Erotic Habitus

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 crosssection 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: [email protected]