This article draws on in-depth case studies of 61 women and men of diverse sexual identities to show how gender, while apparently diminishing in significance, continues to shape interpretations and experiences of virginity loss in complex ways. Although women and men tended to assign different meanings to virginity, those who shared an interpretation reported similar virginity-loss encounters. Each interpretation of virginity—as a gift, stigma, or process—featured unequal roles for virgin and partner, which interacted with gender differences in power to produce (...) interpretation-specific patterns of gender subordination, only one of which consistently gave men power over women. (shrink)

Modern urban life is increasingly characterized by specialized erotic worlds designed for sexual partnership and sexual sociality. In this article, I build on sociological theory developed in areas other than the sociology of sexuality to formulate a framework uniquely suited to the analysis of such modern erotic worlds--the sexual fields framework. Coupling Goffman's social psychological focus on situational negotiation with a Bourdieusian model of routine practice, the sexual fields framework highlights the relationship of interactional work to fields of objective relations (...) wherein historically specific erotic schemas acquire a structural manifestation that erotic players must navigate. In so doing, the sexual fields approach advances a set of sensitizing concepts for identifying the structures of collective sexual life, and raises a set of new lines of sociological inquiry, including the relationship of sexual fields to both psychoanalytic and macro-level structures and processes. (shrink)

This study draws on semistructured interviews with 19 white, rural, straight-identified men who have sex with men to understand how they perceive their gender and sexuality. It is among the first to use straight men’s own narratives, and helps address the underrepresentation of rural masculinities research. Through complex interpretive processes, participants reworked non-normative sexual practices—those usually antithetical to rural masculinities—to construct normative masculinity. Most chose other masculine, white, and straight or secretly bisexual men as partners for secretive sex without romantic (...) involvement. By choosing these partners and having this type of sex, the participants normalized and authenticated their sexual encounters as straight and normatively masculine. The participants engaged in bud-sex, a specific type of male–male sex that reinforced their rural masculinity and heterosexuality. The married men framed sex with men as less threatening to marriage than extramarital sex with women, helping to preserve a part of their lives that they described as central to their straightness. The results highlight the flexibility of heterosexuality; the centrality of heterosexuality to normative rural masculinity; how similar sexual practices carry different meanings across contexts and populations; and the social construction of masculinities and sexualities by age, race, gender, time period, and place. (shrink)

In the sociology of sexuality, sexual conduct has received extensive theoretical attention, while sexual desire has been left either unattended, or, analyzed through a scripting model ill-suited to the task. In this article, I seek to address two related aspects of the problem of desire for sociology—what might roughly be referred to as a micro-level and a macro-level conceptual hurdle, respectively. At the micro-level, the sociology of sexuality continues to reject or more commonly gloss the role of psychodynamic processes and (...) structures in favor of an insulated analysis of interactions and institutions. At the macro-level, the sociology of sexuality has yet to provide an analysis of the structural antecedents of sexual ideation. Scripting theory, grounded in a social learning framework, cannot provide a proper conceptual resolution to these problems but, rather, reproduces them. By contrast, I argue that an effective sociological treatment of desire must incorporate a more penetrating conception of the somatization of social relations found in Bourdieu’s notion of ‘embodiment’ and his corresponding analysis of habitus. In this vein, I develop the sensitizing concepts erotic habitus and erotic work, and apply these to a cross-section of feminist and sociological literatures on desire. I argue that a framework grounded in embodiment, but complimented by scripting theory, provides a promising lead in the direction of an effective sociology of desire. (shrink)

This article gauges the progress that sociologists of gender and sexuality have made in employing the insights of queer theory by examining four recent monographs that have utilized aspects of queer theory in their empirical work: Rupp and Taylor, Seidman, Bettie, and Schippers. The article uses the insights of queer theory to push the monographs in an even “queerer” theoretical direction. This direction involves taking more seriously the nonnormative alignments of sex, gender, sexuality, resisting the tendency to essentialize identity or (...) conflate it with the broad range of gender and sexual expression and treating the construction of intersectional subjectivities as both performed and performative in nature. The analysis of these texts also insists that a queer sociological theory situate its emphasis on discursive power more firmly in economic, political, and other institutional processes. Ethnographic methods are proposed as the most useful way of combining queer theory with sociological analysis. (shrink)