ABSTRACT
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 forty 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.
