Introduction to the special issue on sexuality and place.

This special issue of The Journal of Sex Research (JSR) presents papers that shift the gaze of the researcher and the reader from a narrow focus on the acts of sex to include the context within which people carry out their sexual lives. The place of sex is brought to the foreground, so that we may understand the broader social and spatial negotiations that not only permit or repress sexuality but also influence how it is expressed. A small number of studies of sexuality and place have already been published in JSR. This special issue brings together a group of papers to demonstrate the range and importance of the issues that are encountered by looking at people in context.

Loic Wacquant, among others, has urged social scientists to deepen their appreciation of context, arguing that absent a sense of the social, political, economic, and cultural forces that shape behavior we risk misinterpreting what we are seeing. While the appreciation of the context obviously extends to global economic forces rapidly changing the economies of the world, it begins with an investigation of the near environment, what we can call "place." While place has many definitions, we, as co-editors of this special issue, have relied on an archaic definition that place is the material contents of a three-dimensional object. The three-dimensional object is defined both objectively (as with geographic boundaries) and subjectively (as imbued with emotional meaning). Such bounded places are filled with patterns of interaction and rules of behavior that evolve as the contents of the three-dimensional object bump into each other. A place is a container of folkways, always including ways to have sex--ways that are subtly defined by the particulars of interactions in the given location.

If the devil is in the details, then it is in the appreciation of specifics that we come to understand the urgency of Wacquant's injunction to respect context. The small rules of here and there do indeed shape behavior. It is easy, reading the papers presented here, to imagine the loss of specificity that occurs as we slice across populations, inquiring about what people do and how often. The intricacies of an occult encounter in the park are unique in each park: Do people talk, do they visit in the morning, do they use the bushes or the bathroom? All of these small particulars open our eyes to new worlds of information, all of them glossed over by the usual cross-sectional study.

The reporting of context, it will not surprise the reader, reads differently from the usual article in this journal. In fact, much less of each paper is concerned with sex as particular acts or attitudes and much more is concerned with the shaping of a location which is, in turn, shaping what people will do together. The usual sources of comparison--race, gender, and sexual orientation--are present, but will be seen in a new light as one reads across this collection of papers. One might, at first glance, read about the fantasies of women at basketball games as different from the explicit sexual encounters of men in parks. But, on further consideration, in each case place emerges as an important actor, and these dynamics of place are, in fact, more the same than different. As we come to understand what these various authors have to say about place, we come to appreciate what a large number of actors are implicated in the existence of any given place. No place exists in isolation. Rather, places are shaped by other places, in a constant process of reformulation that includes growth, internal organization, dissolution, and reconstitution. Again, we are reminded of Wacquant's insistence on the respect for context: Though we start our analysis in one place, looking at one set of people, the processes that we observe are organized as systems within other systems, subject to rules which are made somewhere, by some people.

In the course of putting together this special issue, an event took place which provided much food for thought: the August 2004 mass march protesting the Republican National Convention in New York City at which George W. Bush was nominated for a second term in office. One of the organizing ideas of that march was that attendees, coming from many separate organizations, ought to bring their own signs. The half-million protesters that filled Sixth Avenue had a very slow forward movement but a great deal of Brownian motion as individuals meandered through the crowd. This permitted people to absorb the messages on each other's signs. A notable feature of the signs was how many used sexual language to protest the Bush administration and its policies. Sexual innuendo playing on "bush" (for George Bush) and "dick" (for his vice president, Dick Cheney) provided fodder for many signs and costumes. The marchers expressed their appreciation for these provocative and imaginative expressions of the collective opposition with cheers and laughter. In that particular place, at that particular time, sexual allusions became the language of protest.

The link between that place and the place of the Republican National Convention, and many other places in which people assert control over sexual behavior, was obvious. In other places--a wooded park or a basketball game--the mechanisms may be less obvious, but they are certainly there. These papers underscore that social structures arise from the willingness of people to engage with each other. People have the capacity, the agency, to move away from inhibitory structures and toward permissive structures. The strength of such movements is a force that will determine larger kinds of social change. Thus. a deep message of these papers is that structure is constantly renegotiated. Though much of current social practice is based on the idea that structures cannot be changed, that assumption would appear to be contrary to fact.

This is one of those findings that is at the same time both exciting and scary, it is exciting because the possibility for more freedom, more democracy, and more health exists. It is scary because the possibility for more oppression, more tyranny, and more disease also exists. As the founders of the United States put it, "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance." Put another way, the price of creating the places of our desire is constant engagement in placemaking.

We are grateful for the opportunity to work on this special issue. Our thanks to John DeLamater and the editorial board for their interest in our proposal and to the staff of JSR who worked tirelessly to help us meet deadlines. We are most appreciative of the authors, whose work opens our eyes to the contexts which inform sexuality. We hope that this special issue will open the way for more research on the links between sexuality and place.