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The Sexual Self: The Construction of Sexual Scripts, edited by Michael KimmeL Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2007. 298pp. $29-95 paper. ISBN: 9780826515599.
It is safe to say that the sociological study of sexuality could not have happened without the work of John Gagnon and William Simon. Rejecting the standard paradigms of sexuality as rooted in nature as advanced by Kinsey and as channeled desire as maintained by Freud, Gagnon and Simon developed a sexual scripts approach to the study of sexuality-a theoretical framework that is simple in its formulation and powerful in its explanatory potential. The sexual scripts approach utilizes the tenets of symbolic interaction to argue that the complex social formation of sexuality-practices, behaviors, fantasies, identities, and their imbrication with gender, class, race, etc.-develops at three levels or out of interaction among three meaning systems: cultural scripts (the normative guidelines given by the culture); interpersonal scripts (the meaning systems emergent in the process of social interaction); and intrapsychic scripts (the internalized cultural expectations that motivate fantasy, sexual desires, and behaviors).
The many essays in this volume dedicated to the work of Gagnon and Simon attest to these sociologists' pivotal role in the sociology of sexuality and to the continued relevance of their sexual scripts approach. Michael Kimmel brings together scholars whose research spans a broad gamut of subject areas ranging from...