In this article we seek to rehabilitate the radical insights of the pragmatist/interactionist tradition and to establish its continued relevance to a distinctively sociological and feminist analysis of sexuality. We argue for the importance of the contribution of Gagnon and Simon in arguing for a fully social understanding of sexuality. We offer an account of the process whereby interactionism has been rendered all but invisible and make a case for recovering its insights. We argue that interactionism accounts for the processes through which sexuality is constituted culturally, inter-personally and intrapsychically and addresses the actualities of everyday social practices and is therefore ideally suited to grappling with the complexities of contemporary sexual life.
Adams, P. and E. Cowie (eds) (1990) The Woman in Question. London: Verso.
2.
Atkinson, P. and W. Housley ( 2003) Interactionism. London: Sage.
3.
Barrett, M. ( 1980) Women’s Oppression Today. London : Verso.
4.
Becker, H. ( 1963) Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. London: Free Press of Glencoe.
5.
Berger, P.L. and T. Luckman ( 1967) The Social Construction of Reality. London: Allen Lane.
6.
Blumer, H. ( 1969) Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Methods. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
7.
Burke, K. ( 1945) A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley, CA : University of California Press.
8.
Butler, J. ( 1990) Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge.
9.
Butler, J. ( 1993) Bodies that Matter. New York: Routledge.
10.
Crossley, N. ( 2001) The Social Body: Habit, Identity and Desire. London: Sage.
11.
Crossley, N. ( 2006) ‘In the Gym: Motives, Meaning and Moral Careers’, Body and Society12(3): 23-50.
12.
Delamont, S. ( 2003) Feminist Sociology. London: Sage.
13.
Dworkin, S.L. and L.F. O’Sullivan ( 2007) ‘"It’s Less Work for Her and it Shows She Has Good Taste": Masculinity, Sexual Initiation and Contemporary Sexual Scripts’ , in M. Kimmel (ed.) The Sexual Self, pp. 105-21. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.
14.
Faraday, A. ( 1981) ‘Liberating Lesbian Research’, in K. Plummer (ed.) The Making of the Modern Homosexual, pp. 112-29. London: Hutchinson .
15.
Foucault, M. ( 1980) ‘The Confessions of the Flesh, a Conversation with A. Grosrichard, G. Wajeman, J.-A. Miller, G. le Gaufey, D. Celasm, G. Miller, C. Millot, J. Livi and J. Miller’, in M. Foucault, C. Gordon (ed.) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. Brighton: Harvester/Wheatsheaf.
16.
Foucault, M. ( 1981[1978]) The History of Sexuality, Vol.One. London: Pelican.
17.
Fraser, N. ( 1989) Unruly Practices: Power Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. Oxford: Polity Press .
18.
Gagnon, J. ( 2004) An Interpretation of Desire. Chicago : University of Chicago Press.
19.
Gagnon, J. and W. Simon (eds) (1967) Sexual Deviance: A Reader. New York: Harper and Row.
20.
Gagnon, J. and W. Simon ( 1968) ‘Sexual Deviance and the Contemporary American Scene’ , Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science375: 96-114.
21.
Gagnon, J. and W. Simon ( 1974[1973]) Sexual Conduct. London: Hutchinson.
22.
Gamson, J. and D. Moon ( 2004) ‘The Sociology of Sexualities: Queer and Beyond’ , Annual Review of Sociology30: 47-64.
23.
Goffman, E. ( 1963) Stigma. London: Allen Lane.
24.
Halperin, D.M. ( 1995) Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
25.
Holland, J., C. Ramazanoğlu, S. Sharpe and R. Thomson ( 1998) The Male in the Head. London: Tufnell Press.
26.
Jackson, S. ( 1978) On the Social Construction of Female Sexuality. London: Women’s Research and Resources Centre .
27.
Jackson, S. ( 1996) ‘Heterosexuality as a Problem for Feminist Theory’ , in L. Adkins and V. Merchant (eds) Sexualizing the Social, pp. 15-34. London : Macmillan.
28.
Jackson, S. ( 2006) ‘Gender, Sexuality and Heterosexuality: The Complexity (and Limits) of Heteronormativity’, Feminist Theory7(1): 105-21.
29.
Jackson, S. and S. Scott ( 2007) ‘Faking Like a Woman? Towards an Interpretive Theorization of Sexual Pleasure’, Body & Society13(2): 95-116.
30.
Jackson, S. and S. Scott ( 2010) Theorizing Sexuality. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
31.
Kimmel, M. ( 2007) ‘John Gagnon and the Sexual Self’, in M. Kimmel (ed.) The Sexual Self , pp. vii-xvi. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.
32.
Laumann, E. and J. Gagnon ( 1995) ‘A Sociological Perspective on Sexual Action’ , in R. Parker and J. Gagnon (eds) Conceiving Sexuality: Approaches to Sex Research in a Postmodern World. New York: Routledge.
33.
Laumann, E., J. Gagnon, R.T. Michael and S. Michaels ( 1994) The Social Organization of Sexuality. Sexual Practices in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
34.
McIntosh, M. ( 1968) ‘The Homosexual Role’, Social Problems16(2): 182-92.
35.
McIntosh, M. ( 1978) ‘Who Needs Prostitutes? The Ideology of Male Sexual Needs’, in C. Smart and B. Smart (eds) Women, Sexuality and Social Control. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
36.
McNay, L. ( 2000) Gender and Agency. Cambridge: Polity.
37.
Maines, D. ( 2001) The Faultline of Consciousness: A View of Interactionism in Sociology. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Mead, G.H. ( 1934) Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
40.
Mead, G.H. ( 1964[1929]) ‘The Nature of the Past’ , in J. Cross (ed.) Essays in Honour of John Dewey. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Reprinted in A.J. Reck (ed.) Mead: Selected Writings. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill.
41.
Mead, G.H. ( 2002[1932]) The Philosophy of the Present. New York: Prometheus Books. Original publication, Chicago: Open Court.
42.
Plummer, K. ( 1975) Sexual Stigma. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
43.
Plummer, K. ( 2001) ‘In Memoriam: William Simon’, Sexualities4(2): 131-4.
44.
Plummer, K. ( 2003) ‘Queers, Bodies and Postmodern Sexualities: A Note on Revisiting the "Sexual" in Symbolic Interactionism’, Qualitative Sociology26(4): 515-30.
45.
Renold, E. ( 2005) Girls, Boys and Junior Sexualities. London: Routledge.
46.
Rubin, G. ( 1984) ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality’, in C. Vance (ed.) Pleasure and Danger. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
47.
Schatzki, T., K. Knorr Cetina and E. von Savigny (eds) ( 2001) The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London: Routledge.
48.
Schutz, A. ( 1972) The Phenomenology of the Social World. London: Heinemann.
49.
Scott, S. ( 2007) Shyness and Society: The Illusion of Competence. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
50.
Sedgwick, E.K. ( 1991) The Epistemology of the Closet. Brighton : Harvester/ Wheatsheaf.
51.
Simon, W. ( 1996) Postmodern Sexualities. New York: Routledge.
52.
Simon, W. and J. Gagnon ( 1986) ‘Sexual Scripts: Permanence and Change’, Archives of Sexual Behavior15(2): 97-120.
53.
Smith, D.E. ( 1988) The Everyday World as Problematic. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
54.
Smith, D.E. ( 1999) Writing the Social. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
55.
Stanley, L. and S. Wise ( 1983) Breaking Out: Feminist Consciousness and Feminist Research . London: Routledge.
56.
Stanley, L. and S. Wise ( 1993) Breaking Out Again. London: Routledge.
57.
Stein, A. ( 1989) ‘Three Models of Sexuality: Drives, Identities and Practices’, Sociological Theory7(1): 1-13.
58.
Thorne, B. ( 1993) Gender Play. Buckingham: Open University Press.
59.
Thorne, B. and Z. Luria ( 1986) ‘Sexuality and Gender in Children’s Daily Worlds’, Social Problems33: 176-90.
60.
Tiefer, L. ( 2007) ‘Sexuopharmacology: A Fateful New Element in Sexual Scripts’, in M. Kimmel (ed.) The Sexual Self. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.
61.
Walby, S. ( 1986) Patriarchy at Work. Cambridge: Polity.
62.
Walby, S. ( 1990) Theorizing Patriarchy. Oxford: Blackwell.
63.
Warde, A. ( 2005) ‘Consumption and Theories of Practice’, Journal of Consumer Culture5(2): 131-53.
64.
Whittier, D. and W. Simon ( 2001) ‘The Fuzzy Matrix of "My Type" in Intrapsychic Sexual Scripting’, Sexualities4(2): 139-65.
65.
Williams, R. ( 2000) Making Identity Matter: Identity, Society and Social Interaction . Durham: sociologypress.
