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http://soc.sagepub.com/ Rehabilitating Interactionism for a Feminist Sociology of Sexuality

Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott Sociology 2010 44: 811 DOI: 10.1177/0038038510375732 The online version of this article can be found at: http://soc.sagepub.com/content/44/5/811

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Rehabilitating Interactionism for a Feminist Sociology of Sexuality

I

Stevi Jackson
University of York

Sue Scott
Glasgow Caledonian University

ABSTRACT

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, interpersonally and intrapsychically and addresses the actualities of everyday social practices and is therefore ideally suited to grappling with the complexities of contemporary sexual life.
K E Y WO R D S

feminism / gender / interactionism / John Gagnon / sexuality / sexual scripts / sociology / William Simon

Introduction
n this article we seek to recover and rehabilitate the radical insights of the pragmatist/interactionist tradition and to establish its continued relevance to a distinctively sociological and feminist analysis of sexuality. It was this tradition which informed the first fully sociological theory of sexuality, developed by John Gagnon and William Simon (1974[1973]). Their arguments were truly

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radical, challenging not only biological determinism but also the concept of repression before Foucault (1981[1978]) did so. Subsequently, however, their work was eclipsed by the rise of Foucauldian, poststructuralist and queer theory, and also by developments in feminist theory. We argue for an approach, inspired by Gagnon and Simon, which enables us to address aspects of sexuality largely sidelined by queer theory the everyday gendered doing of sexuality in interaction thus enabling us to locate sexuality within wider patterns of sociality. We are not attempting to offer a total theorization of sexuality, but to suggest that Gagnon and Simons interactionism has considerable potential for feminist sociological analysis, even though they themselves did not explicitly address feminist concerns. Interactionism in general has, along with other interpretive sociologies, been neglected by most feminists. Because feminist theorizing has become so significant within sociology, and especially in the field of sexuality, the lack of feminist interactionist work may have contributed to the widespread theoretical amnesia to which, as Maines (2001) and Atkinson and Housley (2003) have noted, interactionism has been subject. This forgetting is not universal. Interactionism has persisted as a minority interest within North American sociology, where it has been taken up by some feminists, notably Dorothy Smith (1988, 1999) and Barrie Thorne (1993). In the UK, interactionism enjoyed a brief period of popularity in the late 1960s and early 1970s among sociologists, a few of whom have continued to develop this kind of sociology (Plummer, 2003; Williams, 2000). More recently a small number of scholars have utilized this approach in empirical work (e.g. Crossley, 2006; Scott, 2007). Nonetheless, its impact on feminist work in the UK has been minimal even in the context of empirical work on everyday gendered and sexual life (see Jackson and Scott, 2010). It is of note that Sara Delamont, an author sympathetic to and knowledgeable about interactionism, identifies very little feminist interactionist work in her overview of feminist sociology (2003). Our focus here is specifically on the value of Gagnon and Simons interactionism for the sociology of sexuality. As Michael Kimmel (2007) notes, this perspective has been taken up far more often by gay male theorists than by feminists. There has always been a minority of feminists working on sexuality who have referenced or drawn on Gagnon and Simon (Holland et al., 1998; Stein, 1989; Thorne and Luria, 1986; Tiefer, 2007), but their work has not been central to the development of feminist theorizing on sexuality. In order to explain why this is so we revisit the history of sociological and feminist thinking on sexuality, tracing the processes whereby some theories became privileged while others were sidelined. In so doing we first outline the key features of the mode of theorizing pioneered by Gagnon and Simon, drawing attention to its points of convergence with and divergence from other theoretical positions. We then move on to explain its rejection by mainstream academic feminism and to make a case for its continued relevance to contemporary feminist concerns, particularly in its utility for theorizing the complexity and multidimensionality of sexual life.

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Sex, Sociality and Interaction

Since recent generations of sociologists have had little exposure to Gagnon and Simons work, it is worth setting out its key features. Their work developed in the context of the emergence of sociological social constructionism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which in turn developed in opposition to the dominance of positivist and functionalist sociology, especially in the North American context. Social constructionism was influenced by two distinct theoretical traditions: North American pragmatist philosophy and its sociological elaboration as symbolic interactionism (Blumer, 1969; Mead, 1934); and social phenomenology exemplified by the work of Alfred Schutz (1972). These traditions were famously brought together by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman in The Social Construction of Reality (1967), one of the earliest explicit uses of the term social construction. Notably, Berger and Luckman use sexuality to demonstrate the plasticity of human conduct and culture, to suggest that man (sic) constructs his own nature (1967: 67). One of the major fields in which these new interpretive sociologies, particularly interactionism and phenomenology, had the greatest impact was the sociology of deviance. In the new deviancy theories that emerged in the 1960s, deviance was seen as a matter of social definition, produced through interactional processes, rather than as a quality of particular acts or actors (Becker, 1963; Matza, 1969). One example of work influenced by this approach is Mary McIntoshs (1968) classic analysis of the homosexual role. McIntosh draws on labelling theory to call into question the conception of homosexuality as a condition (1968: 183) and to argue that while homosexual behaviour may occur in a variety of historical and cultural contexts, the modern western idea of the homosexual, a role that can be inhabited, is historically and culturally specific. Other writers who came to play a significant part in the development of the sociology of sexuality were also influenced by these ideas, such as Ken Plummer (1975, 2003) and, most notably, John Gagnon and William Simon (1974[1973]). Gagnon and Simon themselves produced an edited collection and a number of articles on sexual deviance (1967, 1968), but their most significant contribution was to provide a means of theorizing ordinary, everyday conventional and unconventional sexualities. Gagnon and Simon began working together in the 1960s. They developed a unique approach to sexuality, drawing on the dramaturgical perspective of Kenneth Burke (1945), the pragmatism of George Herbert Mead (1934) and applying the notion of the deviant career (Becker, 1963; Goffman, 1963) to wider social and sexual careers (see Gagnon, 2004: 272). Jointly they published a number of articles which formed the basis of their path-breaking text, Sexual Conduct, published in the United States in 1973 and in Britain a year later. They were truly the first sociologists to radically question the biologism, the naturalism and the essentialism that pervaded most existing research and study (Plummer, 2001: 131). They did more than simply assert the pre-eminence of

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the social over the innate: well before Foucaults critique of the repressive hypothesis they questioned the concept of repression itself. In so doing they allowed for a positive conceptualization of the social as producing sexuality rather than negatively moulding or modifying inborn drives. From our perspective as feminists this has distinct advantages: female sexuality cannot be seen as a repressed version of male sexuality and neither male sexuality nor heterosexuality can be taken as the norm of human sexual being. Gagnon and Simon challenged all forms of biological determinism. Contrary to the idea that sexuality is the most natural of human proclivities, they see it as representing humanity at its most social (Simon, 1996: 154). They also explicitly set up their argument against the received Freudian wisdom of 1960s sexology, and while William Simon later effected a partial rapprochement with psychoanalysis, he continued to reiterate some of the key points of the original critique (see Simon, 1996). Gagnon and Simon challenged psychoanalysis on four main grounds. First, they questioned the notion of an innate sexual drive and viewed desire as socially constituted; second, and relatedly, they contested the idea of sexuality as an overwhelming force, instead insisting on locating it in the mundane actualities of everyday life; third, they argued against the psychoanalytic emphasis on infancy and childhood in the development of human sexuality, instead seeing sexuality as continually constructed and reconstructed throughout adolescence and adulthood; finally, they made an analytic distinction between gender and sexuality in contradistinction to their psychoanalytic conflation where psychoanalysis posits that to be one sex is to desire the other, for Gagnon and Simon there is no necessary relationship between femininity or masculinity and heterosexuality. Gagnon and Simon see the unproven assumption of a powerful, innate sexual drive as a major obstacle to understanding human sexuality (1974[1973]: 15). The empirical variability of human sexuality, they suggest, cannot be explained by the repression or modification of pre-social drives, but must be understood as socially situated meaningful conduct. It is in these terms that Gagnon and Simon establish their preference for the term sexual conduct rather than behaviour. Whereas the latter can imply a response to inner drives or external stimuli the word conduct is used to convey the meaningfulness of human sexuality and the reflexive processes of negotiation through which meanings emerge. For Gagnon and Simon acts, feelings and body parts are not sexual in themselves, but only become so through the application of sociocultural scripts that imbue them with sexual significance. Scripts are involved in learning the meaning of internal states, organizing the sequences of specifically sexual acts, decoding novel situations, setting the limits on sexual responses, and linking meanings from non sexual aspects of life to specifically sexual experience (1974[1973]: 19). The concept of sexual scripts, so central to Gagnon and Simons work can, unfortunately, too easily be interpreted as suggesting fixed, socially determined lines of conduct. Gagnon and Simon themselves note this potential limitation. While the dramaturgical analogy is appropriate for understanding human sexuality we act sexually the conventional dramatic form is more often

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than not inappropriate (1974[1973]: 23). As they point out, even the most conventional of erotic sequences derives from a complicated set of layered symbolic meanings which might not be the same even for participants in the same sexual drama (1974[1973]: 23). Scripts are, therefore, fluid improvisations involving ongoing processes of interpretation and negotiation. In Sexual Conduct, Gagnon and Simon focused on the interacting individual and introduced two dimensions of scripting: the interpersonal, focusing on interactions with others, and the intrapsychic, involving reflexive internal dialogue. While they made generalizations about the processes of becoming and being sexual, they did not attend to the wider cultural contexts in which sexual scripts were located. This left them open to the criticism of failing to address where scripts come from (see e.g. Walby, 1990). Much of the discussion, moreover, was framed within the language of the socialization paradigm and thus too easily misread as a deterministic account (especially in relation to gender). These problems were overcome in later work when, together and separately, they introduced a further dimension of scripting: cultural scenarios (Laumann and Gagnon, 1995; Laumann et al., 1994; Simon, 1996; Simon and Gagnon, 1986). This development not only addressed the wider socio-cultural contexts of sexual life, but also enabled distinctions and connections between the agentic individual, the interactional situation, and the surrounding sociocultural order (Gagnon, 2004: 276). These three interrelated but analytically distinct aspects of scripting the cultural, interpersonal and intrapsychic permit a more nuanced analysis of how sexual scripts emerge, evolve and change and are sustained culturally, interpersonally and subjectively. They also allow for individual agency and variation but without assuming voluntarism. Cultural scenarios are the cultural narratives constructed around sexuality, what the intersubjective culture treats as sexuality (Laumann et al., 1994: 6). This is what might, in a different mode of theorizing, be seen as the discursive constitution of sexuality. Cultural scenarios or scripts do not determine sexual conduct, but are available to us as cultural resources that enable us to make sense of the sexual. Interpersonal scripting emerges from and is deployed within everyday interaction where wider cultural scenarios are interactively reworked, negotiated or contested. Even if these co-constructed scripts are no more than predictable variations on common cultural themes (see Simon, 1996), they are nonetheless locally and interactionally produced by the actors involved. Intrapsychic scripting occurs at the level of our individual desires and thoughts, the internal reflexive processes of the self. Unlike the psychoanalytic psyche, where desires originate largely in our unconscious, the intrapsychic is a socially based form of mental life (Gagnon, 2004: 276) through which we reflexively process material from cultural scenarios and interpersonal experience. Sexual desire and conduct are thus fully social, embedded in wider patterns of sociality. One of Gagnon and Simons most important critical insights was, and is, their emphasis on the everydayness of sexuality, forcing us to reflect on the importance accorded to sexuality in late modern societies, to question the

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idea of the sexual as a high intensity drive, and to be aware that sexual conduct can be guided by non-sexual motives, that it occurs in the context of ordinary lives and that it is shaped by wider social institutions. This view of sex is radical in that it runs counter to much commonsense thinking. Sex is usually seen as special, outside and apart from routine sociality, uniquely exciting and transforming, raising us above mundane quotidian banality or alternatively as a dangerous force with the power to undermine civilization and reduce us to barbarism. As John Gagnon has recently pointed out, there are good reasons for questioning traditions that stress the power of the sexual for purposes of social change or appealing to sexuality as a source of political and personal redemption (2004: 280). Gagnon and Simons interactionism, then, conceptualizes sexuality as interwoven with the everyday social fabric of our past and present lives and as constantly reflexively modified throughout our lives. They therefore contest psychoanalytic and psychological approaches that privilege early childhood experience and which depend on interpreting childhood experience through the filter of adult sexual understandings. Echoing G.H. Meads theory of time (1964[1929], 2002[1932]), Gagnon and Simon suggest that rather than the past determining the present, the present significantly reshapes the past as we reconstruct our biographies to bring them into greater congruence with our current identities, roles, situations and available vocabularies (1974[1973]: 13). Gagnon and Simons approach thus allows for agency and change in the constitution of the sexual self, envisaged as an ongoing reflexive process. Sexual conduct entails actively doing sex, not only in terms of sexual acts, but as making and modifying sexual meaning. For Gagnon and Simon this depends on having access to appropriate sexual scripts. They argue that the acquisition of gender precedes childrens access to sexual scripts and that gender provides the frame through which we learn sexual scripts and become able to locate ourselves within them as sexual actors. This is not deterministic but rather depends on interpretive processes within ongoing interaction with others.

Feminist Objections
Until Foucaults History of Sexuality became widely available in English, Gagnon and Simons work offered the only available theory of the social construction of sexuality (see Jackson, 1978). It might therefore have been expected to appeal to feminists who, after all, were also interested in questioning takenfor-granted assumptions about sexuality and in challenging biological determinism. Many were also seeking ways of theorizing subjectivity and sexuality. Interactionism in general provided a potential means of addressing the former while Gagnon and Simons analysis addressed the latter. These possibilities, however, were rarely explored. The original reasons for this can be traced back to the theoretical debates of the 1970s and 1980s and were compounded by the subsequent development and dominance of queer theory.

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Interactionisms exclusion from mainstream feminist thought at this time might be partly attributable to its own shortcomings, particularly its inattention to systematic structural inequalities at a time when most feminists were engaged in constructing theories around capitalism and/or patriarchy. This did not sit easily with interactionisms microsociological focus. Feminists using interpretive sociologies in the 1970s and early 1980s were an embattled minority and often found themselves misunderstood and pilloried. Liz Stanley and Sue Wises Breaking Out (1983), which drew on interactionism and ethnomethodology, is a prime example. It was grossly misrepresented by its critics and damned as essentialist, individualist and, paradoxically, as both overly abstract and as antiintellectual (see Stanley and Wise, 1993: 913). In this context it is perhaps not surprising that most feminists ignored Gagnon and Simons work completely and those who did engage with it were, in the main, sceptical or even hostile. Gagnon and Simons (1974[1973]) radical challenge to essentialist and biologistic understandings of sexuality was not widely understood. In some respects they were seen as insufficiently radical in not directly confronting the patriarchal and capitalist structures that preoccupied most feminists. At the same time, however, their critique of essentialism was simply too radical to be comprehended given the currency of the concept of repression within Marxist and feminist circles. Mary McIntosh, for example, carefully framed her exposition of Gagnon and Simon to distance herself from their rejection of the biological bases of sexuality. In her terms they go so far as to claim that sexuality is socially scripted rather than a product of innate drives. She suggested that we need not go all the way with Simon and Gagnon to recognize the cultural variations in human sexuality. These are, she says, based, no doubt, on biological structures, and on generic drives but they are not determined by them (McIntosh, 1978: 56). Thus, while she sought to establish the social basis of sexual relations she stepped back from embracing a fully sociological explanatory framework. She concluded that psychoanalysis was preferable because it enables the theorization of the specific differences between men and women, whereas the scripting approach leaves the content of the scripts a contingent matter (1978: 64). What McIntosh saw as a disadvantage has to us always seemed an advantage in that scripts can and do change, not only historically but contextually, allowing for human agency and situated social interaction. Many of McIntoshs reservations were echoed by Michle Barrett. Barretts Womens Oppression Today (1980) was a highly influential overview of feminist theory and is therefore illustrative of the ways in which interpretive sociologies were brushed aside defined by Barrett as subjectivist sociologies and thus as insufficiently social (1980: 30). Barrett briefly discussed Gagnon and Simons work alongside Ken Plummers Sexual Stigma (1975) and does, at least, acknowledge that it brings the definition of sexuality into question. Nevertheless, she saw this form of analysis as insufficiently attentive to specific historical and social conditions and is far more sympathetic to psychoanalysis, which, in our view, is far more vulnerable to this particular criticism. Some of Barretts assertions are baffling. For example, she claims that interactionism accounts for

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deviance so well that one can barely see the overall pressures towards conformity (1980: 61); yet much of Sexual Conduct is devoted to discussions of normative forms of sexuality. Barretts most startlingly inaccurate claim is that interactionism tends to conflate gender and sexuality in its accounts of learned behaviour and identity (1980: 63); yet Gagnon and Simon make an explicit analytical distinction between the two. Once again, this is a criticism far more applicable to psychoanalysis. Barrett, however, suggests that psychoanalysis might provide a better way forward for feminists seeking to understand the meanings, definitions, the discourse of pleasure (1980: 66). Strangely, this is precisely what interactionism does address and which psychoanalysis cannot. Coming from one of the most authoritative feminist theorists of the time, this misrepresentation and dismissal of interactionism helped to confirm the view that it was irrelevant for feminism. There were also other criticisms. Sylvia Walby (1986), like the Marxists, saw interactionism as liberal and insufficiently materialist. Annabel Faraday (1981), in a very partial and uncharitable reading, took issue specifically with Gagnon and Simons sexist language (a product of a time before feminisms influence on academic language, which was corrected in the second edition) and its implications for what they say about lesbianism (see Jackson and Scott, 2010). Most feminists, however, either had no knowledge of Gagnon and Simons work or simply ignored it. A few did continue to work with it during the 1980s (e.g. Stein, 1989) but the central feminist debates of the time were framed either by the opposition between antiviolence feminists and libertarian feminists (the so-called sex wars) or by the growing influence of post-structuralism and postmodernism (see Jackson and Scott, 2010). Many erstwhile Marxist feminists turned to Foucault and Lacan for explanations of subjectivity and sexuality (e.g. Adams and Cowie, 1990). While it was interactionisms lack of materialism that first condemned it, the move from materialist to cultural analysis ironically only served to marginalize it further. Since that time interactionism as a distinctive perspective on sexuality has all but vanished from view in feminist work; the space it might have occupied is now filled largely by Foucauldian and especially queer theory, which has set much of the theoretical agenda in the field since the 1990s (see Gamson and Moon, 2004).

Foucauldian versus Interactionist Social Constructionism

We are not disputing the importance and utility of Foucaults work, but would suggest that while gains were made much was also potentially lost in forgetting the insights of Gagnon and Simon. What was gained, and might be regarded as Foucaults distinctive contribution, was an understanding of how sexuality came into being as an object of discourse capable of producing categories of sexual being. What was lost was a focus on the sexual meanings and practices embedded in everyday social life and conversely on the social relations and meanings that shape sexual practice. Both Foucault and Gagnon and Simon

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question sexuality as a pre-given object, but they do so from different perspectives. For the former sexuality is a discursive construction, for the latter it is constituted at a number of levels through social practices. This in turn produces three significant differences between these two modes of theorizing, which are worth discussing in order to establish the sociological utility of Gagnon and Simons work. First, Gagnon and Simons analytical distinction between gender and sexuality enables us to explore their empirical interrelationship: how gender is sexualized and how sexuality is gendered. This is indicative of their commitment to placing sexuality in its wider social context, enabling us to investigate how the social ordering of sexuality is intertwined with non-sexual aspects of gender relations and social life in general. Foucault on the other hand, had little interest in gender relations. Foucault posits a sex/sexuality relation in which the apparatus of sexuality produces sex: What this discourse of sexuality was initially applied to wasnt sex but the body, the sexual organs, pleasures, kinship relations, interpersonal relations (1980: 210). Thus Foucaults terminology does not permit a distinction between sex as erotic acts and sensations, and sex as sex difference what we would call gender. Both are subsumed under sex. While we would acknowledge, with Foucault, that sexuality and gender are commonly discursively conflated, we maintain that retaining the analytical distinction between them is essential to sociological analysis. Some queer theorists and other Foucauldians do make a sexualitygender distinction but this is more commonly done to create a distinct space for theorizing the sexual rather than as a means of exploring how it articulates with gender (Rubin, 1984; Sedgwick, 1991), and although some, like Butler (1990), are concerned with the co-construction of gender and sexuality this tends to be focused on the heterosexual matrix at the expense of a wider analysis of gendered and sexual social relations. A second important distinction between these theories relates to what it is that is socially constructed. Foucault was never particularly interested in the question of where sexual desires come from or in contesting biological arguments about the origins of individual sexualities. In an interview, when asked for his opinion on whether homosexuality was an innate predisposition or social in origin, he replied On this question I have absolutely nothing to say. No comment (cited in Halperin, 1995: 4). Gagnon and Simon on the other hand do directly confront biological determinism and insist on the social origins of desires and practices. For Foucault, bodies and pleasures are ordered by the discursive apparatus of sexuality and are therefore effectively positioned as extra discursive (see Fraser, 1989). One effect of this is a turn to psychoanalysis to explain our identifications with subject positions (Butler, 1993). Another, evident in feminist debates, is the libertarian position on desires and pleasures as a locus of oppression and a site of resistance (e.g. Rubin, 1984), which effectively insulates those desires and pleasures from critique or from any analysis of their social origins (Jackson, 1996). Bodies and pleasures cannot be abstracted from the social, but should be firmly located within the contexts in which bodies interact and pleasures are defined, experienced and made sense of (Jackson and Scott, 2007).

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A third difference between Foucaults and Gagnon and Simons perspectives is in the spheres of sociality encompassed by them and how they are conceptualized. At the macro-level of culture the concepts of scripts and discourses can be used virtually synonymously but with different effects for sexual subjects and practices. Discourses are generally seen as creating subject positions in which individuals are located (whether as conforming or resisting subjects), whereas Gagnon and Simons cultural scenarios should be understood as creating resources on which individuals draw in locating themselves within and making sense of everyday social and sexual relations; they thus both constrain and enable sexual possibilities. Furthermore, the other two levels of scripting, the interpersonal and the intrapsychic allow for analyses of how these cultural scenarios get into embodied interaction and are variously engaged with, negotiated and modified. The interactionist perspective therefore provides the analytical tools to link culture and subjectivity to everyday interaction and practice, to place sexuality in the context of wider social relations and to explore the relationship between gender and sexuality. Lack of knowledge of these analytical tools has left recent generations of scholars struggling to apply a Foucauldian understanding of discourses to empirical studies of sexuality work it was never designed to do. To take one example, Emma Renolds (2005) in many respects excellent study of the heterosexualization of primary school children is keen to demonstrate their agency but this is framed in terms of investments in or resistance to dominant discourses through drawing on counter-discourses (e.g. Renold, 2005: 523). What is represented then are either/or choices between available discourses and between investment in or resistance to the subject positions on offer which does not do full justice to the complex interrelationships between discourses (or cultural scenarios) and agency/identity (the intrapsychic) and the interaction she so vividly describes but fails adequately to conceptualize as integral to agency and self. An example that illustrates the possibilities that such an interactionist account might offer is Shari Dworkin and Lucia OSullivans (2007) study of masculine heterosexuality. Dworkin and OSullivan use Gagnon and Simons theoretical framework to explore disjunctures between mens desired and actual sexual practices and to highlight the fluid, dynamic, negotiated and contested playing out of sexual scripts and emphasize the importance of the complexity of multiple levels of sexual scripting in understanding both desire and practice. As they say, everyday interactions might not simply derive from larger cultural scenarios but might actively reproduce, contest, or shift the gender order (2007: 118). Both of these studies seek to acknowledge human agency while locating it in social context. In Foucauldian theory, however, the emphasis on the normative effects of discourse makes it difficult to conceptualize agency. Generally this is achieved through the idea of subjects positioning themselves within discourses or resisting available discursive positions, but this gives no account of how such intentionality becomes possible and we are therefore left with an unexplained voluntarism (see McNay, 2000). The interactionist understanding of the self deriving from the work of G.H. Mead, on the other hand, has a theory

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of agency based on reflexive self-hood at its heart. While the self is seen as fully social, unable to exist outside social relations, it is constituted and perpetually reconstituted through reflexive engagement in social interaction. Reflexivity, the ability to see oneself as object and reflect back upon the self, underpins Gagnon and Simons conceptualization of intrapsychic scripting as drawing upon interpersonal and cultural scripts.

Sexuality and the Complexity of Sociality

The interactionist approach to sexuality is open rather than prescriptive: it addresses the processes through which sexuality is constituted culturally, interpersonally and intrapsychically, but the content of sexuality at any of these levels and their interconnections is contingent rather than predefined. As Atkinson and Housley note, this resonates with recent developments in sociology, particularly the emerging conceptualization of the social in terms of process, flux and movement (2003: 178). What is specific to interactionism, however, is that this fluidity and contingency is emergent from the actualities of everyday social practices, which ensures that it avoids the dangers of ungrounded abstraction common in other forms of theorizing: it does not wish to lose its grip on the obdurate empirical world (Plummer, 2003: 520). It also, in presupposing a social, reflexive self, gives scope to human agency but locates that agency in social context. These features of interactionism make it ideally suited to grappling with the complexity of contemporary sexual life and the diverse range of influences on sexuality and sexual subjectivity. Normative constructions of sexuality may still dominate commonsense understandings of the sexual, but competing cultural scenarios are now available in late modern societies and thus these are competing scripts on which we can draw. These in turn are mediated through interpersonal interaction in diverse social contexts and inform intrapsychic scripting and constructions of self that may be particular to specific local conditions of life. An interactionist approach, therefore, enables us to take account of the ways in which sexuality is shaped not only by gender but also, simultaneously, by a multiplicity of interrelated social differences and divisions. It is the only theory in which the formation of the self reflects the shifting complexities of a social world external to the individual without being deterministic: the effects of the social are always mediated through interpretive processes that are fundamental to the selfs sociality, our ability to make sense of the world and interact with others. This is not a unitary self acted upon by situations in which we find ourselves, but a self constructed and reconstructed in and through multiple social encounters and social practices in the multiple social locations we each inhabit, enabling us to mobilize and live with the multiple identities we each embody. Although Gagnon and Simon put gender at the centre of their theorization of sexuality, there is no reason to suppose that gender alone shapes sexual outcomes. Given that their work helped to break down deterministic linkages

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between femininity/masculinity and heterosexuality it also enabled us to think beyond the homo-hetero binary as definitive of desires and practices, to take account of the many aspects of the social that simultaneously constitute sexuality and the sexual self. As David Knapp Whittier and William Simon say:
It is easy to see how social the sexual is when one notes that the patterns of idiosyncratic desires flow from all that which is social racism, sexism, ageism, romanticism, etc. All social values and beliefs are complexly present and visible. Everything matters and nothing alone ever simply matters. (2001: 162)

However, although Gagnon and Simons perspective emphasizes that sociality of the sexual it does not account for all aspects of the social. We are not arguing, therefore, that this perspective solves all theoretical problems associated with sexuality but rather that it offers a mode of theorizing that has explanatory power itself while also enabling connections with other theoretical frameworks. For example, we have suggested some points of convergence with poststructuralist and queer theories and would therefore not argue for rejecting these, but simply for recognizing their limitations and the distinctive contribution that interactionism can make in addressing these, specifically in relation to everyday interaction and practices. Similarly, we would acknowledge the limitations of interactionism itself. In particular, the old criticism that it does not engage with the structural dimensions of power and inequality still holds and this is a shortcoming shared with Foucauldian perspectives. We accept that in order to explain some aspects of sexuality (its institutional ordering and regulation and its interrelationship with gender as a social division) a more materialist, structural analysis is required. But since interactionism is a modest theory that makes no totalizing claims (Plummer, 2003), there are no barriers to using it in conjunction with other perspectives that might illuminate different aspects of the social. Moreover, interactionisms focus on the everyday practical actualities of life makes it more consonant with materialist analysis than is often recognized (see Jackson, 2006). As Arlene Stein suggests, Gagnon and Simons sexual scripts can be seen as points of articulation between actors and structures (1989: 12). Steins analysis is suggestive of links with Bourdieusian theory and this might be further developed by engaging with recent developments in the theory of practice (Schatzki et al., 2001; Warde, 2005). Connections have been made between Bourdieusian and pragmatist theories, specifically Meads theory of self, and it has been suggested that that latter might complement and extend the former (Crossley, 2001). This linkage back to the pragmatist foundations of interactionist thought indicates possible directions in which interactionism itself might be extended and developed in future theorizing on sexuality.

Conclusion
In concluding, we would like to re-emphasize what it is that is valuable in Gagnon and Simons work and what should be retained in any fully sociological

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and feminist theorization of sexuality (see also Jackson and Scott, 2010). First, its radical anti-essentialism enables us to think through the differences between mens and womens sexuality as the consequence of social processes rather than differential repression, thus avoiding the pitfalls of either taking male sexuality as the norm or valorizing an essential feminine sexuality as morally superior. Second, by distinguishing analytically between gender and sexuality, it allows us to theorize the relationship between them without deciding in advance (as in psychoanalysis) how that interrelationship is manifested. It therefore alerts us to the diversity within both heterosexual and homosexual sexualities. Furthermore, because it is not deterministic and is predicated upon a reflexive social self, it also allows for variation within gender and sexual categories, for social and cultural change and for human agency. It also locates sexuality in the context of the everyday social fabric of our past and present lives. Finally, in treating sexuality as fully social it brings into question the special status of sexuality. This, for us, is highly significant since we have always been wary of forms of feminism that over-privilege sexuality either as the root cause of womens subordination or, as in the case of psychoanalysis, as the basis of human psychic functioning. Revisiting interactionism redirects attention to the everyday sociality in which sexual encounters take place and in which sexual experiences are negotiated. In its emphasis on mundane everyday experiences and practices, interactionism differs radically from theories that privilege desire as something outside or pre-existing the social or those theories that focus only on the discursive constitution of the sexual. It enables us to explore the interconnections between gender, sexuality and other sources of social differentiation and identity without positing deterministic links, but always locating all that we are and all that we do firmly in the social.

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Delamont, S. (2003) Feminist Sociology. London: Sage. Dworkin, S.L. and L.F. OSullivan (2007) Its 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. 10521. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Faraday, A. (1981) Liberating Lesbian Research, in K. Plummer (ed.) The Making of the Modern Homosexual, pp. 11229. London: Hutchinson. 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, 19721977. Brighton: Harvester/Wheatsheaf. Foucault, M. (1981[1978]) The History of Sexuality, Vol. One. London: Pelican. Fraser, N. (1989) Unruly Practices: Power Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. Oxford: Polity Press. Gagnon, J. (2004) An Interpretation of Desire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gagnon, J. and W. Simon (eds) (1967) Sexual Deviance: A Reader. New York: Harper and Row. Gagnon, J. and W. Simon (1968) Sexual Deviance and the Contemporary American Scene, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 375: 96114. Gagnon, J. and W. Simon (1974[1973]) Sexual Conduct. London: Hutchinson. Gamson, J. and D. Moon (2004) The Sociology of Sexualities: Queer and Beyond, Annual Review of Sociology 30: 4764. Goffman, E. (1963) Stigma. London: Allen Lane. Halperin, D.M. (1995) Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holland, J., C. Ramazanog lu, S. Sharpe and R. Thomson (1998) The Male in the Head. London: Tufnell Press. Jackson, S. (1978) On the Social Construction of Female Sexuality. London: Womens Research and Resources Centre. Jackson, S. (1996) Heterosexuality as a Problem for Feminist Theory, in L. Adkins and V. Merchant (eds) Sexualizing the Social, pp. 1534. London: Macmillan. Jackson, S. (2006) Gender, Sexuality and Heterosexuality: The Complexity (and Limits) of Heteronormativity, Feminist Theory 7(1): 10521. Jackson, S. and S. Scott (2007) Faking Like a Woman? Towards an Interpretive Theorization of Sexual Pleasure, Body & Society 13(2): 95116. Jackson, S. and S. Scott (2010) Theorizing Sexuality. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Kimmel, M. (2007) John Gagnon and the Sexual Self, in M. Kimmel (ed.) The Sexual Self, pp. viixvi. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. 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. 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. McIntosh, M. (1968) The Homosexual Role, Social Problems 16(2): 18292. 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.

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Stevi Jackson
Is Professor of Womens Studies at the University of York. She has published extensively on sexuality, especially heterosexuality, and on feminist theory. Address: Centre for Womens Studies, University of York, Heslington, York, YO10 5DD, UK. E-mail: sfj3@york.ac.uk

Sue Scott
Is a Professor of Sociology and is Pro Vice-Chancellor for research at Glasgow Caledonian University. She has published widely in the areas of gender, sexuality, risk and consumption, particularly in relation to children and young people. Address: Glasgow Caledonian University, Cowcaddens Road, Glasgow G4 0BA, Scotland, UK. E-mail: sue.scott@gcal.ac.uk

Date submitted August 2009 Date accepted May 2010

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