Sexual Agency and Gender Subjectivity: Integrating Psychoanalytic and Interactionist Perspectives.

This paper presents partial findings from a larger study looking at how young heterosexual people negotiate sexual encounters. In this project I found that young people display a variety of different styles when negotiating sexual encounters. In delineating these different styles, I focus on the degree of agency (how much influence the subject exerts within an interaction to sway the outcome of events) evidenced. There is a discernable difference between those who actively negotiate sexual interactions and those who passively succumb to them. Of the 83 subjects in this qualitative study conducted in Northern California, approximately one fourth demonstrate considerable agency in their participation in sexual encounters, a full half choose not to act agentically and approximately one fourth of the participants demonstrate a shift between styles over several encounters in their sexual biographies. In this paper I examine the latter group, those subjects who transition from one sexual style to another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]