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Sexual addicts together. Observing the culture of SCA gay groups in New York

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2002

Moshe Shokeid
Affiliation:
Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, PO Box 39040, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel
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Abstract

The article reports on observations made at meetings in New York of support groups for gays and lesbians who identify as sexually compulsive. It examines the participants' – mostly males – narratives and its language, the social relationships they develop at meetings, and the impact of that experience on their lives. The article's major premise is that these meetings do not initiate a curing forum to reform an ‘addiction’. Instead, they evolve a compassionate community that engages its participants in a performative discourse on sexual behaviour and gay life style. My purpose is to extend the field of ethnographic research into unvisited domains of experience and association in contemporary urban life.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2002 European Association of Social Anthropologists

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Footnotes

An earlier version of this paper was written during my 1997 stay at the University of Iowa as Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for International and Comparative Studies. I was able to prepare the present version during my stay in 1999/2000 at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. I am grateful to the editor and reviewers of Social Anthropology for their helpful comments.