Sociological Discipline and the Unruly Erotic

Will sociological theory and methodology, with its inclination towards ordering and structuring of the social, ever manage to come to grips with sexuality and the vicissitudes of fantasy, desire and passion? There is no clear answer to the question, and sociologists engage theoretically and empirically in a number of ways in studies of the sexual, often looking to other disciplines for perspectives to inform the analysis. In this paper, theoretical concepts from psychoanalysis are deployed in an attempt to deconstruct the conceptual distinction between homosexual and heterosexual practices. The author introduces a notion of ‘triangulation’, drawn from psychoanalysis, where a third eroticising element is seen as part of the relation between desiring individuals, thereby making the distinction between ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ a more problematic one.