In pursuit of the potential of sexual field theory: A research agenda

To what extent can a structure of desire be independent of its participants’ desires?

Upon enrollment at a residential college, students enter a near-total institution with high exit costs. There they encounter a preexisting sexual field coterminous with the iconic college party. Yet, the majority of students are interested in forming loving relationships and there is a high degree of nonparticipation: one-third of students opt out of hooking up (Kuperberg and Padgett, 2015; Uecker et al., 2015).

This makes campus hookup cultures an especially good place to explore what I call “structure/desire disconnects,” or differences between the structure of desire and the aggregate desires of a field’s participants, an area of inquiry encouraged by Green (2014). We have not mapped the potential strength of these disconnects, nor how widely they can spread across participants. Nor have we explored what it feels like, and what happens, when a person is unable to easily abandon a sexual field they do not particularly like. Because hookup cultures can be sampled, comparative research could also shed light on why and when these two features of sexual fields do or do not harmonize, and what happens when we find a strong disconnect.

Whether, how, and to what degree the structure of desire must reflect its participants’ sexual desires, however, may not be the right question. Instead, a closer consideration inspires a new question.

New: What is the interaction between structures of desire and multiple and conflicting desires within individuals?

While most college students are interested in romance, it does not follow they are uninterested in casual sexual encounters. In fact, few students have desires that straightforwardly do or do not “match” the structure of desire. Instead, some of their desires may be reflected in hookup culture and some may not. Students may also have contradictory desires, so hookup culture may simultaneously fulfill and fail them.

Many students who express dissatisfaction still actively seek out casual sexual contact. The majority also report that their hookups are at least somewhat enjoyable. Only 5 percent of students report they did not enjoy their last hookup “at all” (Padgett and Wade, 2019). So, though hooking up has been shown to negatively correlate with student well-being (Bersamin et al., 2013; Fisher et al., 2012; Lewis et al., 2012), it would be inaccurate to suggest that students are not getting something out of it.

In this case, the interesting questions may be more about the whole range of sexual wants present in any given (set of) individual(s), some of which may lay dormant. Such questions are about the capacity of structures of desire to set participants on trajectories that develop previously untapped desires, perhaps even waking sleeping ones, coordinating erotic potential. What structures of desire may do, in other words, is not reflect or fail to reflect individual sexual desires, but enhance, surface, and coordinate some sexual desires and not others. This gets at the heart of the matter: the power of sexual fields to make sexual life not merely personal, but collective.

New: In encounters with sexual fields, what else might happen to the habitus?

Thinking in terms of multiple and conflicting desires within individuals, and the power of sexual fields to set participants on some paths and not others, opens up three additional new avenues of investigation. What might be lost when a person encounters a sexual field? What harm might be done to desire? And how might participants resist?

Sexual field research has been absorbed with sex’s seductive power. Accordingly, implicit in the literature is the idea that the habitus shifts toward alignment with structures of desire it encounters. The transformation of the erotic habitus of gay men who come to enjoy BDSM after patronizing leather clubs is perhaps the clearest example (Hennen, 2008, 2014). This focus on attraction, however, “is not enough to understand how sexual life is structured,” write Frye and Gheihman (2018: 619), “because sexuality is shaped by risk and domination as well as by desire and pursuit.” Their research describes Malawian men who fear that beautiful women—by virtue of being irresistible and untrustworthy—pose a risk to their reputation, health, and finances. In response, some encourage each other to resist the power of women’s sexual capital, inculcating a habitus in contrast to the structure of desire, made possible by their own ambivalence.

Alongside positive forces, then, a sexual field may inspire resistance or produce aversion. This suggests the most interesting questions regarding the habitus is not whether it will be changed, but how, how much, in what directions, by what, and among whom? Here, too, Hennen (2008, 2014) offers some ideas. The leathermen sexual field did not merely shift people’s habitus through mere exposure. Instead, sadomasochism specifically resonated with World War II veterans for whom the conflagration of sex, pain, and power both triggered and soothed the trauma of war. A particular kind of man was primed to respond to the leathermen sexual field.

In fact, there is good reason to believe hookup culture has collective power specifically because it resonates so well with late-stage capitalism. Bay-Cheng (2015: 280) argues, for example, that evaluations of young women’s sexuality no longer rely merely on a virgin/slut binary, but must be read through a “neoliberal rationality” that “does not simply affirm agency, [but] demands it.” So long as sexual behavior reflects self-interest, autonomy, and personal responsibility, level is irrelevant. With this insight, women who embrace hooking up can be cast as powerful instead of exploited (like men whose agency has always been granted) (Gill, 2008). The idea that sexual agency can be grasped willfully denies interpersonal and institutional constraints related to ongoing oppression of all kinds. However, it does resonate with young people who are eager to feel “empowered” even as they capitulate to White supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy (Gavey, 2012; Moran, 2017). This is true, perhaps, especially for women, as they have long been primed to see themselves as regulatory projects (Gill, 2008).

Enhancing a neoliberal approach to sexuality, though, precludes selflessness, commitment, and mutuality (Wade, forthcoming, 2017). The result is a scarcity of sex that satisfies a desire for meaningful connection. Emotional intimacy becomes de-eroticized, a phenomenon made explicit when students call it “unattractive” and a “turn off.” Some students may develop a habitus that finds “emotionless sex” erotic. Others may not be able to do this. Their reaction to hookup culture may not be attraction, but aversion. Some students have acutely traumatic experiences, others just vaguely negative ones, but many are left less enthusiastic about casual sexual encounters than they were prior to entering the sexual field.

A research agenda that considers aversion alongside attraction may also contribute to theorizing how collective sexualities change or emerge anew, a question posed by Hennen (2014). He shows that the bear subculture was partly a response to the leathermen, signifying resistance to military masculinity. Men whose bodies were judged unsexy, and whose desire for connection was judged uncool, articulated and ultimately shared an alternative set of desires that congealed into a new sexual field. It is unclear what sexual field might emerge from the hookup cultures dominating college campuses today, but attention to the discontent spurring student activism is warranted. Like the emergent bears, college students may think themselves into new ways of organizing sexuality. Already, we have some evidence that students are forming alternative hookup cultures that serve queer students and students of color (Pham, 2018). Additional research should continue to document such competing sexual fields, while also looking for new ones. We might see sexual fields organized around student clubs, religious affiliations, interest-based residence halls, or other features of campus life. Some of these may gain sufficient adherents to challenge the hegemony of hookup culture on some campuses.

The next question builds on these insights to discuss how hookup culture might contribute to answering an existing question in the literature: the role of power.

How can we better theorize power in sexual fields?

In triangulating the concept of capital with field and habitus, field theory is inherently a theory of power. Sexual field theory has the same premises, understanding sexual negotiation as struggle between inequitably empowered individuals. In several ways, however, sexual field theory has not thoroughly engaged with power. This may be partly because the fields studied thus far have been populated by relatively homogeneous participants. Hookup cultures, in contrast, sometimes have the benefit of being more diverse.

First, hookup culture invites scholars to explore how economic, cultural, social, and symbolic capital intersects with sexual capital. Economic capital facilitates the acquisition of social and institutional capital, as it predicts participation in both Greek life and athletics, which often translates directly into sexual capital. Male athletes, fraternity men, and sorority women all hook up more frequently than their counterparts (Allison, 2016; Padgett and Wade, 2019). We know little about how the whole range of capitals shape structures of desire, inflect sexual capital, and imprint themselves on the erotic habitus (Green, 2014). Hookup culture could aid us in answering these questions.

Second, privilege related to race, ethnicity, citizenship, disability, class, age, and gender, among others, manifests directly as an embodied cultural capital with the potential to be eroticized or de-eroticized. Thus far, sexual field research has engaged primarily with race. It has shown that participants discern racialized erotic capital by reading structures of desire alongside intersubjective feedback; this information is used in deciding who to approach (Green, 2011). They also maximize their erotic capital according to fields’ logics. Lewis (2014) found that Latino migrants to Australia tried to embody the “Aussie Bloke” favored by Sydney’s gay culture. Among Black men, sometimes the best option is to embrace fetishization based on stereotypes (Green, 2008; Smith et al., 2018). Han et al. (2017) find that some gay men of color form a pan-racial identity, recognizing that features of their experience transcend their specific racial difference from Whiteness. Hookup culture is an excellent site to expand research on racism in sexual fields, while also enabling intersectional research on how embodied capitals related to other axes of oppression become part of the structure of desire, distribution of sexual capital, and erotic power of individuals.

Third are power relations at the level of interaction. Several scholars have shown that low relative levels of sexual capital are disempowering. Farrer (2010) finds that some White, Western wives tolerate husbands’ affairs in Shanghai to compensate for their downward sexual mobility. Low status men who have sex with men sometimes refrain from asking partners to use condoms to compensate for perceived unattractiveness (Green, 2014) or racial stereotypes (Han, 2008). Armstrong et al. (2006) find that men disproportionately target women with low status for sexual violence. Given the stakes of these micro-level power dynamics, it is critically important to learn more about how low sexual status translates into exploitation, abuse, and public health threats.

Fourth, Green (2014, 2015) has been insistent that we need more research on macro level influences such as colonialism, White supremacy, hegemonic masculinity, and other ideologies of domination. The number and variety of hookup cultures become especially convenient here, too. By documenting the degree to which structures of desire at different institutions reflect hegemonic ideologies, scholars of sexual fields could empirically map a range of possibilities, while also attending to what organizational features correlate with autonomy from such exogenous influences. For instance, fraternity men still disproportionately hold at least some power on many campuses, but the degree to which they do varies substantially. This gives researchers the chance to evaluate how forms of institutional capitulation to power consolidation by White, male, wealthy students shape sexual experience for all.

A final set of questions have to do with how, when, and why sexual fields deviate from reproducing the axes of oppression sociologists know so well. The fact that some sexual fields manifestly defy hegemonic logics—any queer space by definition—is evidence some autonomy is possible. How do fields of force come to undo well-grooved trajectories related to social stratification? What role might individual desire play in jumpstarting such anomalies? How could a sexual field come to overrule our oft-treaded patterns of exclusion and exploitation?

What sites can function as sexual fields?

One of the most pressing theoretical lacunae in sexual field theory regards the very concept of sexual field. Green (2015: 27) defines a sexual field as “a configuration of social spaces, anchored to physical and virtual sites, that are inhabited by actors who strive to obtain the rewards of the field.” Concretely, what are the possible reaches and bounds of these “sites?”

The literature provides conflicting answers. In one chapter of his anthology, Green (2014) argues that sexual fields are differentiated by geography and patronage. Indeed, much of the research is tightly focused on individual bars or clubs (e.g., Green, 2008; Hammers, 2008; Hennen, 2008; Weinberg and Williams, 2010). This suggests that sexual fields operate in small physical spaces. Green, however, also includes virtual sites and other scholars describe apps or websites as sexual fields (Robinson, 2013; Scheim et al., 2019). In another chapter of his anthology, however, Green (2014: 29) writes: “it may be analytically useful to consider highly similar sexual subcultures with mutually exclusive patronage bases as a single sexual field.” That was my approach in Wade (2017) where I lumped together analyses of hookup cultures at two geographically distant colleges. In other instances, scholars make a case for even larger and more diffuse sexual fields (e.g., Farrer, 2010).

This raises many questions. If fields exert a force, how far can they exert their influence? How many individuals can be included? What mechanisms of interaction can it involve? If it has a social media dimension, how far can it extend through networks? Can it be primarily media-driven, with independent outposts gravitationally influencing each other through mass communication? In other words, if a sexual field is a field of force and struggle, then field participants must be able to interact with some regularity in some way, but how regularly and in what ways?

Together, the ubiquity of hookup culture, the variation in their connectedness to one another and their environments, and its manifestation in hookup apps is an opportunity to tackle these questions. Some hookup cultures are isolated in rural areas. Others are intimately embedded in urban life. Sometimes colleges are like binary stars revolving around each other. These varied configurations are opportunities to test hypotheses about the potential and limits of sexual fields’ force.

Communication tools are also at play. Referring to hookup apps, Hanson (2017: 49) writes that students “carry hookup culture with them in their pocket or purse” and can seek hookups outside of the parties that facilitate them. Students also “swipe together” as a social game. These behaviors enhance the sexual field. Others might interrupt it. Christensen (2018) describes a “hybrid hookup script” on apps in which matches go on a date that ends with a one-time hookup. Students also report conversing more with app matches than with people they hook up with at parties, and sometimes use apps to seek romantic partners (Licoppe, 2020). Studying whether hookup culture manifests in or is undermined by these technologies can help us better understand the degree to which sexual fields can transcend modalities. Likewise, we can explore whether sexual fields that share neither geography nor patronage can be coordinated by shared socialization based on media.

The COVID-19 pandemic also presents an opportunity. The sudden retreat to online learning that occurred in Spring 2020 could be mined for retrospective research on the ability of sexual fields to maintain themselves online. Did hookup culture follow students home? By what mechanisms? With what effects? Likewise, Fall 2020 and beyond are tests as to whether hookup culture can thrive in the absence of its most iconic manifestation—the large-scale fraternity party—and the attendant loss of social power suffered by the men who host them. Starved of its spaces and with weakened proponents, does hookup culture persist? How? If not, what emerges in its place? Sexual field theorists have never had the opportunity to ask what happens when there is a sudden vacuum where a sexual field once stood. This may be exactly that opportunity.

When exploring fields’ bounds and reach, the question as to whether hookup culture extends beyond college is also worth considering. Where else do we find hookup cultures? Can entire cities (like Shanghai) accurately be described as sexual fields? Has hooking up become part of American culture more broadly? What role might apps be playing in extending it beyond the collegiate environment?

Or, we might discover there are other forces that coordinate sexual fields, making it appear as if they share influence, even if they do not. That is a concern of institutional field theory.

New: Can we build an institutional sexual field theory?

Across colleges and universities, we find few differences in who hooks up, how much, and with what motivation and consequence. There may be more hooking up at large colleges and ones with high female–male ratios, less at campuses with heavy top-down sexual control (such as evangelical campuses), and little at commuter schools (Adkins et al., 2015; Allison and Ralston, 2018; Allison and Risman, 2017; Malone, 2018). Pham (2018) is the first to make a case for a qualitative difference, finding that women at elite colleges say hooking up protects their career ambitions, while women at state colleges call it fun. Clearly, this does not go far enough. We need more research on differences across hookup cultures and their relationship to institutional features.

Institutional field theorists have been producing work aimed at answering exactly these kinds of questions. Positioning organizations themselves as objects within fields, institutional field theory joins organizational research to social field theory. Their central problem of order is organizational isomorphism, or similarities among organizations that share a field. Isomorphism has been explained with reference to institutional concerns emerging out of embeddedness in the organizational field (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Emirbayer and Johnson, 2008; Fligstein and McAdam, 2012). Forces producing isomorphism can be coercive (pressing organizations to make specific choices), normative (encouraging similar choices through the production of norms), or mimetic (creating examples that can be copied).

Institutional field theory, then, suggests another plausible explanation for similarities across hookup cultures: forces that produce organizational isomorphism. For instance, Title IX may produce coercive isomorphism as organizations respond to changes in the law and its interpretation. Pressure from social movements like #metoo may produce normative isomorphism as tolerance for abusive sexual behavior declines. And publications establishing “best practices” could produce mimetic isomorphism.

The nature of, and especially shifts in, the environment in which these organizational fields operate may also produce tensions, creating field-wide pressures. As the nature of work and family changed, for instance, young women have increasingly reported personalities as “masculine” as those of men, and even higher career ambitions (Donnelly and Twenge, 2017). Women’s adoption of a stereotypically masculine approach to sex has escalated the scale and intensity of hookup culture. Changes like these shift the institutional context, producing new challenges that organizations must address individually, but also as members of organizational fields.

In sum, sexual field theorists could engage with institutional field theory and craft a new literature: institutional sexual field theory. In turn, they could contribute to the current conversation in institutional field theory about the possibilities and mechanisms by which organizations deviate, innovate, and evolve.