Towards a Practice Theoretic Approach to Understanding Sexuality

In our book ‘Theorising Sexuality’ (2010) we re-worked the Interactionist  sociological account of everyday sexual behavior drawing on the work of G H Mead (1973) and utilising the notion of sexual scripts (Gagnon and Simon 1973). We do however, accept some of the criticisms of interactionism as overly cognitive and have attempted to overcome this by developing a more embodied understanding of sexuality - using the example of orgasm (Jackson and Scott 2007 and 2010), and developing the ideas of Lindemann and de Nora in order to enable an understanding of the ways in which sexual interactions are composed. While we have utilized the term sexual practice, and engaged to some extent with the work of Bourdieu we have not, until recently, begun to develop fully a practice theoretic approach to the sociology of sexual conduct. In this paper we will engage with the work of writers such as Schatski; Reckwitz ; Warde  and Shove in order to set out the ways in which sexual conduct constitutes a practice, and to indicate to what extent this approach, if brought together with interactionist ideas, can support the development of a general sociological theory of sexuality.