53

Major French quantitative surveys have observed social differences in the ways people experience sexual desire. This article envisions those differences as a locus of inequality in the area of sexuality, and seeks to understand how they are produced in terms of gender and social class. Drawing on a life history survey of individuals with diverse social profiles, it envisions the learning of sexual desire as a trajectory that begins in childhood and continues throughout a person’s life, bringing experiences into play that unfold in several different social spheres. It shows that the socialization of desire operates by transmitting a set of bodily dispositions—through repeated practice of physical activities—and mental dispositions—through either instantaneous or consciously internalized interpretive frameworks and meaning repertoires. Proceeding this way, it establishes that men are socialized in sexual desire to a greater degree than women and concludes that the child and juvenile socialization experienced by women of working-class background becomes more durably integrated into their dispositions concerning sexual desire than the socialization that operates in adulthood among women of middle- or upper-class background through the appropriation of feminist or psychological interpretive schemata.