Racialized Embodiment and Eroticism

Sexualities scholarship in sociology and the social sciences often leaves sexuality, as an axis of power, uninterrogated, inadvertently sustaining the power it seeks to critique. Even the scholarship that weaves sexuality with race, class, or/and gender tends to operate disconnected from questions of the body. In this article, we unearth historically relevant aspects of how sexualities became implicated in sustaining a single lens, then survey current scholarship on the racialized embodiment, revealing how approaches to studying racialized embodiment that do not center whiteness or operate from an unwittingly “race-neutral” location offer us with nuanced accounts of the body as implicated in, and produced by, the social world. We also consider the instrumentalization of the erotic in current empirical work, deploying erotic capital in erotic labor today. We close with implications for future work based on our review of the field.