Sociologists are increasingly aware that analyses of social life must include a consideration of how the social may be structured by the sexual. In turn, this insight is contributing to a shift in understandings of sociology. This volume - drawn from papers from the 1994 British Sociological Association Annual Conference on 'Sexualities in Social Context' - brings together a range of writers who are contributing to this exciting new agenda. Various aspects of social life - including employment, family life, representations, politics, identities and the workings of the law - are considered, in terms of how sexuality shapes their organization and they shape sexuality. In so doing a series of ongoing and new controversies and debates are confronted, from the relationship of feminism to prostitution to the constitution of the self in late modernity.

Acknowledgements - Notes on Contributors - Introduction; L.Adkins & V.Merchant - PART 1: POWER AND CONSENT - Heterosexuality as a Problem for Feminist Theory; S.Jackson - Sinking into His Arms...Arms into His Sink: Heterosexuality and Feminism Revisited; J.VanEvery - The Social Construction of Consent Revisited; L.Jamieson - PART 2: IDENTITIES - Beyond Victim or Survivor: Sexual Violence, Identity and Feminist Theory and Practice; L.Kelly, S.Burton & L.Regan - Genital Identities: An Idiosyncratic Foray into the Gendering of Sexualities; T.Wilton - Irish Masculinities and Sexualities in England; M.Mac an Ghaill - Beyond the Predatory Male: The Diversity of Young Glaswegian Men's Discourses to Describe Heterosexual Relationships; D.Wight - PART 3: SEXUAL EXCHANGE - Organised Bodies: Gender, Sexuality and Embodiment in Contemporary Organisations; A.Witz, S.Halford & M.Savage - Feminist Debates on Prostitution; M.McIntosh - The Cultural, the Sexual, and the Gendering of the Labour Market; L.Adkins & C.Lury - Index