Sexualities

Casual and anonymous sex is available at low cost to homosexually active men in venues such as saunas, sex clubs and backrooms. In order to investigate the relationship between setting and sexual practice, transcripts from interviews with 30 gay men in Sydney were analyzed thematically, taking a situational interactionist approach which focused on practice. Men's reasons for going to sex venues, and for their choice of venue (gay/non-gay, saunas/backrooms), are explored. Physical features (such as steps, platforms, dark spaces, steam rooms, cubicles and glory holes) encourage or enable particular practices, such as fellatio or group sex. Interactional patterns include unspoken rules of venue deportment (e.g. silence) and vary with stages of cruising and how crowded the space is. Patrons consider venues in terms of the other men, and are generally unaware of the conscious intentions of the designers. Yet the venues are commercial spaces and share features with airports, supermarkets, railway stations, hotels and fast food restaurants. Venue layout deliberately disrupts patterns of social interaction which prevent sex from happening in other public places. The layout also shapes the sex that occurs.

It is increasingly taken for granted that `successful heterosexuality' is contingent upon having a `normal' and `healthy' sex life. The recent popularity of the diagnostic label `Female Sexual Dysfunction' (FSD) is evidence that this social climate has fostered the (re)medicalization of women's sexual problems. In response to feminist concern over the growing use of the FSD label, this article considers data gathered as part of a qualitative, empirical study, examining women's perceptions of sexual difficulties and their treatment. It is argued that women with perceived sexual problems, regardless of whether or not they have been diagnosed with FSD, tend to engage in relationship based `sex work': the rationalization, improvement, and mastery of sex in their personal lives. Their decisions to take part in or resist sex work are closely connected to the discursive and material production of heterosexuality, gender inequalities and power differences amongst women.

The relationship between discourse, sex and the body has attracted sustained interest from scholars in sociology and cultural studies over the last 20 years. It is only recently, however, that sociological analyses of sexuality have begun to explore the specificity of the body and its relationship to human agency. This work suggests that, far from serving as a passive surface upon which sexual scripts are inscribed, the body in sexual action is itself a dynamic force in generating sexual subjectivities. This is related to the way in which the praxeological aspects of sex are always corporeal and that corporeality is indivisibly related to individual agency. The specific configuration of sexual practices is central to the making of sexual identities. Indeed, it is through such a configuration that the sexual subject is brought into being. Yet human agency is a central feature of the process, rendering it a project that develops over time. Such an idea is particularly relevant to feminists who are concerned with the way that feminine sexual subjectivity can be theorized as active and desiring. This paper explores the way in which the body is implicated in sex practice and the making of active feminine sexual subjectivities. In doing so, it draws on qualitative data collected from life history interviews with 18 women.

As Foucault has shown, the Christian pastoral and modern psychiatry share a concern for sex as the truth of the subject which must be passed through `the endless mill of speech'. But what happens when the Confessional and the Couch come into contact with the Cinema? How does realist, documentary and cinéma vérité film-making modify confessional discourse? In this article, I compare Pier Paolo Pasolini's Love Meetings (Comizi d'amore) (1964) with a pair of documentaries by Wiktor Grodecki on young male prostitutes in Prague (Body Without Soul (1996) and Not Angels But Angels (1994)), Larry Clark's KIDS (1995), Paul Morrissey's Flesh (1968) and Andy Warhol's Blow Job (1963). I also consider how Jennie Livingston's Paris Is Burning (1990), in its similarity to Grodecki's and Clark's works, also departs from their (implicit) homophobia towards a critique of its own shared cinéma vérité investment in truth-telling.

This article examines independent cinema's depictions of homosexuality from 1990 to 2000. Using mainstream Hollywood films of the 1990s as the context for their development, I show significant differences in how homosexuality is represented outside mainstream films. Specifically, I divide independent films into two types: gay and lesbian standpoint films, and queer cinema. Gay standpoint films are distinguished by their narrative focus on a gay and lesbian subculture, whereas queer cinema generally depicts representations of a character's sexuality as decentered. I suggest that if we understand gay and lesbian standpoint films as a response to mainstream Hollywood ones that exclude subcultural depictions, then queer cinema can be seen as a challenge to both gay and lesbian standpoint films, and mainstream Hollywood films that center and normalize homosexual identity.