The institutional logics of love: measuring intimate life
Roger Friedland&John W. Mohr&Henk Roose&
Paolo Gardinali
# Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
Abstract Building on a long tradition of measuring cultural logics from a relational perspective, we analyze a recent survey of American university students to assess whether institutional logics operate in the lived experience of individuals. An institu-tional logic is an analytic troika of object, practice, and subject linked together through dually ordered systems of articulations. Using the formal method of correspondence analysis (MCA) we identify two latent dimensions that order physical, verbal, emo-tional, categorical, and moral practices of and investments in love. We take these dimensions as evidence of an institutional logic. The dominant first dimension is organized through talk of love, non-genital physical intimacies, and affective invest-ment. It has no sexual specificity. The subsidiary second dimension is organized through moral investment and it has a genital sexual specificity. There is little difference between women and men, either in the way these dimensions are organized or in the location of men and women within these dimensionalized spaces. We find that romantic love has a situated material effect in terms of increasing the probabilities of orgasm. Keywords Institutional logic . Romantic love . MCA . Institutional substance . Institutional practice . Institution and emotion
DOI 10.1007/s11186-014-9223-6
R. Friedland (*)
Department of Media, Culture and Communication, New York University, 239 Greene Street, 8th Floor, New York, NY 10003, USA
e-mail: [email protected] J. W. Mohr
Department of Sociology, 3407 Social Sciences & Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9430, USA
e-mail: [email protected] H. Roose
Department of Sociology, University of Gent, Korte Meer 3, 9000 Gent, Belgium e-mail: [email protected]
P. Gardinali
UCSB Social Science Survey Center, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9430, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Does love follow an institutional logic? Institutional logics have been applied to the study of organizational behaviors where changes are effected in public through the actions of office-holders and there is abundant textual activity both in justification and codification, all of which leave their traces in public statement, law, regulation, budgets, and official statement. Romantic love, in contrast, is an individual phenomenon effected in private through interpersonal relations that not only leave little textual trace, but whose enactment depends on registers of corporeality, affect, and co-presence that do not even accede to language, let alone text. Is it even possible to investigate the intimate behaviors of college students to see if they are ordered by the institutional logic of romantic love?1We think so. In this article, we build on a theorization of institutional logics and a long tradition of measuring cultural logics from a relational perspective that provide figurations more appropriate to that theory. We use the formal method of correspondence analysis (MCA) to examine a set of data recently collected from a sample of American university students in order to see how institutional logics operate in the lived experi-ence of individuals who negotiate their intimate“love lives” within a complex social space where different institutional logics are operative.
What is an institutional logic?
Institutional logics obtain where subjects, practices, and objects cohere as cultural grammars.2 An institutional logic is an order of production composed of distinctive subjects and objects mediated by a regime of material practice. Institutional logics point to socially regionalized orders of meaningful practice that are simultaneously orders of subjectification and objectification, that is, orders of practice that depend on the particular identities of subjects and ontologies of objects, which in turn depend on these same orders of practice (Friedland2009,2011a,b,2013; Friedland and Alford1991). Institutional logics yoke the performativity of language with the productivity of material practice.
Institutional logics are founded neither in subjects nor objects, neither in the will or reason of a subject, nor the material affordances of objects and tools, but through a metaphysical category—an institutional substance. Institutional substances are not values per se, but rather institutional“objects” enacted and thereby valorized through practice, that is through the simple fact of their production or enactment. By using this Aristotelian term we seek to capture the way in which institutional logics are organized around a deep ontology, on valued institutional objects that do not exist as such, whether it be sovereignty, knowledge, art, property, God, or—in the case considered here—love. In each institutional logic, a substance is both the basis of the identity of the
1In contrast, the eminent historian of the conventions of American courtship prefaces her book this way:“the
word love scarcely appears in the following pages. This is not because I have a cynical view of the subject but because love was not so much the province of convention. Convention looked to a multiplicity of desires, not to love itself. It structured and controlled the manifestation of sexual desire and the desires for security, for status, for a clear role in society—even the desire for love. Love and desire are intertwined, but I will leave love to lovers in private and examine the public conventions of desire” (Bailey2013, p. 12).
2Institutional logics refer to materialized languages, not just to linguistic speech, but to constellations of unit
acts, concepts, objects, and relations. Note that this article builds on but also goes beyond earlier theoretical and empirical work that we have published on the formal analysis of institutional logics as duality structures (e.g., Mohr and Duquenne1997; Breiger and Mohr2004; Mohr and White2008; Mohr and Neeley2009; Mohr and Guerra-Pearson2010).
subject and of the ontology immanent to her material practice, and thus the lesser objects deployed within it, the metaphysical ground of subjectification and objectification. Institutional practices only have efficacy because they presume production or enactment of that substance. How and what, deontology and ontology, are tied to one another.
In that they are objects that are not, in the Aristotelian category of substance, a unity of form and matter, this seems an appropriate way to describe the institutional object anchoring an institutional logic. An institutional substance is only known through its material instances, but cannot be reduced to that materiality. For Aristotle, substance is not matter, but what makes matter a“this,” “that by virtue of which the matter is in the state it is in” (Aristotle1998, pp. 167, 229). In Aristotelian metaphysics, substance, or substantial form, is the foundation, or essence, of a thing that cannot be reduced to the accidental properties that attach to it nor to the materiality of its instances. But neither is that form autonomous from its material instances, knowable independently of its sensible manifestations, of determinate things themselves. Aristotle presumes that things that exist present themselves as already intelligible, as realization of forms. Unlike Platonic and Augustinian traditions that understand soul, for instance, as a substance separate from the body and that ground cognition in universal concepts or revealed truth, Aristotelian form cannot be accessed except through the sensible manifestations of material entities.
Institutional substances are not objects at all, but rather non-observable reasons that can only be phenomenalized through practice. One can never arrive at them, only repeat the approach through practice. By comparison to the presence of things, an institutional substance is an absent presence towards and around which material practice incessantly moves, known only through this movement. Institutional logics are ontological enactments, a what done through a how, popular sovereignty through democratic election, justice through juridical practices that classify actions according to the binary of legal and illegal, divinity through pilgrimage and prayer, romantic love through intimate exchange of body and word. Institutional logics depend on making the invisible substance visible. Institu-tional practices are the visible face and the condition of possibility of instituInstitu-tional sub-stances, and hence the source of their identity across time, but reciprocally, the continuity of those practices depends, particularly at moments of logical multiplicity, on instituting and institutional failure on a metaphysical belief in the substance, as an actionable good.
That an institutional object operates as if it were a substance does not mean that the analysis presumes a substantialist point of view, the object of Pierre Bourdieu’s classic critique of sociology. For Bourdieu, who largely follows Cassirer, substantialism describes a kind of metaphysical essentialism, harkening back to pre-modern times, which lingers on in tendencies to reify and essentialize individuals, groups, and social categories such as race, class, and gender.3Substantialism also implies a tendency to
3In his classic book, Substance and Function, Cassirer identifies substantialism with its presumption that
abstraction occurs in the sorting of things, according to common features, into taxonomic hierarchies, as species and genus.“Just as we form the concept of a tree by selecting from the totality of oaks, beaches and birch trees, the group of common properties, so, in exactly the same way, we form the concept of a plane rectangular figure by isolating the common properties which are found in the square, the right angle, rhomboid” (p. 5). Cassirer criticizes substantialism from multiple angles, including the classic Kantian critique that the theory cannot account for its own principles of differentiation. But also because, in a fashion that prefigures both Gaston Bachelard and Thomas Kuhn, Cassirer suggests that the logic of substantialism defines and limits one’s scientific thinking and thus prevents one from being capable of understanding the relational foundations of reality (Cassirer1910; Martin2011; Mohr2010).
treat other types of social phenomena such as power as substances that have a unity, an integrity and a logic that exist prior to and which operate independently of the field of social relations in which they are constituted.4For Bourdieu substantialism signals an approach to scientific understanding that privileges social substances as being outside of and thus prior to the relational systems (or fields), an appreciation of which, according to Bourdieu, is required for an adequate understanding of the social.5With Bourdieu, we also see substances as very human social constructs. But for us “sub-stances,” while built out of constellations of subjective meaning and material practice, are also themselves part of the constitution of those constellations. Substance on the one side, and material practice and subjectivity on the other, are mutually constitutive. They are the absent presences necessary to institutional life.
The idea of measuring mutually constitutive relationships has been developed through the application of structural duality analysis. The roots for this approach are in Ronald Breiger’s (1974) efforts to model Simmel’s conception of the mutual constitution of individuals (who are members of groups) and the groups of which the individuals are members. Structural duality analyses examine how these two different orders of social life (distinct in type, dimension, and internal form) can nonetheless be shown to be structurally derivable from one another when the linkages of the one are constituted by the elements of the other. Starting about two decades ago, this style of articulation analysis was usefully applied across a series of settings and situations in the study of culture. Such duality relations have been found to link practices, concepts, identities, subjectivities, individuals, groups, organizations, and events into larger social structural and institutional forms (e.g., Breiger2000,2009; Breiger and Mohr2004; Martin2006; Mische2011; Mische and Pattison2000; Mische and White1998; Mohr and Duquenne1997; Mohr and Neeley 2009; Mohr and White 2008; Pachucki and Breiger2010; White1995; White and Duquenne1996; Yeung2005).
In our view, this same type of dual ordering describes how foundational institutional objects exist when people believe in their substantiality, or where their practices are ordered as if a substance were an object and they either ascribe their subjectivity to the qualities of its objectivity or where the nature of its objectivity affords or requires a particular kind of subjectivity. Institutional logics operate across a transom of immanentization and transcendentalization. They do not necessarily require explicit belief. But institutional logics are based on the substantializing practices of its practi-tioners; one must believe or act as if“it” exists, as if a set of practices produce or access it, and as if a particular set of objects constitute a situation in which this is possible. One engages in practices understood to produce or to access“it,” as well as pointing to “it”
4
Bourdieu writes:“It is for the purpose of breaking with this substantialist mode of thinking, and not for the thrill of sticking a new label on old theoretical wineskins, that I speak of this“field of power” rather than of the dominant class, the latter being a realist concept designating an actual population of holders of this tangible reality that we call power. By field of power, I mean the relations of force that obtain between the social positions that guarantee their occupants a quantum of social force, or of capital, such that they are able to enter into the struggles over the monopoly of power, of which struggles over the definition of the legitimate form of power are a crucial dimension” (Bourdieu and Wacquant1992pp. 229–230).
5There is a deep and complex genealogy of relationalism running through Bourdieu’s thought. It includes a
reading of Marx, Durkheim, and Simmel as well as an appreciation of the tradition of cultural analysis that begins with Saussurian (and Pierceian) semiotics. But there is also a very explicit embrace of Cassirer’s philosophical stance of relationalism, which extends also through Bourdieu’s appreciation of Lewin’s field theory (Martin2003,2011; Mohr2010,2013).
by invoking its name. Institutional logics depend on the conjunction of material convention and linguistic naming. Love is an institutional object that one “has,” “makes,” or inhabits as being “in” love. But like property or knowledge, love is neither an ordinary object nor is it just a feeling. It is a social construct, a substance enacted in practices by which one gains access to it, affording emotions and affects that substantialize it.
Thus, institutional logics are troikas—object-practice-subject—regionalized into meaningful categories of social relations (see Fig.1). The elements of the troika are mutually constituted (dually ordered), each is defined by and through its relation to the other two. Institutional logics are built around particular ontologies, around objects whose reality and value can never be secured through rationality or the senses. These institutional objects are pointed to through names and performed through practice. Institutional logics are organized around unobservable substances, the institutional object, where constellations of particular practices are understood as their enactment or production.6Practice then is not just a sign or signal; it functions as symbolization or performance. An institutional logic obtains where institutional objects that are pointed to and known through particular categories are also enacted through particular sets of material practices. Institutional logics imply both practical specificities of institutional objects and objective specificity of practices. Institutional logics should be clumpy with limits to their decomposability.7 Unlike Bourdieu’s theory of social fields, which centers around the distribution of capitals the accumulation and deployment of which generate power, in the institutional logics approach power and distribution are second-ary moments. Power is just as likely to be a medium or outcome of the possession of a substance as it is to be its telos. It is not that powers and interests do not exist and are not stakes, but those powers and interests are often constructed through the very institutional objects through which power and interest are deployed. Resource ex-changes flow out of the ontologies; the ontologies do not simply derive from or act as figures for those flows.8
The subject of institutional logics has not been adequately addressed.9 Just as individuals’ critical abilities to judge the justness of a being relative to a common good is essential to the operation of conventions of worth (Boltanski and Thévenot2006), so too is the institutional formation of subjects invested in and by a particular value an essential element in the operation of any institutional logic. Institutional logics are not
6This approach obviously has a kinship with and has been partially inspired by Michel Foucault’s
method-ological project in the second volume of the History of Sexuality, where he lays out the elements of his analysis of Greek sexuality: ethical substance, mode of subjectification, ethical work, and telos. Foucault centers his analysis on the ethical relation to self (Foucault1990, p. 251).
7
Friedland2013; Thornton et al.2012.
8Useful extensions of Bourdieu’s ideas about field theory and the social organization of sexual capital have
been developed by Martin (2003,2014; Martin and George2006) and also in a somewhat different fashion in a series of works by Adam Green and colleagues (2011,2014; Leschziner and Green2013). While we find much that is admirable in this work, we also see some of the same limitations that we complain about in Bourdieu, including a tendency to define the field primarily as a site of hierarchy, competition, and contestation that is constructed around the use and accumulation of sexual capital. While we agree that such competitions and forms of capital operate within the field, we contend that they do so only within the context of a set of intersecting institutional logics that serve to orient and to anchor the production, consumption, and deployment of these capitals.
9
One of the major contributions of Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury’s book on institutional logic is their development of theories regarding the micro-mechanisms of logics (2012).
Weberian value rationalities grounded in individual will, an isolable intention, un-hinged from any particular regime of practice (Weber1958a). Weberian value ratio-nalities hinge on a subjective pursuit of a value ultimately independent of practical forms and their consequences. Institutional logics, in contrast, hinge on a subjective pursuit of a value that is only knowable and actionable through practical forms involving words, objects, and bodies in which that value is immanent. In an institu-tional logic person, practice, and value are co-implicated. Instituinstitu-tional substances not only ground objectification, but subjectification, belief and emotion, cognition and investment, upon which the instituting and the institutionalization of practice depend (Friedland2011a,b,2009).
Institutional logics co-implicate objects and subjects, domains of objectivity and subjectivity, and hence of objectification and subjectification. The import of subjectification is clear if one understands institutional logics as sets or domains of praxis in the Aristotelian sense. Aristotle distinguished between poeisis and praxis, which he also termed the distinction between production and action (Aristotle1998). In the former, an act is derived instrumentally from an end external to the act, as in the case of a craftsman who uses his skill, or techné, to execute a pre-existing plan for a chair. Word and act are related as a making. In praxis, in contrast, the standards of action are internal to the action and the goal of the action is the action itself. Word and act are related as a doing, or a performance. Whereas poeisis is governed by a means-ends logic where the end has an exterior relation to the means and the person, in praxis, subject and object are both immanent in the act. A prudent man practices prudence. Praxis, unlike production, is a self-contained order of action. In production, Aristotle says, the actuality of the making is in the thing being made; in action, the actuality of action is located in the actor himself (Aristotle 1998). Praxis is organized around ontologically subjective objects, objects that can only approximate appearance through practice, through the acts of subjects whose actions and subjectivities depend on them. The institutional logical approach seeks to specify the domains of praxis into which
various forms of poeisis are situated, the way their operations are consequently conditioned. Powers, projects, and interests are institutionally contingent.
Institutional logics entail particular forms of subjectification, not only particular forms of emotional identification, but motion through and around the substance. An institutional logic entails not just an attempted possession of the substance, but possession by the substance, which takes cognitive, emotional, and affective forms.10 It diverges from Bourdieu’s theory of practice. For Bourdieu subjectification operates primarily through non-reflexive doxa, as habitus, the dispositional incorporation of position, in the sense of a categorical order immanent in the distribution of particular species of capital to which individuals grant a tacit authority (Bourdieu1977, p. 81; Bourdieu1998, p. 47).“Interest” in a field, in the sense of illusio, of the arbitrary value of its stakes, derives from the dynamics of competition for domination of that field (Bourdieu1984,2000; Bourdieu and Wacquant1992; Friedland2009).11For Bourdieu, the ends of a field have a tendency to become media of domination, ends to become means.
In an institutional logic, it is the reverse. Institutional logics are not subjectively energized primordially by a will to power, but by a passion, often a conscious one, by a desire to possess the central institutional object, which is a manifestation of being possessed by it.12
One believes and is moved by the prospect of having or losing, being close to or distant from, the institutional object.13That movement operates not just through notion and emotion, but through affect, as“surging capacities to affect or be affected that give everyday life the quality of continual motion,” as Kathleen Stewart puts it (Stewart 2007, p. 2). Institutional practice is a structured movement, a conventional progression or flow, towards, around, or through an institutional object, towards a particular value, an embodied narrative. Our situated movements through its forms, around its objects, affect us—within and between us and the things in play—movements that are signifiers, bodily energies or intensities evoked by practical forms, the energetics of our social possession, the way the social lives within us, affording our continual movement, to keep dancing, in ways that are much more compelling than incorporated categorical orders, the possession by habitus upon which Bourdieu’s social worlds depends. Affect, an ordinary embodiment manifest in the movements
10
The integral relationship between ontology and emotion is pointed to in Clifford Geertz’s definition of religion:“A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.” Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” (Geertz1977, pp. 87–125.
11
The ends of a game are illusory, given by entry into the game, by competition, by being“taken in by the game” (Bourdieu and Wacquant1992, p. 98).
12This recalls Bourdieu’s understanding of habitus: “The doxic relation to the native world is a relationship of
belonging and possession in which the body possessed by history appropriates immediately the things inhabited by the same history. Only when the heritage has taken over the inheritor can the inheritor take over the heritage.” The predecessors, whose pedagogy assure the heritage, are “possessed possessors” (Bourdieu
2000, p. 152).
13Creed et al. (forthcoming) have pointed to a complementary emotion, that of shame, which they treat as a
systemic attribute of institutional life, which both disciplines the lovable and is a lived by-product of institutional contradiction. An adequate account will have to integrate both positive and negative aspects of subjective engagement, the pleasures of possession and the displeasures of failure to be possessed, to identify and dis-identify, beyond the distributive question of one’s ability and inability to possess.
of practice, substantiates a telos, an end, towards which or in which one is moved, becoming ordinary signifiers of that end—like expectant pilgrims moving to a sacred center, customers eagerly reaching for their wallets, or soldiers deployed and tense at the border—a living proof of a reality evidenced by our movement, by the way it moves us. It is precisely because affect exceeds semiotic systems, unassimilable to language, (Massumi 1995) that it is a powerful basis, not just as a medium for publicizing a common place (Thévenot2011), but for the substantiation of a substance, the valuation of a value. The social does depend, as Bourdieu insists, on incorporation below the level of words, but not just as an intuitive and immanent sense of a categorical hierarchical order.
The institutional logic of romantic love
What about“this thing called love,” to cite Cole Porter’s famous 1929 song?14There are many ways to theorize love, from Plato’s daimon, or spirit mediating between humans and the gods (Plato1999) to a refraction of hormonal processes that regulate sexual desire, mate selection, and attachment (Fisher 2004), or as a conditioned constituent of pair-bonding necessary to raise infants for survival in long-term mating strategies (Kirkpatrick2005). We wish to explore the notion that love is an institution with its own logic, conjointly composed of a substance (love), forms of subjectivity (both emotions and affects, as well as beliefs in the existence of love) and a set of material—here corporeal—practices (exclusive, repeated acts of bodily and expressive intimacy and verbal invocation of the category) yoked to another institutional space (marriage). In its classic modern formulation, love is enacted through practices of intimate communication and exclusive sexuality between a man and woman ratified by a marital rite, as“proof” of that love (Luhmann2010).
Love is an institutional object, something in which one must believe in order to participate in it, to be the kind of subject who can organize his or her life around it. Romantic love is not just a structure of experience, an emotion; it is an order of belief, a metaphysics. One must believe in it in order to enact it. “One loves loving and, therefore, a person whom one can love,” remarks the systems theorist Niklas Luhmann (Luhmann2010, p. 32). One falls in love, he notes,“because of loving love.” Love is a self-contained order of action where the goal of the action is the action itself.
Love is a praxis with a history. Romantic love, as we understand it today, involves two critical historical moments: first, the emergence of romantic love as basis of mate choice in which a structure of feeling and a mode of communication became both a telos and a ground of mating and marriage, and second, the eroticization of that relationship in which the sexual pleasure of each partner became a central component of those feelings, unhinged first from reproduction and then from marriage itself (Seidman1991).15
14Cole Porter’s lyrics include: “What is this thing called love/this funny thing called love/just who can solve
its mystery/why should it make a fool of me?”
15
As Stephanie Coontz points out, in many cultures of the world“love was seen as a desirable outcome of marriage but not as a good reason for getting married in the first place.” (Coontz2005, p. 18).
In the pre-modern West, passionate romantic love operated outside of marriage, which revolved around the production of heirs, the accumulation of family wealth and power, and the management of a household (de Rougement 1956). In the West it is only over the last three centuries— specifically since the late eighteenth century—that romantic love has come to order marriage as a private relation between individuals, “shifting the basis of marriage from sharing tasks to sharing feelings” (Coontz 2005, pp. 156, 145–146).16
The rise of marital romantic love required the erosion of paternal authority and the emergence of autonomous individuals who thought it proper and themselves capable of making a mating choice based on their personal preferences. The historical emergence of love as a basis of marriage in the West evolved slowly out of a series of social changes. These changes either increased the autonomy and agency of women (and men) relative to their parents and their husbands, or valorized a marital relation as a binding source of personal meaning and satisfaction in its own right: the primacy of independent household formation as economic units that put a premium on the cooperation of husbands and wives, the emergence of wage labor and education, which gave women and men more independence in choosing their own mates and the opportunity to meet each other out of sight of their families, the Protestant reformation, which infused marriage with spiritual value and desacralized celibacy, the religiously imposed difficulty of di-vorce, which rendered marriage a singular and irrevocable act, and Enlight-enment political movements, which made liberty and the pursuit of “happi-ness” the basis of contractual consent between equals the basis of social order (Coontz 2005; Hunt 1993).
Romantic love continued to evolve with the decline of household produc-tion and the rise of separate spheres in which predominantly middle class women were identified—both as mothers and wives—with the home as a private center of female-provided and defined nurturance and intimacy in opposition to and in refuge from the outside “heartless” instrumental male world of work (Coontz 2005; Giddens 1992, pp. 42–43). Women, in this order, were both freed from direct control by their husbands and rendered morally superior, more loving and“compassionate” beings (Coontz 2005, pp. 154–156). Romantic love, as a “reparative” joining of souls, was grounded in what were assumed to be essential differences between the sexes in which superior female emotional powers conquer the hearts of rough, rational, and pragmatic males (Giddens 1992, p. 45). In Victorian domesticity, women were armed with superior virtues, but inferior sexual drives, thereby empowered to make their husbands better people and the world a better place. The older view that wives and husbands were work mates gave way to [the] idea that they were soul mates” (Coontz 2005, p. 156). The rise of romantic love empowered women not only vis–à–vis their husbands, but ultimately provided them the bases for entry into the public sphere in order to make it a better, more humane place. While female domesticity would
16
Indeed it was only at the end of the twentieth century that the majority of American women declared that love was the most important factor in mate choice (Coontz2005, p. 186).
steadily decline over the century, the notion that a nuclear family home was a site for the production and enactment of love would remain. While divorce rates would rise over the course of the century, marriage would remain ever-more centered around the premise and promise of love, indeed as its productive and reproductive reasons withered, the central ground and telos of the relation.
The fusion of sexuality and love that emerged in the early twentieth century likewise depended on a host of other transformations that made sexual pleasure a legitimate goal for both women and men, shorn of the stigma of Adam’s Fall, a pleasure whose legitimacy no longer depended on its reproductive role. The eroticization of relationships between men and women depended on the collapse of Victorian gender dualism in which women were sexless moral beings, a change facilitated by rising female labor-force participation and education in which women had opportunities to interact with young men outside of parental control. These changes were manifest in the rise of “dating,” which replaced middle class “calling,” in which young women were allowed and expected to engage in some measure of sexual physical contact in exchange for being taken out by a man for a meal or entertainment (Bailey 2013).17 Over the course of the twentieth century, sexual pleasure of both partners increasingly came to be part of the repertoire of intimacy, of the sharing of feelings constituted as love, first inside marriage, and then before it as pre-marital sex became normative after the Second World War (Giddens 1992; Seidman 1991). As women and men deferred both marriage and childbearing, growing percentages of women and men engaged in sex before marriage beyond their ultimate marriage partners. T h e ri s e o f th e bi r t h - c o n t r o l p i l l g a v e wo m e n c on t r o l ov e r th e i r reproductivity, enabling them to eliminate most of the risk of pregnancy, whether inside or outside of marriage, thereby enabling them to pursue sexual pleasure for its own sake and to discount love as a basis of pre-marital sex because they no longer had to worry about marrying their sexual partners in the event of pregnancy (May 2011; Coontz 2005). The legaliza-tion of aborlegaliza-tion with Roe v. Wade in 1973 had similar effects.
Over the last century love, sex and marriage have become increasingly differentiated as young people delayed marriage and child-birth, educational requirements have grown, and large numbers of emerging adults no longer live in their parents’ households. As divorce rates soared, not only did it become increasingly permissible for young people to experience an eroti-cized love that was not expected and did not lead to marriage, but it also became increasingly viable to have sexual relations with each other un-hinged from intimacy, let alone love.
Much has been made about the rise of the “hookup” culture among
emerging adults where casual sex and physical gratification, not intimacy, let alone love, has primacy (Bogle 2008). Although most American adoles-cents still transition to intercourse through romantic relationships (Bearman and Bruckner 2001; Manning et al. 2000), over the last two decades an
17
institutionalized erotic culture of “hooking up,” casual sexual encounters without any emotional, or sometimes even social, relationship attached to them, has emerged (Bogle 2008; England et al. 2006; Freitas 2008; Glenn and Marquardt 2001; Grello et al. 2006; Manning et al. 2000, 2006; Stepp 2007; Thompson 1995). Large percentages of adolescents and college stu-dents have intercourse and various forms of genital sex with non-romantic partners, a majority of whom are friends (Bogle 2008; Grello et al. 2006; Manning et al. 2006).
American university students today live in a world that has fostered the possibility of de-linking sexual behavior and romantic attachment, unhinging sex not only from marriage, but from love, reconstituting it as a domain of pleasure that is legitimate to seek for its own sake (Laumann et al. 1994; Seidman 1991; Whyte 1990). Indeed recent ethnographic work indicates that college students talk a lot about sex, but rarely about love, and that when talking romance, they almost never associate it with erotic behaviors or feelings (Freitas 2008). Over the last several decades there has been a decline in the affective depth of young people’s erotic relations (Stepp 2007; Schmitt 2003).
There are a multitude of polemics about the irrationality of young women seeking romantic partners, let alone marriage partners, in college when they must concentrate on their academic performance and ensure their flexibility of being able to go on to an uncertain post-graduate training program either in the academy or the labor force (Rosin 2012; Hamilton and Armstrong 2010). Hamilton and Armstrong argue: “The imperative that privileged young adults invest heavily in self-development also makes committed rela-tionships less feasible as the sole contexts for premarital sexuality. Like marriage, committed relationships can be “greedy” (Gerstel and Sarkisian 2006; Glenn and Marquardt 2001; Swidler 2001). Committed relationships can siphon time or motivation from the acquisition of human capital. They may also limit the geographic mobility required to pursue educational or career goals. Relationships may have to end if they progress to the point where marriage is inappropriate due to life stage. These breakups can be painful.”
Questions of method
Love is in question. Historically we have witnessed both fusions and differ-entiations among marriage, love, and sexuality. As a result young adults today live in a complex institutional field, not unlike the way that organi-zations are understood to do. The question we seek to address is how beliefs, practices, categories, and feelings cohere in the intimate life of single, university students. Are their intimate lives ordered according to an institutional logic of love?
Studying love as an institutional logic raises a whole series of methodo-logical questions. An institutional logic obtains where an institutional object— here love—is pointed to, evoked, and known through particular categories
enacted through particular sets of practices that are experienced through particular forms of subjectivity, both belief and emotion. We will read their situated ordering as evidence of an institutional logic.18
Studying an institutional logic suggests the need for a different technical approach. The traditional way of understanding social action is through estimation and specifi-cation of net effects based on a partitioning of the co-variation of attributes of individuals or organizations. Institutional logics are part of larger, older project of what can be called the study of fields, that is, of practices, codes, and emotions as an ordered relationally defined social space. If the first presumes a world made up of individuals whose attributes cause them to act in particular ways, the second seeks to analyze the ordering of their actions as constituting a space, or field, in which they participate. Following Ernst Cassirer (1953) and Einstein’s concept of field theory in physics, Kurt Lewin originally described the concept of a social field as consisting of the“totality of coexisting facts which are conceived of as mutually interdependent” (Lewin1951, p. 240). This definition suggests a focus on the analysis of relations rather than on individuals and it calls attention to the mutual constitution, or duality, of elements within the field (Breiger1974,2000; Martin2003,2011; Mohr and White 2008; White2008). The approach we pursue in this article follows in the line of these and a number of other recent projects committed to the pursuit of what has also been termed a “relational sociology” (Dépelteau and Powell 2013a, b; Emirbayer 1997; Fuhse2009; Mische2011).
One of the great proponents of a relational sociology who focused on the analysis of field spaces was Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu 1984; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Bourdieu, who emphasized the importance of finding methods suited to this theoretical task, advocated the use of correspondence analysis because it“is a relational technique of data analysis whose philosophy corresponds exactly to what, in my view, the reality
18
This article is in part inspired by the challenge of Boltanski and Thévenot’s “orders of worth,” belonging not to groups, organizations, or institutions, but to situations. We here study the practical order of situated moments, rather than perduring hegemonic orders observed in socially regionalized domains of actions. To begin with, Thévenot would not consider love to be an institution, exterior, accountable, and rule-bound, a “regime of engagement” not raising to the level of public justification and a common good, but having a kinship with the attachments of familiarity (Thévenot2011). But even if one accepts that the applicability of institutional logic to“romantic love,” this project is incommensurable to theirs in other ways. Institutional logics, unlike Boltanski and Thévenot’s orders of worth, did not derive from, nor delimit, a set of political grammars by which members reached agreement over evaluation (Boltanski and Thévenot2006). We are not studying polities in which disputes must be resolved. Although this has been left undeveloped in the institutional logical approach, we both insist on the ways in which materiality—even if it is corporeality— constitute and are constituted by value. While both our approaches insist on the role of material practice, material objects in economies of worth operate both to stabilize the fitness of a situation and as media through which evaluation based on an unobservable“worth” takes place, whereas Friedland’s institutional logical approach understands material practice to be a medium through which an unobservable“substance” is produced or enacted, more in the manner of the“teleological” side of Max Weber’s value rationality (Friedland 2014, unpublished; Arjaliès and Friedland 2014, unpublished). Although we here study the practical order of moments, they are not moments of contest over worthiness—of whether and how much one loves or is loved—resolved through tests, but moments of enactment manifest in corporeal practice. Finally, Thévenot has since developed a theory of“regimes of engagement,” beyond, or rather below, to which something like “love” would be assimilated in that they cannot and do not need to break into words, into publicness, into bases of agreement (Thévenot2011). This exercise seeks to apply an institutional logical approach to a “private” order of practice in which agreement is dyadic at best. This does not mean, however, that love is not a“collective good.”
of the social world is. It is a technique which‘thinks’ in terms of relation, as I try to do precisely with the notion of field” (p. 96).
The question we ask is whether love, as an institutional object, has a practical and subjective specificity in young people’s intimate lives. In this article, we follow Bourdieu’s lead by applying correspondence analysis to our data in order to highlight the relational and mutually ordered character of material practices and emotional and moral subjectivities, including, for example, modes of performative speech, that com-pose the institutional logic of love. The methodological assumption of this project is that institutional logics reveal themselves in ordered dimensions reflecting the co-presence of practices, subjectivities, and substances composing them. Notice that each dimension reflects a distinctive opposition among these practices and subjectivities, and that successive orthogonal dimensions (ordered according to their ability to account for variation) might be interpreted by the analyst either to elaborate upon or indeed, to contradict those prior in the ordering.19
There are other theoretical assumptions embedded in this approach. First, we assume that the systematic co-presence of the category of love within a field of related deployed categories is not just an exterior labeling, but a manifestation of belief in a metaphysical substance, and thus an interior constituent, a condition of possibility of the practices by which it is enacted and in which it is immanent, and of the subjectivities through which it is experienced as a real, or in other words, substantialized. This is the theoretical framework that affords our interpretation of the results of the correspondence analysis. Second, following Breiger and Mohr (2004) on the intimate relation between structural equivalence (homogeneity of categories) and dimensional analysis in loglinear models, we think both the dimensionality and the clustering of elements in an MCA are relevant to revealing an institutional logic. While we measure an institutional logic as a dimension ordering practices and subjective states, we assume that institutional logics manifest themselves as central tendencies across multiple, ordered dimensions, as ideal practical types, around and through which people position their lives in particular situations.20 The positioning of practices, categories, and feelings in a given situation vis-à-vis the opposing poles of each of multiple, ordered dimensions, is a medium by and through which logics operate. This is precisely what a correspondence analysis presumes, that the poles of a dimension are mutually constitutive, the very ground of the dimension. With respect to each of its dimensions, an institutional logic is not only a central tendency, a coherence or clustering of subject-practice-object, it is a dimension of difference. Meaning, as the structuralists tell us, is produced through difference. So, too, with an institutional logic. A logic is institutionalized, as Bourdieu once pointed out in discussing struggles over distinction, not just through its enactment, but through its repudiation, it reversal, its chosen oppositional absence, as well. (Sex
19On this last point, Ronald Breiger (personal communication, January, 2014) reminds us of an example from
Bourdieu’s own analysis of the French university field. Bourdieu interpreted the two dominant dimensions of his correspondence analysis as expressing“… two antagonistic principles of hierarchization: the social hierarchy, corresponding to the capital inherited and the economic and political capital actually held, is in opposition to the specific, properly cultural hierarchy, corresponding to the capital of scientific authority or intellectual renown. This opposition is inherent in the very structures of the university field which is the locus of confrontation between two competing principles of legitimation” (1988[1984], p. 48).
20
As Boltanski and Thévenot have stressed, in a given situation people must choose what orders of worth on which to draw and it is the viability of that choice that provides them with critical capacity (2006).
without love is not immoral; sex without love is immoral.) Repudiation, or reversal, involves a contrary positioning of practice, subjectivity, and belief. These positionings arrayed along a dimension are different from simple absences that will show up either as positionings outside the dimension, either along another dimension, at the zero point of that dimension, or as random non-ordered points in the n-dimensional space.
The contemporary dissociation of love and sexuality affords an opportunity to analyze the practical ordering of a field where a decomposition of the institutional logic of love has been under way for several decades. Following Thornton et al.’s (2012) suggestion that changes in institutional logics operate through variation in the modular elements composing them allows us to see whether or not that decomposition, the absence of romantic specificity of sexual practices, is associated with an erosion of the institutional logic of love. If love continues to have an institutional logic, its presence and absence should still order the space of intimate practices, the kinds of things one says, the feelings or affects occasioned by these practices, the nature of the practices in which one engages. If it does not, we can surmise that the rise of casual sexuality, the separation of sex and love, has led to the decomposition of love as an institutional logic and hence to its inability to differentiate experiences of intimate life. If the enactment of love depended on erotic passion, on sexual practice, a world of loveless sexuality might make the distinct experiential and practical order of love more difficult to sustain. If sexual acts lose their efficacy as signifiers or enactments of love, one might expect to see the emergence of sexuality per se as the dominant forms of practice ordering students’ intimate space. If they do not, it suggests that love continues to be an independent institutional logic undiminished by the de-romanticization of sexual activity. Does the rise of loveless sex erode the co-ordering of sex and love?
Studying romantic love as an institutional logic requires a divergence from the dominant lines of institutional work.21 First, we emphasize, as did the original formulation of institutional logic, material practice (Friedland and Alford1991). The material formatting of a situation, posited by the“conventions of worth school” as necessary to evaluation, has been largely absent in the empirical work done on institutional logics (Jones et al.2013; Daudigeos and Valiorgue 2010). In this case, we are looking for the specificities of corporeal practice, of what one does with one’s body: one’s hands, genitals, and mouth.
Second, research on institutional logics has been conducted primarily on the forma-tion and transformaforma-tion of organizaforma-tions and organizaforma-tional fields, both inside and outside the market. This work has centered on organizational levels of analysis. Thornton et al. have sought to specify systematically the individual mechanisms through which institutional logics are transformed or maintained within organizations through foci of attention and sense-making, for example (2012). Research on the relation between individuals themselves, outside of organizations, as sites in and through which institutional logics might be located has been absent. In this case, we study individuals as sites in and through which an institutional logic is operative.
21We use“romantic love” here as a members’ category that not only permeates popular culture consumed by
emerging adults in the United States, but to which students interviewed as part of this project repeatedly refer either as a given or something constructed, a“fiction.” Thévenot objects to the category because of the way it “destroys the object,” creating an ironic distance from love, not unlike the way one would speak of a “religious zealot” (personal communication, February, 2014).
Third, those who have sought to develop the institutional logics perspective have centered their analyses on categories, on the development and application of classifi-cations (Thornton et al. 2012). Emotion and affect have been largely absent (Creed et al.forthcoming; Voronov and Vince2012). Institutional logics have a kinship with Weber’s value rationalities, for which emotion was a central, but undeveloped, aspect. Values, for Weber, were not simply ideas that have validity: Weber understood values as feelings, repeatedly invoking the notion of“value feelings” (Weber1975, p. 182). “That which holds for the description of shades of light, tones of sound, nuances of smell, etc., also holds in exactly the same sense for the description of religious, aesthetic, and ethical‘value feelings,’” he wrote (Weber1975, p. 182). In his catalogue of religious states associated with the quest for salvation, Weber also argued that they were all“sought, first of all, for the sake of such emotional value as they directly offered the devout” (Weber 1958b, p. 278). In this case we study love not just as a categorical decision or event, a relational labeling, but as a structure of feeling and affect.22
And fourth, we center our work on situations, not the structures and practices of perduring institutional fields for which studies of institutional logics analyzing the displacement of one logic by another, for example, are best known. Studying situated individual action from an institutional logics perspective is not new (Arjalies2013; Smets et al.2011; Thornton et al.2012; Mair et al.2012). Indeed, the ways in which individuals choose between, combine, import, segregate, and even change particular practices within organizations is a central mechanism by which institutional logics are either reproduced or transformed. Here we analyze the order of codes and practices in use by individuals in specific non-organizational situations, specifically intimate en-counters with another person. We do not here analyze the attributes of those situations themselves.
In this analysis, based not on organizational contexts of any kind, we seek both to respond to the challenge by and to mind the admonitions of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s pragmatic approach to conventions of worth (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006). It is the contingent construction and deployment of conventions in uncertain situations, Boltanski and Thévenot insist, not the durably structured, interlocked skein of such conventions understood as an institution that constrains and constitutes a situation that orients their approach.“Rather than hypothesizing that value systems or cultures are tied to members of a single social group or a single institution,” they write, ‘rather than presuming that values internalized in the form of ethical precepts or postures can be respected by a particular person in all circumstances of life, we hypothesized that a given person can refer to any and all measures of worth” (Boltanski and Thévenot2006, p. 151).23
22
Garrow and Hasenfeld (2014) are an exception. In their study of nonprofit human service agencies, they emphasize how these organizations differ in their operations as a result of the practical orderings of enacted institutional logics, the specific character of which can only be understood in the context of their anchoring in deep level framings of moral principles and sentiments. See Haveman and Rao1997, for an earlier argument leading in this direction.
23
Compare with recent work in cultural sociology showing how culture and social networks co-produce one another (e.g., Lizardo2006; Pachucki and Breiger2010; Vaisey and Lizardo2010).
It follows that the most exacting place to look for institutional logics is as situational orderings—here in a specific encounter—of meaningful material practice, not the co-variation of attributes of individual practitioners, that is, of persons or groups, let alone in practical scripts that are normatively and narratively elaborated, transmitted through media of all sorts, codified in pastoral, therapeutic, and even legal documents and practices, which can then be read hermeneutically as an“institutional logic.” We should heed Thévenot’s anti-institutional warning that the concept of institution has tended to absorb the social,“confusing institutional forms and all social regularities” (Thévenot 2011, p. 40). If we can find an institutional logic in situational data it should be give us more confidence that they exist and can be measured.
Our unit of analysis is not properly the individual, presumed to have an invariant practice, but the ordering of individual practices in concrete situations. We study an individual’s most recent intimate physical encounter to assess the extent to which different sets of practices, categories and subjectivities cohere in systematic ways. But unlike Boltanski and Thévenot, we study love not as an order of worth by which beings are evaluated, or“qualified,” but as a practical enactment by which a substance is produced or enacted.24
Data and results
During the fall of 2012, a random, cross-sectional sample of four thousand undergrad-uate students enrolled in a major public university was sent an email invitation to participate in a study about“Sex, Love and God.”25Over 1700 students responded, 1,176 students completed the survey for a response rate of 31 %.26In addition to a full set of background measures, the survey included a detailed battery of questions regarding the respondents’ religious beliefs and experiences, measures concerning the respondents’ attachment style, a history of their romantic relationships and a detailed section of questions asking about their most recent sexual experience.27
In earlier work we found evidence that the prevalence of the hook-up culture has been overstated (Friedland and Gardinali2013). These new data suggest that love is still a common condition, a well-known state, among college students. Some 69 % have experienced it, there being no difference between females and males (see Table10).
Indeed large proportions are in love right now: 42 % of the females and 34 % of the males. Women are significantly more likely to be in love now (see Tables1and2).
24
However, for us, it is not a qualification of a being, here as a beloved or a lover, as one would do in tests that constitute the central mechanism in conventions of worth (Boltanski and Thévenot2006), but a production of an institutional object—a substance—through bodily practice, categorical attribution and affect. Institutional logics are more like performative production functions of particular qualities than they are distributive qualifications of beings based on an exogenous value.
25The survey was conducted by the UCSB Social Science Survey Center.
26The abandon rate for this survey was relatively high (thirty-two percent, likely due to the length of the
questionnaire.
27Six percent of the sample who identified themselves as gay, lesbian, queer, or bi-sexual were included in
Love remains an important criterion for marriage. Eighty percent of the women and 71 % of the men indicated they intended to marry for love, women again being more likely to value this criterion (see Tables3and4).
And finally, given the import of love as a basis of mate choice, we asked students whether they hoped to find their marriage partner in college. Most did not know. We found that a very small proportion of women and men—18 %—had definitely decided they were not looking for a marriage partner in college. Indeed more hoped to find one in college than did not– 28 %.
Measuring the logic of love
How should one measure the ways in which sexual practices and beliefs about love cohere into common frameworks or logics of love? Our approach is to take measures of a broad range of the beliefs, emotions, and practices that make up this field of intimate social relations and to investigate how they are ordered. We focus in these analyses on just those students who have had sex—defined as shared genital contact—at some point in their lives (see Table5). Motivated in part by the absence of data on most recent sexual experience for respondents who had not had sex, we excluded this group of students (19 % of the sample) from our analyses. Thus our focus is just on the internal order of the space of shared sexual intimacy, the romantic distinctiveness of sexual practice, not the sexual distinctiveness of all relations that actors define as love. As a way to assess the co-constitution of subject, object, and practice within this field space we use Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) to examine these data
Table 1 “Have you ever been in love?” by gender of respondent
Have you ever been in love? Women Men Total
Yes 547 68.4 % 293 69.1 % 840 68.6 % No 161 20.1 % 74 17.5 % 235 19.2 % Not sure/ don’t know 92 11.5 % 57 13.4 % 149 12.2 % Total 800 100 % 424 100 % 1,224 100 %
* Pearson Chi Square=1.9119 Probability=0.384
Table 2 “Do you consider yourself to be in love now?” by gender of respondent
Do you consider yourself to be in love now Women Men total
Yes 333 41.6 % 144 34.0 % 477 39.0 % No 380 47.5 % 221 52.1 % 601 49.1 % Not sure/ don’t know 87 11.5 % 59 13.4 % 146 11.9 % Total 800 100 % 424 100 % 1,224 100 %
(Breiger2000,2009; Clausen1998; Le Roux and Rouanet2010; Weller and Romney 1990).28For much the same reason that Bourdieu embraced MCA, we see the method as appropriate to representing institutional logics because it seeks to capture the patterned distributions of practices and beliefs rather than the effects of one attribute as a causal determinant of other co-variants. MCA transforms a contingency table into a geometric space. It is a data reduction technique that takes the elements of a contin-gency table and translates them into a simpler data matrix compatible with the construction of a geometric representation of the raw data.“The technique is a tool to analyze the association between two or more categorical variables by representing the categories of the variables as points in a low dimensional space. Categories with similar distributions will be represented as points that are close in space, and categories that have very dissimilar distributions will be positioned far apart” (Clausen1998, pp. 1–2). As Table 6 demonstrates we have included a broad range of variables in our model including: sexual practices, categorical practices, categories of social relations, marital-moral investments in love, and affective investments in love.
With this analytic approach each cell in a multidimensional contingency table will be represented as being close in geometric space to another cell in that table when the same people have tended to participate in both sets of practices or beliefs to a level that is distinct from average, that is distant from what one would expect based on their marginal distributions.29At issue here is very much a question of style of methodo-logical practice. Unlike a causal regression analysis in which one seeks to isolate the independent effects of different variables based upon conditional probabilities, MCA emphasizes distributional patterns in and of themselves in a manner that reflects the overall co-constitution of cases and variables (Breiger2000,2009). The dimensional space is constructed so as to capture the similarities and differences between the categories and clusters of categories. Categories positioned near the origin or (0,0) point in this space (assuming for the moment just two dimensions) are those that tend to exhibit a lack of association with either dimension.
As Bourdieu’s (1984) usage famously demonstrated, one important virtue of MCA is that it treats a multitude of categorical variables within the same measurement field, thereby allowing, for example, the same low dimensional space to represent the hypothesized co-constitution of categories of class location (occupational type,
28We used SPAD (Version 7.4) for these analyses. 29
Ronald Breiger reminds us that an MCA is not capturing the equivalent of p(x,y), the proportion of all people who are both x and y, but rather p(x,y)– [p(x) * p(y)], the size of the overlap “over and above” the size predicted by statistical independence (personal communication, Jan. 2014).
Table 3 Love as an important quality for choosing a partner by gender of respondent Which of the following qualities do you consider important
in your choice of partner?
Women Men Total
Love 746 80.3 % 367 70.6 % 1113 76.8 %
Not Selected 183 19.7 % 153 29.4 % 336 23.2 %
Total 929 100 % 520 100 % 1,449 100 %
educational level) and cultural tastes (choice of subjects for a“beautiful photograph,” favorite composers, and so on). As Le Roux and Rouanet (2010) explain,“the basic outcomes of geometric methods are descriptive statistics, in the technical sense that they do not depend on the size of the dataset. For instance, in Individuals x Variables tables, if the individual observations are duplicated, the clouds of points are un-changed” (Le Roux and Rouanet 2010, p. 2). Much like a Galois lattice analysis (Mohr and Duquenne1997; Mohr1998), MCA is a method that highlights patterns of things chosen and not chosen, or choosable from a logics perspective, rather than emphasizing probabilistic causal associations. Distances between column points in the correspondence analysis display approximate chi-square distances between column profiles, so that two column points are nearby if those two column profiles are similar. With enough dimensions, the display can reproduce these distances exactly, but interpretation is often based on two-dimensional approximations. This strategy for data reduction is similar to the rationale behind Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and the two techniques are very similar. The total association—called inertia in the lexicon of MCA—is decomposed along principal axes.30The first dimension—the horizontal axis in a two-dimensional plot—accounts for the largest share of the table’s row-column association, the second—vertical—dimension (which is by construction or-thogonal to the first) accounts for as much as possible of the remaining association, and so on. A column point’s distance from the origin in the two-dimensional display approximates the difference between that column’s profile and the average profile given by the row marginal proportions. The sociological interpretation of these princi-pal dimensions is based on the relative contribution of each variable to the principrinci-pal inertia—or the variation within each dimension (the variation of all dimensions sums up to the total inertia). These relative contributions show what variables are responsible for the variation along an axis. Higher contributions should be given more weight in explaining the“sociological” meaning of a dimension.
Love’s institutional logics
These data on love and intimate practices include information on an unprecedentedly rich array of verbal and physical practices, emotional states, and moral and marital expectations in single encounters. This information forms the input for our MCA. Our data matrix involves 44 variables, 100 modalities or categories of variables, and 983
Table 4 Searching for a marriage partner in college by gender of respondent
Do you hope to find your marriage partner in college? Women Men Total
Yes 219 28.8 % 113 27.4 % 332 28.3 %
No 143 18.8 % 62 15.0 % 205 17.5 %
Not Sure/Don’t Know 398 52.4 % 238 57.6 % 636 54.2 %
Total 760 100 % 413 100 % 1173 100 %
* Pearson Chi Square=9.325 Probability=0.156
30
individuals. We first determine the number of dimensions we want to retain. Table7 shows (following the analysis of Le Roux and Rouanet2010, ch. 3) the decomposition of the total variance for each of the axes (Eigenvaluesλl) and the inertia rates, which are better approximations of the relative importance of each dimension. The first dimension accounts for 87 % of the modified inertia. Axis 2 adds another 7 %. By convention, the other dimensions are beyond the cut-off for inclusion (as suggested by the elbow in overall measures of contributions) and we do not pursue them further in the current article. Instead, we will retain and interpret just the first two dimensions, the former being obviously more important than the latter.
To get at what constitutes the space of intimate practices, we turn to Fig.2 and Table8. These show the modalities that contribute most to the orientation of the first axis—the table shows their relative contribution or the amount of variance the variables or modalities account for in that dimension.31Looking at the modalities displayed in Fig.2, we see them arrayed along the horizontal axis that constitutes the first dimen-sion. The farther variables are from each other along this axis, the more their co-variant practices are distinctive from those associated with the other pole. So, for example, the presence of an attribution that one loved one’s partner at the time is on the opposite side of the graph from the absence of that state. Likewise, with the absence of the hookup category of relationship from the presence of the hook-up category.32Note each point is labeled with a symbol indicating the type of variable, either+(“yes”) or—(“no,”), as defined in Table6.
31
We opted for the“French” way of doing MCA as it is championed by Le Roux and Rouanet (2004,2010); also see Roose et al. (2012). In simplest terms, we have taken the most important modalities that define the first dimension and plotted those in the plane of the first two dimensions of the MCA (Figure2) and then we have done the same with the most important modalities that define the second dimension (see Figure3).
32
Indeed, if there are just two modalities for a variable (“disjunctive coding”), it is possible to norm the axes so that, by definition, the two modalities have coordinates that, if connected by a straight line, go through the origin. Thanks again to Ronald Breiger for his comments on this issue.
Table 5 Cross-tabulation of“Ever had sex?” (anything genital) with “Are you in a romantic relationship now/ ever?”
Romantic relationship now/ever? Total rel_now rel_not now rel_never Ever had sex
(anything genital)? ever had sex -Count 29 47 169 245 % within Romantic relationship now/ever? 5.2 % 9.4 % 65.3 % 18.7 % ever had sex + Count 525 451 90 1066 % within Romantic relationship now/ever? 94.8 % 90.6 % 34.7 % 81.3 % Total Count 554 498 259 1311 % within Romantic relationship now/ever? 100 % 100 % 100 % 100 %
Table 6 Relative frequencies for variables included as active in the Multiple Correspondence Analysis Physical practices of
love
Yes No Categorical practices of love
Yes No
P1: talking intimately 0.76 0.24 VP1: told partner I loved him/her
0.47 0.53 P2: holding hands 0.60 0.40 VP2: partner told
s/he loved me
0.51 0.49 P3: kissing 0.95 0.05 VP3: loved this
person at the time
0.54 0.45 P4: hugging 0.81 0.19 VP4: thought person was
in love with me 0.52 0.48 P5: manual stimulation my genitals 0.81 0.19 P6: manual stimulation their genitals 0.78 0.22 Affective investment in love True N UT P7: slept over 0.72 0.28 A1: despair if partner
left me
0.53 0.05 0.41 P8: received oral sex 0.53 0.47 A2: happy to make
her/him happy
0.72 0.06 0.20 P9: gave oral sex 0.56 0.44 A3: jealous 0.62 0.04 0.33 P10: vaginal sex 0.70 0.30 A4: body responds 0.76 0.06 0.17 P11: received anal sex 0.05 0.95 A5: want partner to
know me
0.63 0.06 0.31 P12: gave anal sex 0.02 0.98 A6: depressed if
things go badly
0.45 0.08 0.45 P13: orgasm 0.58 0.41 A7: have had my heart
broken
(Yes) 0.73 0.27 (No) P14: faked orgasm 0.04 0.96
Sober Tipsy Drunk Marital/Moral Investment In love Yes No P15: condition during sex 0.68 0.20 0.12 M1: love matters in mate choice 0.90 0.10 M2: expect to marry 0.82 0.13 Social relations of love Yes No M3: expect to find
spouse in college
0.26 0.68 R1: boyfriend/girlfriend 0.44 0.47 M4: been in love at
least once
0.78 0.22 R2: friends with benefits 0.08 0.83 M5: want to stay with
same person
0.60 0.40 R3: hook-up 0.12 0.80 M6: expect to stay with
the same person
0.47 0.53 R4: no strings attached 0.03 0.88 M7: want to have
children some day
0.80 0.20
R5: lover 0.06 0.86 Agree N Disagree
R6: had a boy/girlfriend in high school
0.76 0.24 M8: having sex without love is easy
0.42 0.22 0.34 M9: romantic love
brainwashes women
Love has a categorical, emotional, and a practical specificity. Love is distinguished first by words: by each telling the other that one is in love with her/him, by the categories one uses to describe the relationship in which sexual intimacy took place, and by intimate talk. There is also a subjectivity to love: Those who describe them-selves as loving their partners not only tell their partners they love them, they feel their bodies responding, they feel jealous, they want their partners to know them, they feel depressed if things are going badly between them, they would feel despair if the person left them. Those who love their intimate partners categorize their relations as boyfriends and girlfriends, and not as hookups. And finally love has a practical specificity. Intimate sexual encounters of those who are not in love are characterized by a lack of sobriety, by an absence of holding hands and intimate conversation.
It is striking that variations in sexuality in no way organize this dimension. Loving one’s partner is not associated with a particular profile of sexual practices, suggesting that sexual acts do not organize or differentiate this passionate space of love. Sexual acts appear to have lost their capacity to function as a restrictive code for love. This does not mean, as we have noted above, that love does not have a specific corporeality, or sensuous profile: Those who“make love” experience a distinctive bodily respon-siveness to their partners that is independent of the nature of the acts in which they engage.33Love, in general, has an affectivity linked to the enactment of the category that is independent of the repertoire of physical acts. And finally, ideology and morality are irrelevant to this order of passionate love. It is not that American students do not cleave to certain moral beliefs, but these are irrelevant to ordering how they make love. Believing that love is socially constructed, for example, does not distinguish the practical, affective, or categorical order of romantic love, nor does the moral permis-sibility of sexual intimacy. To summarize, it is not different kinds of sexual practices that primarily order students’ intimate lives, but whether or not an encounter is categorized, practiced, and experienced as love. It is love, not sexual acts, that defines and differentiates the first dimension of students’ intimate sexual worlds.
There is a second, vertical dimension to the space of sexual intimacy that also matters (see Table9). The first dimension of love was amoral; the second is decidedly
33
This may have something to do with the technical and reduced way in which we have posed questions about respondents’ sexual practices.
Table 6 (continued) Physical practices of love
Yes No Categorical practices of love Yes No M10: sex before marriage is wrong 0.05 0.19 0.75 M11: sex without
marriage, with love is OK
0.89 0.07 0.03
M12: sex without being in love is wrong
0.22 0.31 0.48
(n=983) (We performed the MCA only on those students who had ever had sex and for whom data on the variables are available. This explains the reduction in sample size from 1,311 to 983.)
