The study of collective intimate life – including everything from with whom we “hook up” to whom we marry – has been rather devoid of sociological imagination. This is not to suggest a lack of insightful work on sexual identities, communities, and practices; indeed, the last 40 years have seen a proliferation of probing sociological research on these topics, beginning at least as far back as 1974 when Gagnon and Simon developed a social constructionist approach to the study of sexuality that moved beyond the frameworks of deviance and social control. Rather, I suggest that desire and desirability have been understood, with too few exceptions, in a manner that reduces them to either idiosyncratic properties of subculture, or altogether outside the scope of what concerns most sociologists of intimate life – marriage markets [but for a few important exceptions, see Epstein (1991) and Whittier and Melendez (2004)]. But in-between these two polarized positions is a meso-level domain of collective sexual life for which most individuals in the modern world are familiar and which operates via sociological principles to shape and transform the very things we want and desire in a partner. Here is a sociology of collective sexual life, a structured domain of interaction oriented around the pursuit of partnership that I call the sexual field.
A sexual field is a social domain anchored to physical and virtual sites and inhabited by individuals with potential romantic interest in one another. For example, a college fraternity party can be thought of as an event that generates a sexual field where individual participants seek out partnership by orienting themselves toward one another according to norms of desirability that are specific to that particular social domain (Green 2014). Such norms often attach sexual value to particular physical characteristics, such as height, weight, or skin color, along with forms of self-presentation, including choice in clothing, hairstyles, and affect (Armstrong et al. 2006). These norms of desirability, in turn, produce a system of stratification that make some actors more desirable than others. A sexual field, then, is a social space where actors with different degrees of desirability (i.e., what I call sexual capital) convene to find intimate partnership but where status is unevenly distributed, thus lending the field a degree of competition. Although stratification in a sexual field cannot be reduced to race, class, gender, age, and ethnic hierarchies, sexual fields are, nevertheless, social orders that reflect and produce social inequalities, and are therefore an important topic of sociological investigation.
Next, I provide an overview of the sexual fields framework, including its core concepts and its key theoretical insight. Along the way, I use sexual fields research in order to illuminate its concepts. I conclude by highlighting the role of social inequality in collective sexual life and suggest some lines of inquiry that call out for future sexual fields analysis.
The post–World War II era has been characterized both by the increasing autonomy of the sexual sphere from traditional sources of social control (e.g., the family and the church), and the increasing specialization of sexual subcultures (D’Emilio 1983). Hence, when compared to the nineteenth century, actors today have both more autonomy in directing their intimate lives and more specialized options to consider in the pursuit of intimate relations (Giddens 1992; Weiss 2012). Indeed, in the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries, we enjoy, en masse, a semblance of intimate life designed to accommodate highly specific preference structures around partnership to a degree perhaps unrivalled in historical terms. Websites designed to accommodate everything from a fling to a marital relationship make this point especially clear. Today online, one may select from racial, ethnic, and religious preferences (e.g., Jdate.com, AsiaFriendFinder.com), class preferences (e.g., Sugardaddie.com, MillionaireMatchmaker.com), age preferences (e.g., SeniorMatch.com, Cougarlife.com), body type preferences (BigMuscleBear.com, Chubbychasersdating.com), and relationship type preferences (AdultFriendFinder.com, Fling.com), among still others. Similarly, LGBTQ-oriented websites and social apps abound along with real-time brick and mortar sites such as bars, bathhouses, gay-designated neighborhoods, nightclubs, circuit parties, and bookstores. Here, nonheterosexual individuals partake in collective sexual life to cultivate a variety of intimate partnerships and friendships. In total, when one considers the contemporary sociosexual landscape outside the bedroom of the monogamous couple, one finds a staggering array of different kinds of collective sexual life that illustrate their growing independence from traditional institutions of social control, such as the family and the church.
In recent years, scholars of sexuality have sought to makes sense of this proliferation of erotic worlds by building on former social constructionist research, conceiving of collective sexual life as a particular kind of social life (Green 2008, 2014). Drawing from Bourdieusian field theory (1977; 1990) (see the following section), this work understands the search for intimate partnership to occur in the context of a sexual field, each field with its own particular logic of desirability and accompanying distribution of sexual capital (Farrer 2011; Farrer and Dale 2014; Green 2008, 2014; Martin and George 2006). As I draw out in greater detail later, the sexual fields approach entails an analysis of the ways in which partnership preferences, including preferences around sexual, economic, and social attributes, are forged in the context of sexual fields whereby the field organizes both what we desire in another and how we understand ourselves within the sexual status order.
Making sense of sexual fields helps the student of such domains to better understand the dynamics of micro-interaction within these spaces, including who gets approached by whom, who gets left at the margins of interaction, and how deference and demeanor operate over the course of sexual sociality. And from a meso-level perspective, explicating the structure of sexual fields helps the student of sexual social life to understand the broad patterning of systems of judgment that confer advantages upon some and disadvantages upon others.
Bourdieu’s analysis of routine practice, as developed in field theory (see Bourdieu 1977, 1990) is the basis for the development of the sexual fields framework (Green 2008; Martin and George 2006). The chief theoretical insight of field theory is the notion that actors exist relationally in social space, their distinct positions arising as the consequence of differential resources (i.e., the distribution of capital) within the field. Like field theory more generally, key concepts of the sexual fields framework include the concepts of field and capital – and add to these the concepts: sexual sites, structures of desire, and sexual circuits. These concepts are useful to the extent that they help to identify how the things sexual actors want in an intimate partner, and the things that sexual actors need in order to attract such an intimate partner – are, in part, field effects, a product of ecological, social learning, and social psychological processes associated with the field. But before exploring this insight I first review the component parts of the sexual fields framework, beginning with an elaboration of the concept of the sexual field.
In Bourdieu’s (1977, 1990) work, two guiding metaphors capture the field with relevance for collective sexual life (Martin 2011), including the field as a “fields of force” and as a “field of struggle.” Like a field of gravity that brings into alignment the otherwise diverse elements that enter its orbit, the metaphor of a field of force suggests that we consider how collective sexual life is shaped by the structures and processes of any given field, be it an online dating website, a debutante ball, a gay leather bar, a college keg party, or a big-city speed-dating event, to name only a few. That is, upon entering and becoming a participant in any of these sexual fields, one finds that certain lines of action are required to be a relevant “player,” to occupy social space and command the rewards of the field. These lines of action may include self-presentation, such as style, behavior, and the cultivation of a particular body type, along with social practices related to how to approach another, deference, demeanor, the enactment of courting practices, sexual repertoires, nightlife, and lifestyle preferences. One need only consider the contrasting environments associated with a college keg party and a swanky martini bar to imagine how distinct sexual fields require that individual participants align their actions and self-presentation to the logic of desirability specific to each field. As well, sexual fields may require additional individual characteristics and group associations for participation, including one’s occupation, income, race and ethnic background, with whom one socializes and where, religious affiliations, and the like. Websites designed to facilitate long-term dating or marriage, for example, will generally require much more detailed consideration around partner characteristics – including characteristics such as religion, race, and occupation – than the hookup bar with the weekly drink special located in every large college town in North America. This is because the marriage-oriented website and the local pick-up bar represent two distinct sexual fields with their own particular logic of desire and desirability.
To the extent that fields are domains of organized striving, they may also be seen as a field of struggle, like a battlefield or an athletic field. In this sense, field participants occupy social space on account of their distinct, relative positions to one another which are often determined by different degrees of sexual capital between players. These positions confer a “sense of one’s place” within the field along with a corresponding repertoire of lines of action appropriate to their status (Martin 2011). In more common parlance, this idea relates to the notion of being outside of or within the same “league” as a desired other. Thus, the observation, “she is way out of your league!” suggests that a desired woman has much more sexual capital than the desirer.
In a sexual field – say the downtown heterosexual city nightclub – not all men will have access to the most desirable women, and vice versa. To the extent that men and women may vie for the same subset of potential intimate partners, or even simply for significance in this social space (e.g., a sense of visibility and esteem), the downtown city nightclub can be regarded as a kind of battlefield whereby one’s status is determined by and relative to other players in the field. Put in the terms of the sexual fields framework, we might say that nightclub scene participants operate with differential degrees of sexual capital (see discussion of social capital later in the chapter) that stratify sexual actors in their pursuit of field esteem and its rewards, the latter which include securing partnership (or just a phone number) with a partner of one’s choosing. One’s relative status within this field will, in turn, bear on self-assessment, who will approach whom and how, and subsequent practices related to self-presentation and the management of self.
A second key concept in the sexual fields framework – sexual capital – is that type of capital (among other types, including economic, cultural, and social capitals) associated with attractiveness and desirability. Sexual capital confers advantage upon those who possess it within a sexual field. As noted earlier, the precise attributes that determine sexual capital vary across sexual fields as different fields are organized by distinct characteristics of desirability. In this sense, sexual capital is not simply a characteristic of individuals – for example, having a fit body or pleasing facial features – but rather, is simultaneously a property of individuals and a property of the sexual field. Thus, within the context of a given field, individuals possess more or less sexual capital, yet they do not “own” sexual capital (Farrer and Dale 2014). Rather, sexual capital is a relational resource that signals the relationship an actor has to others in the field and to the field’s standards of attractiveness – what Martin and George (2006) call the field’s “hegemonic system of judgments.” In this sense, sexual capital indexes one’s power relative to other players within the sexual field.
However, because desirability in a partner is not reducible to sexual desirability, sexual fields must accommodate a broader notion of what makes someone attractive, including cultural and economic capital. In this sense, it is often helpful to think about how fields legislate not just sexual desirability but a broader kind of capital portfolio possessing different degrees of capitals. Like sexual capital, valued capital portfolios cannot be determined in advance but, rather, take shape differentially between communities, social strata, and sexual fields. Although in some instances actors may convert economic, cultural, or social capital into sexual capital (Martin 2005), in other instances these capitals are desirable in a partner but not themselves sexy. They are thus considered separate from sexual capital but may be as or even more important in terms of providing field status. As a simple example, Buss et al. (2001) shows how women and men, on average, desire a different combination of capitals within the capital portfolio of desired partners, with women placing more value on economic and cultural capital than men, and men putting greater emphasis on sexual capital than women. Interestingly, as women have become more economically enfranchised over time, these differences have diminished, though not completely disappeared (Buss et al. 2001).
A third core concept, structure of desire, captures desire as an aggregate of individual wants and attitudes – that is, the field’s collective judgments of desirability. Collective judgments of desirability materialize at the site of the sexual field and are observable in the representations and patterned interactions of the field. For example, sexual fields often communicate a sexual status order through broadcasting idealized images of what is and what should be important to the clientele, including representations of the perfect “couple” on the front page of a dating website (e.g., characteristics related to race, age, class, affect, body type, presentational style, etc.), the appearance of the bartenders (e.g., including characteristics related to race, age, class, affect, body type, etc.), the décor (e.g., compare the gay leather bar with the upscale martini bar), the name of the site (e.g., the Ramrod), patterns in the fronts of patrons (e.g., dress, adornment, affect), and the patterned written content of website profiles, including descriptions of the likes and dislikes of website members (e.g., “no Asians”; “no daddies”; “under 30 only”; “no fats or fems”). These types of demands are demeaning to those who occupy such statuses and further institutionalize rigid systems of stratification that greatly limit the scope and possibilities of sexual sociality. Structures of desire are also observable in field interactions, including the talk about who is desirable and who is not, observable patterns in who is favored and who is ignored (i.e., who is popular), who is bought drinks and who is left paying for oneself, who gets let in first by the bouncer (and who is stalled or denied entrance altogether), and who earns the most hits, hearts, flowers, or kisses on a dating website.
Taken together, these elements of a structure of desire both reflect and align how individuals understand desirability, including the attractiveness of others and the relative desirability of themselves. That is, to the extent that individuals in a sexual field have an intuitive awareness of the relational nature of “the game,” they are bound to engage in comparison processes whereby they assess the degree to which a given person of interest possesses sexual capital within the field, along with the degree to which they themselves possess the required capitals to hold the attention of such desired person. Rather than understand desirability in purely idiosyncratic or essentialist terms, players in the sexual field act as lay social scientists who are obliged to construct theories around others’ desirability and their own. Hence, structures of desire become crucial to the extent that individual players understand them as determining their opportunities for partnership, including dominant standards of desirability against which they themselves are judged. Moreover, as I explore further later in the chapter, structures of desire can have the effect of re-socializing our desires, such that the things we originally desire change over time following repeated exposure to the field.
The comparison processes by which actors determine the field’s structure of desire, including the sexual status of others and themselves, are usually made in reference to recurring networks of actors who share the field sites we occupy and, in turn, provide the social basis upon which we construct a theory of sexual value. These networks – sexual circuits – are made up of those with whom we regularly “rub elbows” in the field but with whom we lack stronger ties of dependence, such as friends, family members, or coworkers (Adam and Green 2014). Sexual circuits represent patterned flows of individuals and groups that populate particular sexual sites. In Toronto, for instance, Adam and Green (2014) use surveys from Gay Pride attendees and discover ten distinct circuits. These circuits are comprised of patterned groupings of individuals who report attending particular combinations of sites in the prior year, including a distinct subset of fields connected to bars, bathhouses, nightclubs, public restrooms, parks, social apps, and websites. Thus, circuits represent network members with shared interests in particular sexual fields over others, shared lifestyle practices, and in many cases a similar range of sociodemographic characteristics including, most notably, age and race.
Having reviewed some of the major concepts of the sexual fields framework, I turn next to a brief discussion of the framework’s central theoretical insight concerning the transformation of desire and desirability in collective sexual life.
The core theoretical premise of the sexual fields framework holds that desire and desirability are transformed over time as individuals enter collective sexual life and become resocialized in the context of the field. To date, Green (2014) has identified three central ways in which fields “act back” on desire and desirability such that both may be regarded, in part, as changed on account of the field. These include (1) the popularity tournament, (2) socialization, and (3) aggregation and intensification processes. Next, I explore each one individually.
One of the simplest processes by which a sexual field may transform sexual desire and desirability is through the popularity tournament (Green 2014; Martin and George 2006; Waller 1937). In the context of a popularity tournament, one’s relative standing in the sexual field has the tendency to reinforce and even intensify one’s subsequent social status. Thus, Waller (1937) finds that at college co-ed parties, “nothing succeeds like success” – that is, the popular become even more popular. Conversely, one may infer that the unpopular become even less so over time. Put differently, individual partner preferences in a sexual field are not reducible to preexisting, individual desires prior to field participation but, rather, are transformed, to varying degrees, upon entering the “gravitational pull” of the sexual field (Green 2014). Thus, one’s initial field status is consequential for one’s future field standing.
A second core way in which sexual fields act on sexual desires and desirability relates to general processes of socialization. Here, exposure to a given sexual subculture within a sexual field can resocialize sexuality such that we acquire a deeper taste for that which we were previously only mildly interested, or even an aversion to things we previously desired. Weiss’ (2012) ethnographic account of the “pan-BDSM” scene of San Francisco makes this point explicitly clear. In this sexual field, novitiates enter the erotic world of BDSM, often with prior interest in bondage and sadomasochism but without a full appreciation for the relationship of pleasure to pain, the erotic power of a well-skilled “top,” or the erotic potential of “play” scenarios – such as “child molestation” and “slavery” – which, in other contexts, might be quite un-erotic. In a somewhat different vein, in Shanghai, Western Caucasian men favor local Chinese women who participate in the sexual fields of key “ethnosexual contact zones” (Farrer and Dale 2014). Chinese women who seek out these fields are typically younger, on average, then their Western expat-sisters, and hold expat men in higher esteem. Here, the desires of expat men are re-socialized to favor local Chinese women and, consequently, they lose interest in Western women, the latter perceived to be less deferential and more demanding. In this context, we have an instance of the transformation of racialized desires – toward local Chinese women and away from Western expat women – within a sexual field that encourages expat men to cultivate a taste for Chinese women and eschew Western expat women.
Finally, a third central field effect can be seen in an amplification/intensification process that draws from Fischer’s (1975) ecological theory of urbanism and subcultures. With respect to collective sexual life, individual desires are collectivized at the sites of a sexual field such that they obtain a critical mass, exceeding the desires of any given individual to constitute a new, intensified structure of desire. Put differently, structures of desire amplify the individual desires of field participants to produce an intensified, “hyper” realized structure of desire. Levine’s (1998) analysis of the clone sexual subculture of the 1970s and 1980s provides a superior example of this process. Then, the post–World War II gendered sensibilities of gay men participants pooled together as the clone sexual subculture took form, magnifying, amplifying, and intensifying the individually held desires and sensibilities of each man’s construction of masculinity. What resulted was a hyper masculinized “clone” sexual subculture – a “super masculinity” – that intensified their individually held masculine scripts in all aspects of the subculture, from sexual practice to presentation; indeed, even the names and décor of the bars and bathhouses were hypermasculine (Levine 1998). Both the desires and desirability of the clones were transformed as actors entered the gravitational field of the clone sexual field.
Having considered three central ways a sexual field may “act back” upon desire to shape how we think about and experience our own desire and our sense of desirability to others, I turn next to some concluding lines of inquiry for future sexual fields research.
Research from the perspective of the sexual fields framework is in its infancy, and much work remains to be done. For instance, at the broadest macro-historical vantage point, we may ask how sexual capital in any given field is shaped by histories of colonialism, slavery, state-building, globalization, and the like. As well, if Arnett (2007) and other sociologists are correct about the extension of adolescence into the late twenties of contemporary young adults whereby changes in the economy of the developed Western world render both women and men ever more dependent upon parents later into the life course – that is, “emerging adulthood” – we might wonder how these changes will impact intimate life and the sexual field. Indeed, with fewer opportunities for earning a living wage, higher demands for post-graduate credentials and training, and prolonged internal struggles around identity and self-mastery, college-age adults of today will delay marriage and child rearing and establish careers later in the life course than their parents. These kinds of macro-level socio-demographic shifts will undoubtedly bear on the sexual social life that young adults pursue, the latter of which call out for sexual fields analysis.
Of course, the late modern information age, including the introduction of social apps and internet sites that cater to sexual life, has radically transformed the social organization of collective sexual life, increasing both the development of highly specialized sexual fields and ease of access to them. This transformation has facilitated intimate connections, extending possibilities for partnering well beyond the traditional boundaries of time and space. Yet virtual sites, be they dating websites or social applications with GPS technologies (e.g., Tinder; Grindr) are also social in the sense that they are comprised of actors who become visible to one another and who must navigate status expectations in ways not altogether different from real-time sites of sociality. Moreover, because many websites and social apps allow users to search on particular criteria, they facilitate the development of ever-narrower preference structures around age, race, class, ethnicity, religion, body type, relationship type, and so on. This fact is likely to transform how actors, en masse, think about and construct desirability in ways that will surely shape future sexual fields and the ways in which its participants produce and negotiate sexual stratification.
Finally, the relationship of the sexual field to sexually transmitted infections is a substantive line of inquiry that demands immediate attention. Among men who have sex with men, for example, the introduction of promising HIV pre-exposure prophylactic medications (PrEP) and emerging data on the success of anti-retroviral treatment in preventing HIV transmission are likely to transform the social organization of collective sexual life as new sexual identities, such as the HIV “positive but undetectable” and “PrEP user” change the assessment of sexual risk and the subsequent patterning of intimate partnership. But precisely if and how the successful treatment of HIV will bear on collective sexual life, on attributions of desirability, and on the norms of acceptable and “underground” sexual practices, remain as yet unknown and call out for sexual field analysis.
Adam Isaiah Green is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, Canada. His research interests include the study of collective sexual life and, more recently, the invention and practice of HIV prevention praxis. In his most recent work, he has conducted a comparative study of HIV prevention for men who have sex with men in Los Angeles and Toronto, with a focus on the construction of HIV prevention praxis and the politics of HIV prevention more broadly.