The erotization of leisure or the escape from everyday intimate life

Abstract

On the basis of an ethnographic strategy and individual-scale sociology, we analyse the organizing principles of the social sexual relationships of a couple living a multiple-partner relationship – by engaging in swing activities with other couples or finding more or less temporary ‘boyfriends or girlfriends’. Multiplepartner relationships are eroticized and colonize the sexual imaginary but remain under-theorized. Our analytical interest is in change and normative processes in sexuality; in other words, in the relationship between routine and escape attempts with regard to intimate life, on the one hand, and eroticism, on the other. Stereotypically, there is a section of our lives where we may feel temporally removed from monotony, this is sex. Our erotic and intimate life becomes important when it is cultivated as a free area. But apparently transgressive practices must obey more rigid codes of conduct. The erotic scenario of a multiple-partner relationship organizes socially constructed plots for sexual behaviour and expression, turning out to be a ritualistic and controlled dimension of the everyday life of repetition.