Auditando el capital sexual: Pasos hacia una ecología de las relaciones de género

Abstract

Despite being a generalist or multidisciplinary sociologist, I do frequent certain specialties more often than others. The fields of study which have been my priority are gender, politics, age, the family, culture and sociological theory. And to describe the inner workings of my research process there is nothing better than to refer to the development of my studies on gender relations, to which I have been dedicated during the last 30 years, since I received my degree in sociology in 1977 with an undergraduate thesis on couples and the cognitive structure of desire (Utero, Deseo y Safo, unpublished [The Uterus, Desire and Sappho]). Subsequently, I have published four books in this field (La mujer cuarteada [Woman fractured] in 1991, El nuevo sexo debil [The new weaker sex] in 1997, Medias Miradas [The Hidden Gaze] in 2000 and Mascaras masculinas [Masculine masks], in 2006), as well as diverse articles. Today I continue, embarked on this same line of research, as I prepare my next book projected to be published with the title El capital sexual [Sexual capital]. To explain such a stubborn insistence on this object of cognitive desire I could say that it is all due to a certain sexual obsession, whose repeated frustration has been sublimated into a social-scientific interest and dressed up with a patina of academic respectability. Therefore, willing to publically reveal my research strategies, I have opted to expose my most unconfessable mental habits to focus, not on the production of a particular work, but rather on the progressive development of a work in progress; one that has been accompanying me throughout my academic life as if I were leading an unsuspected but covetous and stimulating double life. This is my most valuable sexual capital.