Sexuality in Work Worlds
Scientific coordinators:
Sara CESARO (CNRS, Paris Center for Sociological and Political Research or CRESPPA)
Farah DERUELLE (University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès, UTOPI Research Unit)
Mathilde PROVANSAL (LMU Munich, Historical Economic and Social Institutions and Dynamics or IDHES)
Yaëlle AMSELLEM MAINGUY (INJEP and the Institut des Sciences Sociales du Politique)
The recent resignation of the head of the Astronomer start-up and its human resources director after circulation of a photo of them in each other’s arms; French primary school principal Caroline Grandjean’s suicide following a lesbophobic harassment campaign against her in her place of work; and the #MeToo movement (Cavalin et al. 2022)—these events illustrate diverse ways that sexuality may manifest in work worlds while bringing to light various forms and practices of sexuality at work, their effects on professional and personal trajectories, and the inner workings of how they are (or are not) regulated by work organizations. In this call for papers we propose to think of the sexual dimensions of work world life as connected rather than separate areas of sociological inquiry.
Despite its high media visibility, sexuality in the work world has not been sufficiently investigated in sociology (Roy 2006), especially in France, where it was long thought of as little more than a product of “rumors” or a source of “scandal” (Fassin 2009; Matonti 2014). Not only has sexuality been considered “methodologically taboo” in France, but its existence has been denied by professional associations (Cardi et al. 2005), making the task of analyzing it considerably more complex. Work and sexuality are understood to refer to separate spheres, public and private, and to opposite types of governance: reason (seen as masculine), and affect (seen as feminine) (Weber 1948; Zelizer 2001). Historically this view has manifested clearly as a public and managerial imperative: the need to keep sexuality “outside the factory walls” (Burrell 1984; Scott 1990). Weber’s ideal-type bureaucratic organization, which must be devoid of passion in order to remain efficient, thus ratified a kind of “self-fulfilling prophecy” (Pringle 1989): given that sexuality has been relegated outside the work world, there can be no study of sexuality inside that world (Connell 1987; Acker 1990; Galerand and Kergoat 2014), an effect that works to the detriment of any and all critical readings of sexuality as itself a dimension of work and work worlds. The theoretical antagonisms that structured sociology of gender in France have also led to thinking of work and sexuality as two irreconcilable objects of research (Clair 2013). This explains that when French sociologists did turn their attention to sexuality in the workplace they viewed it first and foremost in terms of alienation and constraint; e.g., sexual violence (Cromer and Lemaire 2007; Pruvost 2007; Zolesio 2012; Boni-Le Goff 2012), the sexualization of work incumbent on women in service jobs (Adkins 1995; Louey and Schütz 2014), and LGBT persons’ difficult experience in and of the workplace (Chamberland 2007; Morand 2022). Meanwhile, only a very few studies took up more ordinary, consensual sexual and even conjugal relations at work (exceptions are Bozon and Héran 2006; Giami et al. 2013; Morand 2017) or their effects on professional careers (Bertaux-Wiame 1982, 2004; Buscatto 2007).
Rather than fragment the research object “sexuality in work worlds,” this call for papers adopts a global, frontal approach to its different dimensions, in an effort to overcome the historical lag of French sociology in the matter. For nearly forty years, English-language studies have shown the analytical ambiguity of the issue, how it involves situations where violence and pleasure, power and resistance, different types of socialization and conflicts intermix (Hearn and Parkin 1987; Williams et al. 1999; Dellinger and Williams 2002; Giuffre and Williams 2019). Aside from a few articles problematizing work in terms of its sexual dimensions (Clair 2016) and sexuality in terms of its work-related dimensions (Lévy and Lieber 2009; Thomé 2022), no French-language sociology journal (and therefore no previous issue of the Revue Française de Sociologie) has yet centered discussion on how these two questions fit together. A number of recent special issues have explored the subject of the body in and at work (Jacquot and Voléry 2019; Boussard and Noûs 2020), but they do not take up specifically sexual issues. Others have probed tensions between work and sexuality while confining the discussion to violence and sexual orientation (Lieber et al. 2019; Avril et al. 2019; Beaubatie et al. 2023).
Now, and only gradually, sexuality in work worlds is being apprehended as a continuum, emerging as an analytical approach that we see as key to renewing the way we apprehend of social relations, gender inequalities, and power relations in the many different spaces where work life plays out. This has already been shown by recent empirical studies (Deruelle 2022, 2024; Beaulieu 2023; Cesaro forthcoming), and with this thematic issue, our priority is a reconfiguring of sociological analysis of sexuality in the work world that will integrate several of the sources, and issues involved in the “fabrication of gender” (Clair 2013). The aim here is to gather a set of new empirical studies that relate practices, norms, and regulations concerning sexuality in work worlds through exploration of one or several of the following areas:
1. Forms and practices of sexuality in work worlds
The first approach is to examine the continuum of forms that sexuality may take in the work place, from explicit violent acts to shared pleasures (Williams et al. 1999), from occasional dates and short-lived relationships (Bozon 2016; Sobocinska 2024) to more enduring commitments. What types of arrangements (professional, organizational, managerial, spatial, temporal, professional ethics-related and others) facilitate or work to contain the emergence of sexual relations—hetero- or homosexual, consented to or not—in the work world? The English-language notion of organization sexuality (Hearn and Parkin 1987) seems of particular heuristic value here for investigating how sexual and professional norms are constructed in the framework of salaried employment and how to de-individualize the issue of sexuality at work by integrating it into analysis of work-centered relations of power (Salzinger 2000).
Submissions in this area should therefore work to apprehend how individuals’ employment statuses, positions in an organization hierarchy, social characteristics, organization cultures, together with male-female workplace composition facilitate or complicate the emergence of certain types of sexuality in that work world, and how they shape the processes by which sexualized interactions in it are identified and described (Williams et al. 1999; Dellinger and Williams 2002; Giuffre and Williams 2019). Moreover, how do such sexual practices work to perpetuate gender, class, and race hierarchies in workplaces and worlds (Oeser 2019)? How is sexuality in the workplace impacted by contemporary changes in the characteristics of work and employment (intensification, flexibilization, deregulation, individualization and the concomitant breaking up of work collectives, newly unstable or “precarious” types of employment, digitalization, etc.)? Conversely, how are contemporary changes in sexuality reconfiguring work and how work is organized (for example, the implementation of LGBT-friendly policies)?
2. Effects of sexuality on work and careers
Papers in this second area will focus on the effects of sexuality and expressions of it on professional careers. While being married and having a family have a favorable effect on men’s careers (Gadéa and Marry 2000; Le Renard 2019), what about sexual-emotional relations that develop within the work sphere? To what degree can sexual harassment and even seductive behavior be used as instruments for furthering a career (a situation that mainly concerns men)? And what are the consequences in terms of professional path bifurcations, job or activity sector changes, or workplace information leaks in the case of people exposed to these types of violence? Conversely, how or to what extent may having sexual relationships at work provide access to professional resources and career advancement (particularly in the case of women)? (Buscatto 2007; Provansal 2023)? To what degree and in what work sectors can minority sexuality be a professional resource and even a competence (Stokes 2015; Wright 2023)? Intersectional studies that help document the different advantages and costs of sexuality in work worlds by individuals’ positions at the intersection of inequality systems involving class, race, age, and other characteristics are particularly welcome here.
This line of inquiry includes exploring the effects of sexuality on professional relations, work groups or collectives, and work activity altogether. To what degree might sexuality contribute to group cohesion in a professional workspace (Lerum 2004), and in so doing orchestrate the marginalization and perhaps exclusion of women and minority groups from work collectives (Lapeyre 2018)? Can the issues of harsh working conditions, work-related or induced suffering,and violence in the workplace (Lallement et al. 2011; Juston Morival 2022) be re-problematized by detailing the effects of sexuality on working conditions and environments? Lastly, do sexualized interactions in the workplace lead to redefining work content? This subset of papers might study the strategies individuals use either to cope with or escape this type of situation (Buscatto et al. 2025), be it through work itself when that work implies sexuality in some way (Bull 2025) or socializing within the context of work activities (Deruelle 2022).
3. Ways of regulating sexuality in work worlds
The third area focuses on how sexuality in the workplace is regulated, with such regulations defined as either the result of ongoing struggles to contain certain phenomena by way of rules or repeated references to control or autonomous norms (Reynaud 1988). Regulations of this type, which came to the forefront of social consciousness with the #MeToo movement, may be formal and tangible (of charters, work contract clauses, sexist and sexual violence prevention policies, etc.) or more tacit (dependent on “company cultures,” for example), and they may be issued by several sources or have several origins (work groups, head offices, unions, professional gender-equality actors, labor movements, public policies and parliamentary legislation, and users such as client groups, patient groups, service work users, and audiences. Submissions in this area might study the effects of the #MeToo movement on how sexuality is “organized” in the workplace (Cavalin et al. 2022; Beaulieu 2023; Buscatto et al. 2025) and the reluctancies or resistances thus elicited. What professional norms, and what sexual norms particular to certain professional milieus, has the #MeToo movement called into question or called to account? Among the sources of resistance are men accused of sexual violence and stigmatized for it in a range of professional contexts (Laurent-Camena 2025). What organizational resources and tools do the accused turn to to counter or undercut those allegations? This question indirectly raises those of peer accountability (Lechaux 2024) and the accountability of work organizations, the latter increasingly called out by victims of sexual violence for their management of cases involving their employees.
But regulation is not merely a matter of repression (Foucault 1976), it can also involve processes that produce and that may actually legitimate certain types of sexuality in the workplace. In fact, while couples in the same work world may seek to escape hierarchical control of their private lives, they are generally better tolerated there. In what ways do workplaces try to accommodate them? A relevant example here would be university “dual career” policies designed to attract researcher or professor couples (Wolf-Wendel et al. 2004).
4. Theoretical and epistemological issues involved in studying sexuality in work worlds
This last line of inquiry involves drawing on theoretical and epistemological contributions for fitting together two sociology fields in order to analyze relations between work and sexuality.To what degree can an approach by way of sexuality enable us to renew theoretical and conceptual approaches to sociology of work (Lapeyre 2018; Oeser 2019)? Can “sexuality-related bias” in professional organizations be investigated and probed in the same way that gender biases have been (Acker 1990)? Here submissions should be particularly attentive to concept circulation between two fields. Until now, sexuality in the workplace has been apprehended through certain categories used in sociology of work (Thomé 2022; Jarty 2024). What conceptual tools used in sociology of sexuality—along the lines of the sexual scripts concept (Giami et al. 2013) or reasoning in terms of the “eroticization of work” and “making use of the intimate” (Trachman 2013)—could be used to think about work, its boundaries, and contemporary transformations of it? Contributions in this area might adopt a broader-scope notion of work that would include non-paid, informal, and association or advocacy group work, for example (Simonet 2018).
Contributions may draw on qualitative and/or quantitative materials and methods. Recent empirical studies by early-career researchers and new approaches to older debates are equally welcome.
Submissions must be original works in French or English and not exceed 75,000 characters, including spaces, figures, and tables.
Any proposal not following this format will be automatically rejected.
Send submissions by June 2, 2026 at the latest to:
the Revue Française de Sociologie Editorial Office: christelle.germain@cnrs.fr
and the three scientific coordinators: sexualité-au-travail@services.cnrs.fr
All submissions are anonymized and will be assessed by the journal’s Editorial Committee in September 2026.
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