the most fruitful way possible the organization of action and motivation across all fields of action. This statement acquires more significance when we remind ourselves that if we are to develop a coherent approach to the explanation of social action, that approach must perforce take the form of a field theory (Martin 2011). If social theory is to make progress in explaining why persons are motivated to do what they do, then we must come to terms with desire. Sexual fields are the sites where we can find the nonrandom organization of desire.

There are some eerie parallels between theoretical developments in sexuality studies and the theory of action since the 1970s. The key challenge has always been to provide a coherent explanation to what is an obdurate observation: sexual desire and even sexual behavior are patterned and regular; the issue is to attempt to account for the origins of this regularity. We may call this the problem of sexual order (or, maybe even more accurately, the sexual problem of order). Social learning models attempted to shed light on the problem of sexual order by proposing the (fantastic) hypothesis that this order could be explained by building this model into the actor. Via a massive learning process, actors could be molded into desiring subjects; sexual styles and modes of self-presentation acquire regularity via processes of identification with and imitation of available, culturally sanctioned role models. This approach domesticates desire by making it a pliable product of institutionalized cultural scripts. This contrasts with the decided nondomestication of desire in the body of scholarship that came to be known as queer theory (Green 2007). Here, rather than being a product of social conditioning, desire (especially non-heteronormative desire) is that which destabilizes any attempt to create order via the imposition of a set of authoritative discourses. Yet, precisely because of the fact that desire is recovered as a subversive, destabilizing force, we lose the capacity to properly theorize it (because it becomes a veritable deus ex machina). If in standard approaches in the sociology and psychology of sexuality desire is caused by some sort of social process, the deconstructive penchant of queer theory questions the very capacity to engage in this sort of explanation in the first place, without reifying the very same categories that are supposedly doing the explanation.

At the level of epistemological challenges in the explanation of social action, this impasse feels a lot like déjà vu. In fact, it seems to recapitulate a rather familiar story. This is the story of how, after more than a hundred years of trying to produce scientific accounts of human action, social scientists have instead left in their wake accounts that, when they sound scientific, fail miserably at explaining anybody’s action (and fail in equal fashion at convincing any real person that that’s an account of their own or anyone’s action) and, when they actually succeed in explaining action, do not end up sounding very scientific (they essentially reproduce the very explanations that people give for why they do the things that they do). While this story seems unrelated to the contents of the book that you are about to read, it is actually a prelude to my main point—namely, that a field theory is our best bet at developing an account of action that actually explains why people do the things they do (or why they want the things they want, which in some cases—the successful ones—amounts to the same thing) in a way that does not ultimately amount to a paraphrase of their own explanations with long Latinate words and that is actually recognizable as an account of somebody’s action for everybody, expert or layperson alike.

The contours of the problem are now well known, but solutions continue to be elusive. In their attempt to explain why people (or the folk, as distinct from expert scientists) do the things that they do, social scientists rely on a fairly well-established model of how beliefs and wants combine to produce action. It has long been noted—sometimes with glee, at other times with embarrassment and chagrin—that there is nothing particularly special (or even scientific) about this particular account of action, for it happens to be indistinguishable from that which the folk (whose action the social scientist is putatively trying to make sense of) use to account for their own and each other’s actions (Heritage 1984). The recipe goes like this: if you want to explain why people do what they do, all you have to do is link what people want to what they believe in order to derive some sort of plausible story (e.g., one that preserves the rationality of the actions that follow) for why persons do one thing and not the other in some sort of setting or situation (generic or specific) (Parsons 1937).

In this respect, the fundamental model of the explanation of action that continues to dominate the social sciences is, as our colleagues in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of action would be quick to point out, a form of "belief-desire psychology. Here, the desires provide the motivation or the force" that impels actors to act, and the norms provide the grooves that canalize that action and make it regular and predictable. It is a rather unremarked fact in the philosophy of action that desire stands at the center of any coherent attempt to explain social action, but so little has been done to theorize the nature and provenance of this desire.

Just as in philosophy, there have been various (failed) attempts in the social and human sciences to wiggle out of the strictures of belief-desire talk. The desire (pun intended) on the part of social scientists and philosophers to find an explanatory vocabulary of action that is not shared by the folk is actually perfectly understandable, for, if the language that we (as social scientists) use to explain action is the same as that used by the very people whose action we want to explain when they account for their own activity, then it seems like the job of the social scientist (as an expert endowed with some sort of specific explanatory authority) in this whole thing is quite superfluous. In fact, taking this insight to its ultimate conclusion leads to a dissolution of (or the imposition of a symmetry between) the social scientist/folk distinction so that social science discourse merges into folk discourse as just another, not more scientific and certainly not more authoritative, way of making sense of one another’s actions. Note that this ethnomethodological (or populist) diagnosis of traditional action theory functions as a deconstruction of the very explanatory project of establishment sociology.

In between the epistemological bumbling of those who think that action is an effect of (sociological?) causes and the enlightened deconstructionism of those who revel in controverting the experts and joining the folk as just another producer of accounts about action without claiming any special epistemological or authoritative validity, there lies field theory. Like the standard explanatory model, field theory keeps all the folk vocabulary around, including talk of beliefs and desires, norms and valuations. Unlike the folk, however, who can do very well in accounting for their action by pointing to the unproblematic (taken-for-granted) qualities of those beliefs and wants, a field theory is not content with remaining at the level of phenomenology. Instead, acknowledging the unquestionably local validity of the felt qualities of both objects and situations as sufficient for the motivation of action, a field theory attempts to disaggregate qualitative judgments predicated on objects as glosses that point to the bundle of relations within a space of position takings. This space is never exhausted by the local phenomenology of any one actor; instead, all actors experience the qualitative impact of objects from their position without making this judgment necessarily invalid (each judgment is perspectival, but the global organization of perspectives can be reconstructed by the analyst).

A field emerges when the qualities imputed to a given set of objects by the relevant set of actors align themselves nonrandomly along some intuitively graspable dimension of valuation and evaluation. These qualities thus come to be dually constituted by the bundle of relations that specify the positions that each actor occupies in that arena. Fields unite the relevant qualities, which are retrieved from objects, by actors, endowed with the relevant capacities, who, because of their sensitivity to these qualities, come to be organized in a positional space. The act of quality retrieval and perception (that’s ugly; that’s sexy) is a judgment.

As shown in the various contributions that follow, qualities specify the relation that an actor, endowed with a set of a capacities built via a specific history of acquisition, has in relation to a given object the qualities of which she is sensitive to; in retrieving a quality the actor directly perceives her relation to the object. Through this mechanism, actors, qualities, objects, and judgments come to be mutually specified: thus, the positions of the various actors are specified by their distribution of judgments across the relevant objects; the position of the objects in the field is specified in the same way (an object’s position is given by the distribution of judgments across the actors). Fields can develop across a very diverse set of judgments all tied to some sort of defining quality. Here, the desire for the object is endogenously organized via routine experience in the field, experience that results in the honing and refining of an erotic habitus (Green 2008a). No longer do we need to presuppose that desire is some amorphous energy waiting for exogenous cultural scripts to give it organization. In fields, desire is endogenously organized, and action is immanently ordered.

A field theory is thus primarily a theory of desire—what people want. In that respect, it reverses the perennial concern (in action theory) with beliefs and the relegation of wants to some sort of exogenous process. Because fields are essentially constituted by the nonrandom organization of desire and the desires are directed at persons who are simultaneously objects of desire and desirers of other persons/objects, sexual fields are (to borrow a phrase from the French literary theorist Roland Barthes) the field degree zero and, thus, the privileged case from which to empirically investigate how action is ordered within fields.

This is important because a lot of the empirical development of field theory has been done in settings in which desire for objects (paintings, books, scientific articles) or products mediates between actors. In sexual fields, no such external objects are required to mediate between persons. Sexual fields represent the limiting case in which persons encounter one another in their dual role as both contributors to the organization of the field via their own classifying judgments and objects of classification open and vulnerable to the judgments of desire and quality of the other players. Sexual fields thus induce a purely endogenous dual ordering of persons and objects in which the persons (and those persons’ qualities) are the objects. Objects are arranged in an order according to the rank of the persons who choose them, and persons are arranged in an order according to the rank of the objects that they choose. Sexual fields are unlike other fields in that we encounter persons on both sides of the ledger.

In this respect, it is important to not underestimate one important feature of sexual fields: the fact that their foundation in desire is impossible to ignore. All fields are, of course, founded in desire; insofar as to desire an object is to recognize in that object the qualities that allow us to enter into an appropriate relation with it (and by implication with other persons who also align their desire toward the object in similar or opposed ways), this cannot be any other way. However, in most other fields, these fundamentally erotic foundations of social integration are euphemized away, even sublimated, so what was initially desire is misrecognized as something else. In sexual fields, desire is out in the open for all to see, as is the negative of desire: rejection. It is precisely because the pattern of acceptances and refusals is so apparent and the ordering of actors within these sets of relations so stark that sexual fields reveal the fundamental dynamics of fields in such a strategic way.

It is no wonder that, when trying to characterize that which energizes actors to engage in action within a field by competing for that which is at stake, Bourdieu resorts to the Freudian term libido (1997b, 167). The contributions that follow show how, in mutually constituting one another as both subjects and objects of desire, field actors effectively invest themselves (and their bodies) in games of mutual cognition and recognition from which the deepest foundations of social order are revealed in seemingly mundane acts of erotic judgment.

Omar Lizardo

University of Notre Dame, 2012

Preface

Verta Taylor, University of California, Santa Barbara

This book illuminates the concept of sexual fields, one of the most important developments in contemporary sexual theory. Until recently, sociologists viewed sexuality as part of a natural order in which biological sex, gender, and sexuality are closely linked and relatively immutable. Sexual Fields: Toward a Sociology of Collective Sexual Life moves the study of sexualities to the mainstream of sociological analysis by proposing a distinctively social framework for understanding the various types of collective erotic life—singles’ bars, gay male leather communities, heterosexual dating Web sites, gay bathhouses, women’s coffeehouses, sex/circuit parties, erotic chat rooms, drag bars, S/M clubs, swingers’ resorts, trans bars, college hookup cultures, et cetera—that cater to a plurality of desires, practices, and bodies found throughout Western societies. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of practice and his concept of the sexual field, Adam Isaiah Green and the contributors to this volume illuminate the power of the sexual fields approach to shed light on the social organization of erotic life in the variety of specialized sexual subcultures that have developed in modern societies. The concept of sexual fields refers to the institutionalized matrix of erotic relations and preferences within particular social spaces that links social structure to individuals’ sexual desires, practices, and identities. It is a pathbreaking approach that allows us to understand the social structure of the multiple and distinct erotic worlds that constitute the complex sociosexual landscape of a given neighborhood or community and, thus, understand how individuals’ erotic choices and sexual scripts are structured by social factors, including race, class, gender, age, ability, and ethnicity, as well as how different kinds of sexual fields are connected to the political, social, cultural, and commercial conditions of neighborhoods and communities.

In the past three decades, sociologists have proposed various frameworks for analyzing sexuality. Social constructionism, which dominated the study of sexuality in the 1980s, represented the first theoretical attempt to denaturalize sexuality by calling attention to the social basis of sexual desire and identity. Because the social constructionist tradition grew out of social problems theory, early research on sexual subcultures in sociology concentrated on the study of deviant sexualities, such as prostitution, pornography, and especially homosexuality. The essays in this collection represent the work of a new generation of scholars who understand that sexual life is not monolithic; rather, it resides in semiautonomous erotic worlds or specialized sexual milieus with distinctive preference structures, sexual and otherwise, that shape individuals’ choice of partners, sexual practices, sexual scenes, and even sexual identities. Whereas research in the social constructionist tradition treated sex and sexuality as properties of individuals, the sexual fields approach emphasizes the social or collective aspects of sexual desires, practices, and identities, accentuating the relationship between sexuality, social structure, culture, and politics.

If social constructionism failed to address the structural and institutional basis of sexuality, it took queer theory, which originated in the humanities, for scholars to recognize the significance of the heterosexual/homosexual binary as the structural foundation of a modern regime of sexuality that regulates and disciplines individual identities by excluding and devaluing other ways to frame the self, the body, and sexual desire. In the 1990s, queer theory burst on the scene to challenge essentialist constructions of sexuality and gender and to interrogate how sexual subjectivity is constructed and regulated through discursive practices and gender and sexual performances that reinforce heteronormativity. Heteronormativity, according to Schilt and Westbrook (2009, 441), is the suite of cultural, legal, and institutional practices that maintain normative assumptions that there are two and only two genders, that gender reflects biological sex, and that only sexual attraction between these ‘opposite’ genders is natural or acceptable. Queer theory advanced the study of sexuality by introducing the idea of a sexual system—or a matrix of sexual meanings, discourses, and practices embedded in social institutions—that had been absent in social constructionist perspectives on sexuality. The hallmark of queer theory has been its emphasis on the identity performances and narratives people use to resist, challenge, and subvert the regimes of normality that bear on the sexual and gender status quo. But, because of its origins in the humanities and literary studies, queer theory has been biased toward cultural analyses, ignoring sociology’s tradition of social structural and institutional analysis that fore-grounds the role of institutions and socialization in shaping the sexual.

The sexual fields approach represents a tremendous advance in the sociology of sexuality by viewing sexual subcultures in their own terms, rather than through the lens of deviance, as was the case with social constructionism. The study of sexual fields embraces the agenda of queer theorists by turning its gaze on and making visible the queer, which, by definition, is whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant (Halperin 1997, 62). The sexual fields framework also provides a theoretical bridge that connects the social structure of a sexual field to individuals’ sexual scripts, the sexual script being, heretofore, the primary conceptual lens used by social constructionism for understanding the imprint of the social on sexual desires, behaviors, and identities. This is a book that every scholar of sexuality should own. The sexual fields approach likely will set the research agenda for the sociological study of sexuality over the next several decades. The contributors to Sexual Fields are creating a new and distinctively sociological theory of sexuality, and this book represents the state of the art as far as the sexual fields approach is concerned.

Acknowledgments

The completion of this book is a milestone in a long journey across two countries and multiple institutions of higher education. Its ideas emerged in the presence of a few very special mentors, a few very special friends, a few terrific colleagues and students, a few doubters, and one very important convert.

Of course I have to start at my roots: My dad is a man of tremendous generosity and heart and made the journey imaginable and believable. My mom passed to me the gift of writing and issued the call to develop a voice. Viola gave me unconditional love. And Nick, the pup, kept me glued together after I had shattered into a thousand pieces of despair.

At college I was first found by Margaret Hofeller, a social psychologist who taught me about attribution processes, probability curves, and the possibility of a career in the social sciences. Warren Mintz brought the human experience to sociology. And, when a few years after graduation I showed up lost at the office door of Linda Longmire, I was welcomed back into the academy with open arms, good humor, and an abundance of opportunities to make something of my life. Thank you, Linda.

In graduate school I had the good fortune to receive the meticulous and steadfast mentorship of David Greenberg. By dint of their genius, Jeff Goodwin and Robert Max Jackson dazzled and inspired. Kathleen Gerson was a first-rate mentor, a brilliant big-picture thinker, and now a dear friend.

I owe every success following graduate school to Brian Powell, who plucked me out of NYU, supervised my work as a postdoctoral fellow at Indiana University, and offered unwavering good spirits and an occasional, much-deserved slap on the snout. B, as I call him, is nothing short of an angel in my life. Jane McLeod generously delivered me to medical sociology, patiently read my stuff with razor-sharp analytic acumen and blunt, no-bullshit assessments, and helped me become a better thinker than I was when I had entered the program. Finally, Tim Hallett was the earliest supporter of bringing Bourdieu to sexual life, and I am especially thankful to have fortuitously crossed paths with him at this vulnerable time in my intellectual development.

I have been blessed with a few very dear friends. Doron, my fairy godmother, has spent nearly two decades now protecting me from the world and perhaps most from myself. My roommate and friend Norm—an acquired taste—has been an unexpected source of gravity and peace of mind. Liena Gurevich’s smart comments on my job talk were pivotal in my hiring at the University of Toronto, and I am always grateful for her companionship. Jormah has been an emotional rock and an extraordinary champion of mine.

The book itself is a product of the intelligence and creative energy of a handful of scholars who took a chance to think outside the box. John, Matt, James and Sonja, Marty and Colin, Peter and Barry, I am eternally indebted. Thank you!

I must also thank Brigid Burke and Rachael Carson, talented graduate students, both of whom took great care in the preparation of the manuscript.

To Doug, well, what can I say? Thank you for listening and, eventually, believing! No one loves your rhetorical efflorescence more than I.

Finally, I have to thank Karrie Ann Snyder, who first came into my life at the start of graduate school in a flower dress, a fluffy perm, and an odd rambling bit about car noises and finger dances. Karrie held my hand through a three-semester statistics sequence and showed me how to turn a fraction into a percentage on a calculator. No one on the planet knows me so deeply or has witnessed so patiently the vicissitudes of my life. I literally don’t know who I’d be without her.

INTRODUCTION

Toward a Sociology of Collective Sexual Life

Adam Isaiah Green, University of Toronto

As a doctoral student in New York City, I read social theory and searched for a life partner at the same time, which meant, in practical terms, that my intimate life became an object of study. As well, I bartended and worked as a bouncer at gay bars and nightclubs to cover the exorbitant rent of my Manhattan studio, my jobs affording me first-hand observations of sexual social life even when I was not myself an active participant. Hence I was both a player in and an observer of the game throughout my graduate career, until a move to the Midwest for a postdoctoral fellowship. And there, in a small, quiet office at Indiana University, far removed from the Sturm und Drang of sex and New York City, I had time to reflect on my experiences with a new set of eyes. Indeed, there was no question that I had been embedded in a very particular youth-oriented, middle-class, white-dominated, urban gay milieu while living in Manhattan, variations of which had been described in outstanding accounts such as Martin Levine’s Gay Macho (1998), Francis Fitzgerald’s The Castro (Fitzgerald 1986, 25–120), and Martin Weinberg and Colin William’s Gay Baths and the Social Organization of Impersonal Sex (1975a), to name only a few. But, as insightful and provocative as they were, these accounts produced less a general framework for thinking about contemporary sexual social life than an account of the institutions and practices of