Not Playing the Sexual Field: How Women Shape Interactions between Gay Men in Philadelphia Gay Bars

• In Event: 1480 - Section on Sociology of Sexualities Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 02. Sexuality and Space

Abstract

Studies of situated sexuality tend to consider interactions between actors who could be sexually interested in one another. Using a framework of collective sexuality (Green 2014), however, not every individual occupying space in a particular sexual field will be seen as, or see themselves as, a sexual player in that field. In this article, I introduce the concept of sexual non-players and argue that they are consequential actors in sexual fields. I draw on ethnographic observation of gay bars popular among heterosexuals in Philadelphia and supplemental interviews with young gay club-goers to illuminate how non-players (predominately straight women) can shape the game for players (predominately gay men). Using ethnographic observation and supplemental interviews with young gay club-goers, I argue that non-players wield and exhibit embodied and interactional power that many players do not (or cannot). These situational advantages stem from non-players’ positionality outside of the field’s sexual status order. Bound to the game’s rules, men in these sexual fields seemed constrained and sometimes leaned on non-players to help them play the game. Specifically, men’s women friends, acting in Goffmanian teams (1959), (1) helped integrate men into the sexual field by getting their feet through the door and performing emotion work to buttress men’s experience, (2) brokered introductions between men, and (3) buffered men from unwanted interactions with other players. Accounting for a field’s non-players has implications for a growing queer sociology as well as numerous other subfields that are interested in the relationship between a field’s structure and the agency of actors within that field. I theorize that non-players in sexual fields are structurally positioned to assume roles as integrative agents, brokers, and buffers. Most broadly, this paper calls attention to how a lack of sexual attraction between individuals is a powerful social dynamic that shapes our interaction order.

Author

• Tyler G. Baldor, University of Pennsylvania