Sie sind auf Seite 1von 1

Theor Soc (2008) 37:597–626

DOI 10.1007/s11186-007-9059-4

Erotic habitus: toward a sociology of desire

Adam Isaiah Green

Published online: 9 February 2008


# Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2007

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.

One of the tasks of sociology is to determine how the social world constitutes
the biological libido, an undifferentiated impulse, as a specific social libido.
–Bourdieu 1994:78
In the sociology of sexuality, desire is an elephant that sits upon the scholar’s
desk, seen by all but addressed by few. This is particularly curious given that the
discipline rests, implicitly, upon a desiring subject. In fact, present day scholars of
sexuality have a large, rich, and diverse body of literature from which to conceive
sexual identities, practices, communities, politics and polemics, but comparatively
little by way of a sustained, systematic analysis of desire itself. If Epstein (1991) was

A. I. Green (*)
Sociology Department, University of Toronto, 725 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, ON, Canada M5S 2J4
e-mail: adamisaiah.green@utoronto.ca

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen