Culture and the Sociology of Sexuality: It's Only Natural?

Abstract

This article locates six themes in the overlap between the sociology of culture and the sociology of sexuality, highlighting both institutionalized and discursive forms of power. These themes include (1) works that develop or problematize economic metaphors in the study of sexuality; (2) studies of commercial sex that problematize cultural assumptions about sex, money, and morality; (3) explorations of “nonsexual”-seeming institutions, which can reproduce or challenge hierarchies of race and gender as they transmit sexual norms; (4) considerations of the sexual underpinnings of citizenship and personhood; (5) analyses of mass-mediated discourses of sexual personhood; and (6) critiques of sociology itself, as reproducing discursive power by neglecting to problematize certain assumptions about sexuality. The article ends by considering sociology's relationship to humanities-based queer theory, arguing that sociologists should bring analyses of emotions and feelings rules into our considerations of how people develop a sense of self through social interactions.

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