Abstract
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.
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Notes
It is important that in linking the dispositions of erotic imagination to the social order that one does not overstate this relationship and, extending the caution of Wrong (1961), construct an oversocialized human eroticism. As I argue further below, I take it for granted that human sexual desire is a quite complex and fluid composition of drives, emotional injury and loss, semi-conscious strategies of revenge, compensation, and the like (c.f. Stoller 1985), and cannot be reduced to a sociological explanation.
For an interesting exception, see Bem’s (1996) multifaceted model of sexual orientation, which posits a dynamic developmental trajectory that originates in physiology but intersects with childhood interactions in gendered play groups. This theory, however, is meant to explain sexual orientation as opposed to the substance of desire within a given object-choice.
Specifically, Laumann and Gagnon (1995) define master status in the United States as: “socially interpreted physical attributes such as gender, race, and age, or other socially salient characteristics, such as marital status, educational background, political orientation or religious affiliation” (p. 191).
This is not to suggest that Bourdieu saw no role for more traditional psychoanalytic interpretations of intrapsychic process, such as sublimation (for instance, see Outline of a Theory of Practice on male sexuality), but rather to stress that Bourdieu held an ambivalent relationship to psychoanalysis, preferring to situate psychology within a broader sociological referent—i.e., a “socioanalysis.” As Fournay (2000) notes of Bourdieu: “It may be noted that all the keywords of the Bourdieusian vocabulary (“a quality of social logic,” “institute,” “fields,” “habituses,” “essentially social,” “social universes,” “engendered”) are strategically placed like a quarantine line around the word “libido” as though to neutralize it, or block it, in the name of a “quality” of sociology that appears, decidedly, threatened” (p. 109). And see Widick (2003) for a similar point.
This is not to suggest that the concept of habitus entirely dissolves disciplinary distinctions between sociology and psychoanalysis. As an example, habitus cannot address the operation and organization of primary process, though the former may indeed inform the substance of the latter.
While the modern West has operated with a sex epistemology organized around binary sex categories (i.e., male and female), other cultures conceive of sex in more expansive terms, including the recognition of a “third” gender, as among the berdache of Native North American societies, the travesti of Brazil, and the hijra of India.
One could argue further that even as the irrational domain of primary process—determined by its own pre-established laws—will bear on how an individual experiences the world, primary process exists in relation to the self’s encounter with the social order. That is, the self is itself an object in social space and, as such, will not have a universal experience of the world of objects, but one patterned by social forces. Hence, the raw material of experience and perception that is metabolized by primary process, situates primary process in relation to the social world—i.e., society penetrates primary process via socially patterned experience.
Ethel Person (1999) coined the phrase “erotic signature” to indicate, in psychoanalytic terms, the specificity of a given individual’s desires. Like a fingerprint, an “erotic signature” distinguishes individuals in relation to the particular scripts that arouse them. The erotic habitus concept is commensurable with this term, but provides a stronger emphasis on the sociological, collective basis of seemingly “individual” sexual fantasies.
Catharine MacKinnon (1989) makes a related point in relationship to women’s sexuality. MacKinnon argued that women, in the context of patriarchy, are not free to experience sexual pleasure but are subject, rather, to an androcentric, eroticized violence. Hence all heterosexual encounters, even those that bring pleasure, are but mere variations of rape. By contrast, Sedgwick (1997), along with other “pro-sex” feminists, regards BDSM as a potentially therapeutic engagement with power and violence by transposing these into a sexual improvisation where these themes can be explored and managed.
In a related point, Foucault (1980) has argued that power, as a form of subjectification, generates pleasure at the same time it produces dominated subjects.
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Acknowledgment
The author wishes to thank Anna Korteweg, Jim Davis, David Greenberg, and Barry Adam for their very helpful insights.
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Green, A.I. Erotic habitus: toward a sociology of desire. Theor Soc 37, 597–626 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-007-9059-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-007-9059-4