Understanding Embodiment, Consumption and Taste in the Context of Everyday Sexual Practices

In our past work (Jackson and Scott 2010) we have engaged in a feminist re working of interactionism in order to develop an understanding of everyday sexual practices. More recently we have explored what it would mean to take a practice theoretic approach, making a comparison between sexual practices and practices relating to food and eating (Jackson and Scott 2017), and have further explored questions of embodiment and consumption (Scott 2017). In this paper we will continue the focus on sexual practices, as they relate to everyday embodied consumption, through an exploration of the ways in which habitus and cultural and social capital interplay with gender, generation and sexuality to shape consumption and taste. We will discuss the ways in which habits, routines and practices come together to produce sexual scenarios through the relationship between ideas about the exotic erotic and more prosaic sexual interactions. We will explore the tensions between established routines and the pressure of expectations, especially as this relates to gender and generation, before going on to discuss the social dimensions of the development of sexual tastes and how these lead to the appreciation of particular settings, objects and practices as an integral part of our everyday sexuality. We take Warde’s (2010) understanding of acquisition, appropriation and appreciation as a starting point for the development of research to better embrace the multi-dimensionality of sex, bodies and consumption as historically, socially and culturally located. We will address the following question: how are the differences between the classic signifiers of the erotic and the actual tastes of sexual actors in negotiation with sexual partners played out in a specific contexts?