The Sex Deficit: Mapping the Absence of Sexual Practice in Sexuality Research

• In Event: Methods and Theory in the Sociology of Sexualities

Abstract

Within the sociology of sex, particularly in symbolic interactionist traditions, sex has long been conceptualized as a social and interactional accomplishment rather than a private expression of inner desire. Building on sexual script theory and subsequent interactionist scholarship, sex is understood as something people do: an embodied, situated practice coordinated between bodies through learned sequences, affective attunement, and practical know-how. Yet theoretical recognition does not necessarily translate into empirical attention. While sexuality is extensively theorized, politicized, and narrativized, the pragmatic “how” of sex as an unfolding, coordinated bodily process remains comparatively underexamined. This gap between conceptualizing sex as practice and studying its enactment is termed here the “sex deficit.”
To examine how this deficit operates empirically, the study presents a systematic review of all peer-reviewed research articles published between 2015 and 2025 (N=824) in Sexualities, a leading interdisciplinary sociology journal. Articles were analyzed to assess whether sexual conduct was treated as an embodied, interactional accomplishment unfolding over time, or whether analytic attention instead focused on discourse, identity, norms, space, or political regulation. Articles were classified into three categories: full engagement with practice analysis (10.4%), partial engagement (17%), and no engagement (72.6%).
Preliminary findings indicate that although references to “sexual practice” are present across the corpus, they rarely develop into sustained analytic engagement with its interactional and pragmatic dimensions. Even when specific sexual acts are discussed, analysis typically centers on surrounding moral, political, or regulatory frameworks rather than on the embodied coordination of the act itself. Taken together, the findings raise broader ontological and epistemological questions about how sex becomes constituted as an object of sociological knowledge and what would be required to study it as an embodied, interactional practice.

Authors

• Yeela Lahav-Raz, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

• Dana Kaplan, Department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication, The Open University.