The Oxford Handbook of Symbolic Interactionism

Wayne H. Brekhus (ed.) et al.

https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190082161.001.0001
Published: 2021 Online ISBN: 9780190082178 Print ISBN: 9780190082161

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CHAPTER

Sex and Sexuality 

Cirus Rinaldi

https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190082161.013.20
Published: 14 July 2021

Abstract
Symbolic interactionist approaches to sexuality state that human beings become sexual as they become
whatever else and learn sexual de nitions and sexual meanings just like they learn any other kind of
meaning. Therefore, interactionist analysis shifts the focus of inquiry into sex from being sexual
towards becoming sexual, which takes into account how sexualities are produced, organized, and
negotiated, rather than tracing their sources in an immutable (conception of) nature. Sociosexual
meanings give people the chance to de ne themselves and others sexually, to construct their sexual self
and doing sexual things together in the shaping of more complex sexual choreographies and
performance.

Keywords: sexuality, becoming sexual, sexual definition, sexual motives, sexual scripts, sexual
choreographies
Subject: Social Theory, Sociology
Series: Oxford Handbooks
Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online
Introduction

Most of our sexual activity originates in the body, to the extent that as beings, we are and we have in
common a body, much like we respond to external inputs through our organs of perception. However, it
would not be possible to comprehend fully the range of biological and physiological reactions, nor their
e ects, unless we were able to employ a series of meanings used to describe those particular situations that
are usually referred to as sexual situations (Weinberg 2015:xiii). Sociological essentialist and positivist
approaches to sexuality justify the status quo and consider it as provided with a reality sui generis (Plummer

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2007:16); accordingly, this “reality” is de ned as a series of characteristic features that are deemed natural
and that would reproduce themselves mechanically through social structures and hierarchies involving the
body itself, such as ability, ethnicity, race, class, and age, as well as people’s own sense of themselves as
sexual beings (Plante 2006:95). These approaches fail to problematize the interactions of the biological,
psychological, and physiological level and the social, cultural, and contextual dimensions in which they are
embedded. The implicit risk is that we are led to consider sexuality as a direct and mechanical product of
“nature,” whose representations are able to transcend time, society, and history (Rubin 1984:275). In turn,
sociological analysis grounded in essentialism risks invoking “nature” or de ning a particular conduct as
“natural,” thereby positing a particular social and cultural object as essentially “true.” It follows that
sex/sexuality is conceived of as a universal, abstract category that can be applied to any social context across
time and space (Padgug 1992:54). Whereas “essentialist” or “naturalist” perspectives view sex/sexuality as
something “given,” as a set of immutable, “natural,” xed characteristics (Weeks 1985), symbolic
interaction(ism) engages with the idea that human sexuality is fundamentally unstable and variable. By
de nition, “sex” is the e ect of society and of culture, one of many variables that are the e ect of di erent
arrangements and structures (like, for instance, gender, age, class, ethnicity, ability)—it is one element
interconnected with many other factors de ning society. Interactionist analysis allows us to grasp the full
range of human sexualities as the result of the production, organization, negotiation, and transformation
processes that occur in the social realm (Plummer 2002:1). This chapter aims to outline the ways in which
symbolic interactionism shifts the focus of inquiry into sex from being sexual toward becoming sexual, which
takes into account how sexualities are done, rather than tracing their origins in an immutable (conception
of) nature. Symbolic interactionism is mostly concerned with analyzing language and its capacity to typify,
to classify, and to share experiences and events. It pays particular attention to the social reality of social-
sexual worlds, conceived as the result of social interaction and negotiation, as well as of the production of
meanings (DeLamater and Hyde 1998).
Symbolic Interactionism and Sexuality: A Short Outline

The predicament of symbolic interactionism is that, beginning with the process of social learning through
which we employ and negotiate a “repertoire” of meanings that subjects can perform, we develop a speci c
language, a series of names, and meanings de ned as “sexual” that we employ to talk about and label a
particular set of sensations, situations, subjects, and traits (Gecas and Libby 1976). Symbolic interactionism
developed within the work of the pragmatists at the Chicago School in the 1920s. The idea of process and of
the possibility of multiple forms that a single process can take is central to symbolic interactionism. It

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follows that, as a theory, symbolic interactionism is concerned with the interactions, forms of adjustment,
and the mutual in uences between social actors and environment(s), where both human and social life are
seen as emerging processes (Mead [1934] 1962). Key thinkers of this tradition, including George H. Mead and
Robert E. Park, never dealt speci cally with issues of sexuality; others, like William I. Thomas, produced
works that touched on this subject tangentially, drawing from secondary sources mostly borrowed from
anthropology that presented rather stereotyped notions of gender di erences (Thomas 1907). It is only in
recent times that the role of the Chicago School has been reassessed, shedding light on its contribution to
urban studies more generally, and speci cally to understanding the city as “sexual laboratory” (Heap
2003:459), as well as to the study of sexual subcultures (Mumford 1997; Rubin 2002; Heap 2009). In
1
addition to unpublished research and reports, in their canonical texts the Chicago School group has tended
to focus more or less explicitly on sexual themes, though they did so within a moralist and pathologizing
framework that ultimately failed to broaden the scope of a theory of sexualities in a meaningful way. Having
said this, the group never really treated the subject of sex without bespeaking their prudish discomfort,
arguably springing from their position inside the academy, and from the predominant views on sexuality
within the studies of the time, which focused exclusively on exploring (and condemning) social deviance.

The work of Florian Znaniecki is a case in point. In a paper he presented at the rst International Congress
for Sexual Research (Berlin, October 10–16, 1926), he argued that “a sexual act is a social act when it bears
upon a human being as its object and tends to provoke a conscious reaction of this being” (Znaniecki
1927:222), hence taking into account a series of strictly regulated activities. Conversely, and in the midst of
the then-emerging taxonomic approach to human sexuality, mainly through the in uential work of Alfred
C. Kinsey, some key gures of the pragmatist and social interactionist schools elaborated more nuanced
understanding of the subject. E. W. Burgess, for instance, argued that human sexuality, unlike that of
animals (which remained the product of instincts), was the result of attitudes and values emerging from
particular groups and social environments. He went on to claim that it was therefore impossible to speak of
sexual behavior; rather, sexuality was a matter of “conduct,” namely, of “behavior as prescribed or
evaluated by the group. It is not simply external observable behavior, but behavior which expresses a norm
or evaluation” (Burgess 1949:229). Herbert Blumer was the leading theorist in this approach to human
sexuality. His famous study, Movies and Conduct, met the censure of the authorities. This work had been
developed as part of the Payne Fund Studies, a series of researches published between 1933 and 1935 devoted
to the theme of “motion pictures and youth”; the author never published his “Private Monograph on
Movies and Sex” (see Jowett, Jarvie, and Fuller 1996) and just dealt with the topic in a review of Sexual
Behavior in the Human Male of Alfred C. Kinsey and colleagues (Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin 1948), which rst
appeared in a nonspecialist journal (Blumer 1948), and in which he criticized the authors’ exclusive focus on
quantitative data, since they were interested in the mere distribution of sexual outlets and the biological
occurrences of orgasm. By doing so, Blumer believed that these authors were failing to consider that orgasm
should be placed within a “framework of social de nition and social practice” in order to grasp its social
nature, while also allowing to recognize its di erent meanings according to a speci c situation. It was not
until the quantitative interactionist school of Iowa Manford H. Kuhn published his theories on quantitative
social interactionism that a symbolic-interaction view of sexuality emerged, however incomplete. For
Kuhn, sexual actions, not unlike any other type of actions, are more carefully understood as social objects
that determine the range of responses by social actors. Actors apply a prede ned vocabulary of meanings
based on the particular group to which they belong, as well as on the language and sexual motives borrowed
from their own social roles. This also explains why meanings cannot be fully comprehended through the
mere application of physiological factors to account for sexuality (Kuhn 1954:123). John H. Gagnon and
William Simon’s work is one of the most comprehensive studies of sexuality in the postwar period. At the
end of 1950, the two met at the University of Chicago, which was a leading institution in the elds of
symbolic action and interactionist theories. They met again toward the mid-1960s at Alfred C. Kinsey’s
Institute for Sex Research, where they elaborated their “theory” of sexual scripts by building upon

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dominant interactionist approaches, as shown in their volume Sexual Conduct: The Social Sources of Human
Sexuality. The “theory” of sexual scripts represented a further improvement of American pragmatism,
bringing together a number of approaches, among them George Herbert Mead’s theory of social roles, the
in uence of literary critic Kenneth Burke’s dramatism (Burke 1945, 1965), and Wright Mills’s theory of
motives (Mills 1940), as well as key interactionist concepts, primarily the idea of “career” rst introduced
by Everett Hughes (Hughes 1971) and reworked later on by Howard Becker (Becker and Strauss 1956; Becker
1966) and Erving Go man (Go man 1961). Gagnon and Simon’s work led to a major change in sociological
inquiry, through shifting the analytical framework of research on human sexuality away from biological,
psychological, and medical approaches. Speci cally, the two authors replaced the idea(s) of impulses and
physiological activities that were typical of a bio-medical approach with that of symbolic actions. In other
words, sexuality was no longer seen as an “independent variable” but rather as a “dependent” one,
in uenced by social categories such as age, gender, class, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. For Gagnon and
Simon, there are three distinct types of sexual scripts: rst, cultural scripts, which refer to orientations, maps
of instructions, and repertoires of meanings available in social life guiding individuals toward a suitable
choice of speci c roles to perform within a given relationship; second, interpersonal scripts, which refer to
the ways in which individuals apply a certain cultural scenario based on a speci c cultural of interactional
context or situation, and nally, the so-called intrapsychic scripts, which conjure the desiring dimensions of
subjects’ intimate lives (Simon and Gagnon 1986). Sexual conduct therefore results from the combination of
the three kinds of scripts. However, for the most part, a certain relationship can be considered satisfactory
only to the extent that it employs speci c cultural codes as de ned by cultural scripts. Although it is possible
to proceed with an analytical de nition of sexual scripts, each script is interrelated with the others. The
theory of sexual scripts thus allows exploring subjects’ own organization and building of individual sexual
meanings and behaviors. Rather than merely responding to physiological and sexual sensations, subjects
are motivated by their own symbolic system, which plays a fundamental role in the social organization of
their sexual experience. The theory of sexual scripts has been subject to criticism on several grounds. Some
have argued against its lack of consideration for more structural issues (Green 2008a, 2008b); others have
claimed that it does not adequately consider, for instance, the di culties in predicting intrapsychic scripts
due to the changing nature of people’s desires (Green 2014:52); still others have added that this
indeterminacy also extends to the possibility that unexpected sexual meanings may occur (Walby 2012:2,
28–31). Despite this criticisms, sexual scripts nonetheless have o ered a deeper understanding of the fact
that there are more reasons to be sexual than ways of being sexual (Simon and Gagnon 1986). Furthermore,
the theory of sexual script has made it possible to move beyond what can be viewed as more simplistic
aspects typical of a Freudian approach to sexuality that either naturalizes the sexual or sees it as the
founding aspect of social behavior, while failing to consider that “social roles are not vehicles for the
expression of sexual impulse but that sexuality becomes a vehicle for expressing the needs of social roles”
(Gagnon and Simon [1973] 2005:33). Following from what has been discussed so far, the theory of sexual
scripting shares a series of common traits with symbolic interactionism, including the following: (a) sexual
meanings originate in our social interactions and that we learn about them and how to use them through
others, not through our individual experiences; (b) sexual meanings are neither static, nor are they assigned
to things, people, and objects once and for all, but rather, they change much like our perceptions of them;
(c) the attribution of sexual meanings is not an automatic action, but rather, it is always the result of a self-
re exive and interpretative process, which also involves creativity; (d) we are always positioned within
interactions soliciting our search for the “correct sexual meaning” of events, which is also the most
appropriate in terms of context; (e) individuals become fully human through interacting with others, and
furthermore, becoming sexual is part of the development of the social self, of communicative processes, and
of the forms of social organization; (f) all kinds of behavior, including sexual conduct, is the result of
instincts, urges, and objects that we nd in our environment, as well as of the de nitions we use to describe
them; (g) we refer to a set of rules and ways of feeling, which not only allow us to frame our actions as
members of a particular group within the context of the available cultural models, but also provide us with a

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repertoire of feelings that may be seen as desirable in a particular context; (h) it follows that our shaping of
sexual behaviors is not based exclusively on physiological and biological impulses, but rather emerges from
the di erent contexts in which we are involved, as well as from the very processes of building, negotiating,
and establishing the meaning of a certain situation with others. A number of both classic and more recent
theoretical perspectives (Plummer 1982; Longmore 1998) and anthologies (Steele 2004; Weinberg and
Newmahr 2015) have assessed the in uence of symbolic interactionism within a constructionist framework.
As demonstrated by these works, symbolic interactionism remains one of the most compelling analytical
perspectives for the study of human sexualities, even in the context of its interrelations with other
approaches. The next sections in this chapter will discuss the key aspects of becoming sexual from an
interactionist perspective. More speci cally, the analysis will focus on the role of language and of naming in
saying oneself sexually, the processes of socialization and learning, and the status passages involved in
constructing the sexual self and doing sexual things together in the shaping of sexual performances.
Talking sex(ually): The Production of Sexual Meanings and Naming
Desires

Sexuality is built upon meanings that are not necessarily sexual, much in the same way as the language we
use to produce and to communicate sexual meanings is not based solely on sexuality itself. Whenever people
use words in their daily interactions, they are not just shaping their own sexual identity, but rather, and as a
matter of fact, they are doing many more things (Cameron and Kulick 2006:xi–xii). When we say something
sexual, we are saying many things at once: something that has the power to do (or not to do) something else

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(“You can’t be back home so late at night. You’re a girl!”), a form of mastery (“You like this, don’t you? Shut
up and get it”), a form of intimacy (“Doing this with you feels so di erent… I’ve never felt like this before”)
< something about race (“Those migrant bitches like it that way; they never say no/refuse”), something
about social status and class (“Do you really fancy her? Can’t you see she’s just a wench, she’s not for
you!”), and so on. Social actors use language to make sense of what they do, what they expect to be doing,
and what they should do as they are presented with something they view as sexual. If we did not refer to
language, to systems of meanings, and to symbolic and culture mediation, there could be no sex/sexuality as
we know it: if we conceived sexuality as mere natural and organic product, we would end up having a series
of “uncoordinated erections and lubri cations, of sexuality without rule or fantasy, of fumbling inabilities
to interpret acts, orgasms, objects or people as sexual” (Plummer 1984:38). Our ability to interpret, which
allows us to produce meaning, is not ensuing from the fact that we have sexual organs and a sexual
apparatus: the materiality of instincts, urges, and physiological reactions—and here, one can think of
ejaculating or having an erection—are telling us very little (if anything at all) about socio-sexual meanings,
other than that we share some kind of biological “baggage.” What is referred to as nature fails to predict our
own uses of this baggage (and there are many), in both social and symbolic terms. It follows that any
attempt to think of sexuality as a set of prede ned elements including where we have sex, when, with whom
or what, and how is doomed from the start. All these aspects are the product of society, culture, and the
symbolic; they require establishing relationships within the context of dynamics that involve power, status,
toles, meanings, rules, and representations alongside speci c sexual con gurations (Berger and Luckmann
1966:100). As a consequence, we nd ourselves providing meanings and “names” to instincts, urges, and
sensations so that all things, including sexuality, may function properly. Although they are regularly
appearing as “crude” characteristics, as objective and universal facts, their meaning changes based on the
social group to which they refer, the social context, and the di erent historical moments when they occur
(Brekhus 2015). If we succeed in interpreting an “urge” (for example, an erection) and in giving it the
necessary meanings in order to be able to “feel something” or “to do something” (having an orgasm), then
this is only because, in the meantime, we learn nding certain names, responding to speci c urges; we also
learn a series of techniques and modalities with regard to what we should feel and how we should
experience pleasure, thus matching our “desires” and “fantasy.” Yet, this is also the case because we learn
how to self-stimulate adequately, to identify the attending e ects, and to feel satis ed about a speci c
outcome and for a particular reason (often, these exceed the sexual). In other words, we learn to give a name
to what happens to us, to others, and to us when we are with others.

The very moment we use a sexual de nition or label, we are also adding on qualities and expectations to the
thing or person we are referring to, somehow drawing the boundaries (Strauss 1959:19), organizing our
sensorial experiences based on categories available from cultural models that are currently in use in our
social world and in the groups to whom we belong. When a person or a thing is referred to as “masculine” or
“feminine,” for instance, something from the surrounding reality is at stake: we would not expect to call
“masculine” a male subject who wears a miniskirt or some makeup. Along the same lines, a high-pitched
tone of voice is read a sign of a lessened masculinity, or at least as gender ambiguousness; or else, a male
subject acting arrogantly may be read as someone who “knows his own way,” whereas a woman subject
with the same characteristic is likely to be read as a “no-good.” It is necessary to be able to understand the
range of de nitions and names people use to refer to objects, acts, individuals, and relationships available
in their contexts in order to grasp sexual conducts. Furthermore, these de nitions are highly dependent on
context, while also bringing forth speci c social and sexual worlds. Consequently, a particular sexual name
is used or someone or something is de ned as “sexual” based on the uses and semiotic repertoires available
in a speci c social and sexual world; this also changes according to the de nition we employ when referring
to a particular situation, itself a rather ambiguous process. The ensuing repertoires of meanings inform the
names we give to people/things, the reasons we use a particular name to refer to something or someone, the
subjects and actions we identify, and the times we decide to call them by sexual names. So, for instance, a

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man from Nicaragua is called a “macho” or “man-man” (hombre-hombre) if he is the penetrative sexual
partner with either women or men; by contrast, a man who performs as the receptive partner is called
“chochòn,” which is not always used to denigrate him. This allows drawing the con nes of sexual
categories and practices that do not align themselves with our (Western) situated conceptualization of
homosexuality (Lancaster 1992). Sexual meanings orient people’s actions in the sphere of social life. When
they act, people draw from the repertoires that are constituted by these meanings, also through adapting
them dynamically or creatively. By doing so, people become legitimate, competent sexual actors. These
meanings collect stories and semiotic systems through which we all receive information about the
requirements and practices needed to perform our own roles (what Gagnon has termed the sexual “who,
what, where, and why”; see Gagnon 1977). We learn our lines and to improvise certain actions according to
what is required by a given situation as well as to our resources. Su ce it to think that de ning the meaning
of “having sex” is highly problematic, and it varies according to the meanings provided within the di erent
groups. For example, if we stress the role of penetrative sex (penis-vagina) by viewing it as the
quintessential sexual practice, as well as the most rewarding one—namely, as “real sex” or “normal sex”—
then, we may end up considering any other sexual practice as not strictly, or not fully, sexual (e.g., fellatio or
anal intercourse; Sanders and Reinisch 1999). Alternatively, these other practices may be de ned
“immoral” or “dirty sex.” By the same token, to associate a woman’s loss of her virginity with her rst
penetrative sexual act is to deny those women who do not want to experiment with it the status of “former
virgins” (Carpenter 2001:136; Medley-Rath 2007).
Sexual Labeling and Desire

Not only are these practices of naming and labeling used to navigate the world of social relationships, but
they are also used to “let it all work out properly,” that is, as a way for subjects to ensure that (their own and
the others’) expectations are met. When we manage our bodily sensations and physiological urges, we are
also, at the same time, performing individual and collective actions like giving names, labels, and meanings
to ourselves and to others. In other words, we are creating sensorial and corporeal codes that allow us not
only to assign meanings to our actions, desires, and sensations, but also to interpret other people’s

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perceptive behavior (Schwalbe and Mason-Schrock 1996:115; Snow and Anderson 1987). When we bring in
our senses to the so-called social-sexual interactions (touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste) we are
enacting a series of practices and re exive processes, rather than just responding to external inputs or
urges. In this case, we are making these inputs, urges, and desires meaningful, which would otherwise
remain vague and ambiguous, just like we are signifying our “shared common socio-physiological natural
capacities” (Mead 1962:139n, cit. in Dingwall, Nerlich, and Hillyard 2015:75). We could paraphrase Becker
and say that our sensorial and physical experiences of sexual inputs emerge from our conceptualization of
sexuality and its uses, within the development of our experiences of what is socially de ned as sexual (Becker
1966:42). There are no universal inputs and urges that produce general, universal, homogenous responses,
because we all depend on the dynamic, complex interrelations of culture, interaction, and subjectivity. This
is not to deny the materiality of our perceptive organs, but rather to argue that sexual arousal originates
within cultural and symbolic contexts, and that through interpreting meanings we enrich our physiology. In
other words, we experience sexual arousal only as the product of a mediation involving social structures,
cultures, interactions, and social contexts. Our sexual conducts are shaped and organized according to
culturally mediated inner experiences (Lindesmith, Strauss, and Denzin 1975): individuals must become
aware of what is happening to them—that is to say, they must learn to develop a vocabulary in order to
name their (and other people’s) sensations and actions, as well as to provide answers if required. Our
physiological reactions constitute the raw material subject to processes of interpretation involving the
shared common experiences of a particular group; as such, they can be perceived only according to certain
modalities, and they “function” only when endowed with symbolic meanings. We are not reacting suddenly
to a given input; rather, we are providing meanings to what is happening inside (as well as outside)
ourselves, whereby we translate these sensations into names, labels, and linguistic categories. Nothing can
be seen as inherently or ontologically sexual that belongs to social and human life (Parker 2010:58). This
also applies to solitary sex and related masturbatory fantasies, in that they both originate in erotic
imaginary, language, names, and labels that are internalized, together with social in uences and previous
experiences, as well as future projects. All these aspects perform a regulatory function on social behavior
and, by extension, sexual behavior. Subjects are always in the position to be able to somehow control their
own internal symbolic processes; this means that, to varying degrees, their sexual responses and reactions
can always be accelerated, slowed down, or inhibited completely (Lindesmith, Strauss, and Denzin ibid.:
506). In one way or another, even when we think we are surrendering to desire in its most solitary and
intimate form, we are transforming our culture into the internal language of symbolic mediation, which is
also to say that we are creating, more or less deliberately, an (absent) audience for our own activity
(Go man 1959:170–75). We are dealing with cultural repertoires that are acted upon in two di erent ways:
on the one hand, we learn and internalize them as part of the values, norms, and sexual codes available
within a particular historical context; on the other, we mobilize our internal resources to in uence and be
in uenced by them. At times, these internal resources can be experienced as and manipulated into
professional imaginaries, as in the case of pornography. From this point of view, the projection of sexual
fantasies is based on enacting (verbal or visual) scripts that produce collective or individual scenes
(fantasy), for instance, by drawing from hegemonic imaginaries where the codes of masculinity are
represented by speci c forms of heterosexuality (which entail, among others, the sexual availability of
women, whereby they are expected to synchronize with and to respond promptly to males’ sexual
demands). It is not by chance, then, that the few sociological inquiries into sexual fantasies have shown
their di erent production between males and females, beginning with the language and narrative strategies
that are being used. And so, if a higher degree of sensual imagination is detected in women, full of emotional
details and romantic elements, sexual imagination is a characteristic feature of men, who tend to de ne
themselves as active, aggressive sexual actors, as the instigators of sexual activity through making explicit
reference to speci c sexual practices (Kimmel and Plante 2004). The analysis carried out so far is evidence
of the fact that fantasies and intra-psychic processes are rmly embedded in personal contexts and cultural
scenarios that are symbolically mediated by actors (in this case, by referring to gendered structures). These

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fantasies and processes are responsible for the di erential sexual standard: whereas boys are educated to
become proactive subjects when searching for or experiencing their own sexuality, girls are subject to more
severe forms of control, which leads them to internalize a passive or receptive role—a process that rst
takes place in childhood and increases with menstruation. The meanings attached to gender roles and their
social construction contribute, though always in nondeterministic terms, to the de ning construction of
sexual fantasies and desires, and to the kinds of feeling rules that must be displayed by competent gendered
subjects. This also extends to the compromises within what is de ned as identity (hetero)sexual work
whereby, for instance, a couple may develop strategies to indicate the partner’s sexual availability and to
prevent women from displaying their desire(s) openly (Duncombe and Marsden 1996:227, cit. in Kimmel
and Plante ibid.:63). Cultural scenarios allow for varying degrees of specialization of males’ fantasies with
regard to gender(ed) roles, in that heterosexual males usually learn to give sexual meanings to women’s
bodies and physical attributes (“I like butts,” “I am crazy about breasts”), but we do not hear very often the
same or similar comments made by women in public (“I like a particular kind of penis”).

The Definition of the Sexual Situation and the Sexual Definition of the
Situation

Is the patient standing naked in front of their gynecologist doing anything sexual? If a guy has an erection
as he climbs a tree, are we led to assume that he is doing something sexual? Is a naked couple sunbathing on
the beach doing something sexual? And what about a clerk working for a mortuary, reassembling, washing,
and undressing a corpse? Is he, too doing something sexual? For the most part, the answers to the above
questions varies according to our de nition of the situation that we are observing, the names we give to what
is being described, the type of expert gures labeling the behaviors and traits indicated, and the moral
judgement that we hold with regard to the above; they also vary according to our social status, the time
when we make this assessment, and who we make it with, as well as to our religion, ethnicity, and so on. Our
actions must be in accordance with those of others for any kind of social action to be possible; this requires a
shared common de nition of the situation. Contrasting interpretations may occur, for instance, in the adult
world. A case in point is adults’ tendency to view children’s manipulation of their genitals as something
“sexual,” even though boys and girls alike do not give the same (sexual) meaning to what they are doing
(Gagnon and Simon [1973] 2005:10, 30; Plummer 1975:31–32). We would not be dealing with anything
sexual at all in the absence of the elements required to give us a “sexual” name, to give others a “sexual”
name, to de ne the situation in a particular way, to give a speci c name to the sexual actors involved and
their aims, to sketch a particular behavior, and to anticipate its e ects as well as the e ects of the others’
expectations. For the most part, our social experiences are “translated” in sexual terms—they are
“sexualized.” Furthermore, it could also be the case that a wide range of sexual conducts may not have an
exclusively “sexual” origin, or they may be justi ed by referring to a number of reasons to support the idea
that sexuality is highly in uenced by culture (Meston and Buss 2007).

Some people have sex in return for money; others see sexuality as a boost to their self-esteem and a means
to reproduce a successful form of masculinity; still others view masturbation as a way to relieve stress.
There are also males who have sex with other males to create and to reinforce a gender(ed) bond. In the
past, there were forms of sex work and group sex verging on the sacred. Some people may have sex in order
to establish a relationship with others; some others may do in order to prove that they have nally
succeeded in changing their status (“Now that I am 18, I nally made it!”); still others instead are having
group sex to be allowed to enter a confraternity. Some people may use violence to conquer and to
subordinate others (as in the case of ethnic rape in times of war). The proposed shift toward the de nition of
the situation allows us to understand that the actions we perform are not abstract or decontextualized, but
rather they inform our conducts in general, and our sexual conducts in particular, which are always situated.

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Furthermore, attempts at de ning a situation require the ability to grasp or to predict the actions performed
by others, as well as the ability to see ourselves in terms of a particular image emerging within a particular
context. Here su ce it to think of the kind of de nition at stake in those situations when we are asked to
show those body parts usually hidden from the other’s gaze like, for instance, during a meeting with a
urologist or gynecologist whose gender may di er from the one we identify with. In this case, the de nition
of a situation should take into account the existence of nonsexual motives, that is, it needs to be “de-
sexualized”. Furthermore, all the roles involved in the situation (doctor, sta , patient) must act in concert
to maintain this speci c de nition in order to minimize if not neutralize altogether the potential risks of
eroticization of subjects’ conducts, as well as to draw the boundaries between those who show “the body”
and those who observe or examine it (Henslin and Biggs 1978). Given that we are dealing with a context
where nudity is involved (Douglas 1977; Weinberg 1965, 1966, 1967), they also need to avoid using forms of
civil inattention or, more precisely, studied inattention (Go man 1963; Douglas 1977:108;“I am sharing the
same nudist space and as she is talking to me I try to look right into her eyes; I am pretending this man
standing naked in front of me and who’s making me blush and who may turn me on is not actually standing
in front of me, I am faking it while strolling on the beach, I look disinterested and even quite bored”). This
brings us to focus on the situated dimension of sexuality and its components, which do not coalesce to
produce a static, xed dimension. In other words, if our capacities include being sexualized, they also extend
to creating the conditions according to which a certain context may be desexualized. As a result, sexuality
emerges as a dependent variable that we can adjust and adapt to speci c situations, which are going to be
with us across our lifetime as sexual becomings.

Constructing the Sexual Self

Our socialization takes place within cultural contexts that over time have provided a “vocabulary of sexual
motives” we are all asked to learn more or less directly and implicitly, yet which we can also reject. This
vocabulary is not necessarily associated with a speci c sexual activity, but it has socialized us into a series of
analogies, associations, and meanings. This process happened way earlier than our rst contact with
sexuality. Here su ce it to think, for instance, of informal expressions and slang we have heard or may hear
at school, in the street, or those writings on the wall whose meaning exceeds their application to a speci c
sexualized situation (even though they anticipate the majority of dominant social values).

A female adolescent who is thought to be sexually emancipated, with a particular appearance, or her dress
code may be addressed as “whore.” A shy, e eminate, male classmate or who does not play soccer may be
called “queer.” Also, expressions like “suca” (“suck my cock”), which are very common in Mediterranean
Europe, or “ti ho fottuto” (“I fucked you,” used to imply a person’s shrewdness and ability to cheat others)
may be used as a joke within a group of males. This set of examples refers to forms of decontextualized
meanings and their indirect application; however, they produce e ects on a subject’s sexual image of
themselves and others, or even addressed deliberately to others. These expressions do not immediately call
into question a sexual practice, but they function informally as practices of sexual socialization where
sexuality is a tool to say and to mean something that is not strictly sexual (much in the same way as gender
roles, subordination, di erential power relationships, etc.).
In contrast to functionalist theories (Parsons and Bales [1955] 1974) that look at socialization as the
mechanical reproduction of a given social system, symbolic interactionism rejects the idea that sexual
socialization may be grounded upon predictable and automatic phases, but rather, it frames it within the
context of a dynamic, multidimensional, and above all mutual process. Any social-sexual interaction is such
that subjects learn and are provided instructions: the people involved learn how to adapt as required to the
di erent situations, as well as to coordinate their actions with (those of) the others with regard to their
objectives, hence shaping new scenarios. In any society at any given time, people become sexual just like they
become anything else: beginning with their human interactions within their social environment, context,

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and group they learn and collect meanings, much in the same way as they do skills and values with regard to
sexuality (Gagnon 1977:2). There is early evidence that constructing a sexual self is an open process in their
interrelatedness with gender belongings, de ned as the labels attached as part of a process of sociocultural
attribution of roles. Gender belongings are rst ltered through the expectations of meaningful ones, such
as parents, who provide instructions on what is required to be appropriate females or males across the key
stages of child development. It follows that, instead of looking at the early stages of individual life as phases
in the emergence of a “natural” sexuality, they should be dealt with as the timeframe within which most of
the preparatory work aimed at sexuality is being carried out (Gagnon and Simon [1973] 2005:22). Here we
are dealing with the very phases when parents reproduce their normative expectations about gender roles—
with regard to children’s appearance, bodies, and conducts—while also projecting onto them sexual
meanings from the adult world, thus causing children’s feelings of embarrassment, anxiety, pride, anger, or
unease. These processes represent the means through which the sexual norms people internalize and the
feeling rules and emotion they formulate are pre guring informal social processes that will control the
people’s future sexual development (Hochschild 1979). They also entail verbal and nonverbal sanctioning of
girls’ and boys’ explorations of their own bodies, such as the following: “You shouldn’t do this!,” “Stop
touching,” “You’ll get dirty!,” or “Stop touching down there!” These reproaches contribute to children’s
development of a vocabulary of motives (Mills [1940] 1971), including both emotional and sexual motives,
providing them with answers, justi cations, and excuses that are instrumental to the adults’ sexual scripts,
without constituting a particular sexual script they can apply to a given context (Gagnon and Simon ibid.:
26). At this stage, children still receive rather scant, “nontargeted” information from their interactions
with parents. Girls and boys codify this information, which will be used in their di erent learning contexts,
even those that are not strictly sexual, given that the information is not expressed through explicit sexual terms,
but in more general ones involving the moral sphere (“dirty,” “good,” “naughty”). As a consequence, it is
possible to think of gender and sexual socialization within the context of a wider sexual-emotional
socialization process, involving the following: (a) receiving and providing emotional responses according to
our own relationships with meaningful ones; (b) receiving instructions as to what we should feel about
something we do, or feel, and so on; (c) learning the emotional reactions we should expect from others
following a certain gesture or action; (d) beginning to look at our actions based on our own and other
people’s feelings; (e) learning what we should feel at a given time or due to a speci c action, as well as how
to express this (Hochschild op. cit.); and (f) developing romantic norms and emotional roles with regard to
the love stories as they should be (Simon, Eder and Evans 1992; this relates to intragender groups in
general, speci cally to women’s groups). Drawing from Spencer Cahill’s notion of “emotional capital”
(Cahill 1999), there seems to be a particular sexual-emotional capital we accumulate over the period from
childhood to adulthood, which refers to a set of resources that we learn to gather (as we do) and to apply to
the emotional and sexual requests we received during the course of life. In the next phases, in particular
pre-adolescence and adolescence, this kind of information, and the attendant values, moral codes, sexual
cultures, and emotions, are provided by groups of peers and other socialization agencies. Peer cultures are
usually divided along gender lines, allowing their members to develop a moral code through which to
produce speci c images of the (sexual) self and gender(ed) performances. The development of a masculine
moral code inside male peer groups strengthens homosocial bonds between members through the
idealization of toughness, emotional self-control, competition, and the celebration of masculine
aggressiveness (Fine 1987). Through committing themselves to speak about sexuality for reasons that are
not purely sexual, young males subscribe to dominant values and self-validate their masculine status, also
involving the management of other people’s ideas about them (Go man 1959).

Generally, the construction of male homosocial bonds is produced through using the language of violence,
emotional control, and other violent conducts further improved by the acquisition of misogynistic and
homophobic attitudes, the celebration of masculine power, and the public display of a hegemonic
(heterosexual) masculinity. Most of the reference points for the construction of hegemonic sexual roles
originate from the performance of male sexual identarian codes, which need to distance themselves from

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the opposing poles (as in the case of homosexuals, “inadequate” males, and females). This constitutes the
de nition of performance strategies for amplifying masculinity. More speci cally, and as compared to their
female peers, boys are less inclined to limit their freedom and sexual explorations, whereas the former learn
at a very young age that being able to manage feelings of shame and guilt is what is at stake in their
“proper” management of sexuality (Gagnon and Simon, [1973] 2005:31). The process of social-sexual
learning for girls involves their adoption of a reactive sexual role and their learning how to display
reluctance and privacy, while preventing them from receiving speci cally sexual instructions beyond a
punitive, sanctioning framework. The types of informal control of female sexualities are best exempli ed by
di erent types of derogatory expressions usually referred to as “slut talk” or “slut shaming”; these include
modes of address, such as “bitch” and other forms of de nition whose moral contours contribute to the
shaping of their sexual behavior and gendered presentations along the lines of class, racial, and ethnic
belongings (Armstrong et al. 2014; Sweeney 2014). The same line of thought may be applied to the use of
other derogatory terms, such as “queer” and “fag.” Just like the above, in this case the performance of
masculinity is played out alongside the threat of using fag talk in order to ensure that boys conform to
hegemonic masculine codes. Calling someone a whore has got nothing to do with an actual sexual conduct in
the same way as calling someone a queer or fag is used neither to de ne their sexual identity, nor to observe
speci c sexual practices that may actually be carried out. Both instances represent the use of discursive
mechanisms aimed at discipling oneself and others (Pascoe 2007:54).
Sexual Choreographies and Performances

The aspects discussed in the previous section stimulate a re ection on how, in the rst instance, our being
sexual varies according to the rituals and performances in which we are involved as part of our daily lives.
Such is the case any time we perform a role to communicate our identity to one or more audiences from
communicative, expressive, aesthetic, and verbal points of view. From a symbolic interactionist approach,
our being sexual is more likely something we do, a doing (oneself) sexual(ly). It follows that, like other
spheres of social life, sexuality is based on a performative imperative, whereby we must necessarily appear to

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(female or male) others (Edgley 2015:56), or at least a competent and plausible sexual(ized) social actor. The
moment we take center stage from the backstage and stand in front of an audience lends itself to an
understanding of the ways that social actors “dress up for” a particular role or, conversely, “take o ” their
clothes (Go man 1959); the same is true for the reverse movement from one’s presence onstage to their
retreat backstage. Any kind of social-sexual interaction must be somehow staged and “tuned” in order to
reach a balance of actions and therefore to get at a common shared de nition. Having sex means doing some
things with others; what is more, we succeed in understanding certain techniques and in performing certain
acts only by rehearsing them in conversation with ourselves as much as in interactions with others. We are
still doing something with others when we have a sexual fantasy, due to the particular culture we have
internalized. These elements can be seen at work rather easily in BDSM scenes: their dramaturgies provide
an understanding of sexuality and eroticism as something that can be performed. Similarly, it is possible to
use the ensuing representations and organizations to get at the more “natural,” immediate, and pristine
parts of our self, while also questioning the belief that eroticism is one of the most “authentic” spheres of
our daily lives (Newmahr 2013:261).

These are the reasons why our sexual identities change according to our ways to confront the di erent
contexts in which we happen to be situated. They can refer either to strategies to valorize certain resources
in speci c situations, or else, to nd one’s own way in time and space, while managing accurately the so-
called auxiliary characteristics and marks (Brekhus 2015:117), or conversely, nding a hierarchical
organization to discern which speci c resources are more salient for our self (Stryker 1980). If our tendency is
to view a certain identity as more salient, then it is likely to be the driving our interpretation of a given
situation, so that we are able to interact with others and/or to coordinate one another’s actions. Our
interpretation of some of our sexual characteristics allows us to provide to our di erent selves a degree of
identity salience, and consequently to organize the di erent features of identity, relationships, lifestyles,
values, and social networks in which we are likely to be involved. In Brekhus’s ethnography of gay men, for
instance, di erent values and varying degrees of relevance are placed upon one’s homosexual self. As shown
by his gay male interviewees, there are numerous and diverse ways to express a (homo)sexual identity;
furthermore, subjects (both homosexual and non-homosexual) create a number of identitarian strategies,
caught in the midst of individual choices and structural constraints (Brekhus 2003, 2012). This explains
why, within an interactionist framework, changes in life occupy such a crucial role in the sequence of scenes
leading to the achievement of a particular status or identity (Strauss 1959). There is no space for an etiology
of sexual conducts; instead, symbolic interactionism stresses the acquisition of meaning for sexualities as
they are subjectively organized and transformed into (a series of) active roles, that is, in social criteria for
the attribution of a certain status (Glaser and Strauss 1971). For this reason, our sexual identities can be
explained within the context of an ongoing series of changes in status, where subjects are undergoing
biographical (identity) transformations that produce recon gurations of the self. They also produce new
forms of socialization involving the subject’s newly discovered conceptualization of the self and the forms
of recognition from others. It could be that one is becoming gay; another is becoming an ex-virgin; still
another is experimenting with new forms of sexuality at an old age; it could be that a sex worker is leaving
their activity—in all these cases, as well as in many others, we are about to perform a di erent role and to
refuse the previous one(s). This requires our involvement in forms of role exiting (Ebaugh 1988) that will
lead us to de ne new perceptions of our sexual self, to manage our impressions ensuing from a di erent
status, and to learn how to introduce our new roles. One of the most productive concepts in the eld of
sociological studies of sexualities is the notion of career, hinting at a model of investigation into processes
constituted by phases that are not necessarily chronologically arranged, and which take into account both
the subjective dimension and the role of structural constraints (Becker 1966; Go man 1961). It follows that
every form of sexual socialization or entrance into social-sexual worlds, or sexual subcultures, can be seen
through the lens of sexual careers (see, among others, the renowned study of identity works and
homosexuality in Plummer 1975). As part of their careers, subjects undergo cognitive changes; they learn

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how to speak of themselves in new ways, and to retell the story of their life using a new vocabulary (in a kind
of sexual retrospective interpretation); but they also learn to rede ne themselves, and as in the case of
transsexualism, to prepare, shape, and rede ne their own bodies—a proper example of re exive
transembodiment (Schrock and Boyd 2005). Similarly, those subjects involved in certain sexual subcultures,
especially stigmatized subcultures, nd themselves involved in identity works (Schwalbe and Mason-
Schrock:141–42) that are required to manage their own visibility and to avoid control. However, these works
can also be useful for new negotiations of sexual meanings and the constructions of additional ones,
through a process of resigni cation involving the practices, meanings, and codes of the broader subculture
to which they belong in unforeseen ways. Let us illustrate this by making some examples: queer groups
provide an alternative articulation of derogatory terms like “queer” by turning their meaning upside-down
(Rinaldi 2016); normative homosexual males, such as clones, re-articulate the canons of a hyper-virile
normative masculinity to take their distance from age-old stereotypes targeting e eminate gay men
(Rinaldi 2015); more organized groups, such as swingers, reverse some of the (normative) meanings such
as, among others, sexual monogamy and privacy (even though they continue to draw from conventional
society, for instance, when men control their women partner’s sexual activity or force them to realzse their
own erotic or pornographic fantasies; see Welzer-Lang 2005:92). Other examples include the following: in
barebacking (anal sex performed without a condom), subjects who willingly exchange HIV-infected bodily
uids are de ning new forms of social organization and unforeseen “acquired” kinship structures for which
the uid-virus exchange is combined with the myth of the “patient zero” (Dean 2009, 2012); southern
Italian sex workers who de ne themselves heterosexual and look for homosexual clients are involved in a
performative production of sexual activity requiring that they exhibit “authentic” sexual signs (e.g., erection
or orgasm), which are realized through a series of learning strategies ( rst, learning to nd pleasure and to
discern its positive e ects; Rinaldi 2020). In this case, belonging to a deviant subculture allows subjects to
construct situated meanings and interactional rules, to develop situational competences, and to perform
newly emerged identitarian con gurations through which they can remain “males” and therefore avoid a
possible contamination from their cultural enemy (“the queer (man)”; Seidman 2005).

Sex Is Never “Just Sex”: Conclusions

Normative and positivistic perspectives that have dealt with sexuality have often employed a simplistic and
homogeneous notion of the issues. They have produced exoticized and deviantized sexual subjects belonging
to a distinct category, and they have reinforced an idea of (sexual) normality that has seldom been
interrogated and that ultimately remains “unmarked” (Zerubavel 2018). An interactionist approach allows
understanding that we learn how to become sexual and to use sexual meanings just like we learn any other
kind of meaning (Rinaldi 2016). After all, we should pay attention to the terms under which people are
o ering, requesting, having, or otherwise employing sex as people who are developing a joint action
(Blumer 1969). Following Blumer, this could be de ned as a joint sexual action: even when we believe that we
are comfortably placed in a hermit’s cell, the mind is always a place of hospitality and intercourse (Cooley
1992: 97)—we are always making sexual things together with others.
Therefore symbolic interactionists look at all forms of sexualities as “unnatural” (Gagnon and Simon 2019),
since just like any other human behavior they do not include a set of predetermined, xed forms and
contents; as any other human behavior, sexuality is a complex condition originating from the purely human
capacity/ability to think, to act, and to remember, as well as from people’s needs to live with other human
beings.

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1 These are mostly PhD and MA theses, ethnographic notes, or even just life stories, which are collected and then
transcribed. The vast majority is held at the Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, and at the Ernest W. Burgess Fund,
Special Collections Research Center of the University. See Heap 2003:458n.5 and Heap 2009.

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