Sexual field
A sexual field is an arena of social life wherein individuals seek intimate partners and vie for sexual status. Sexual fields emerge "when a subset of actors with potential romantic or sexual interest orient themselves toward one another according to a logic of desirability imminent to their collective relations and this logic produces, to greater and lesser degrees, a system of stratification" (Green 2014:27). The term builds on Pierre Bourdieu's (1980) concept of field and has been defined as a "set of interlocking institutions" (Martin and George 2006) and an "institutionalized matrix of relations" (Green 2005, 2008 , 2011) that confers status upon sexual actors based on individual variation in sexual capital. Relative to those with a sexual capital deficit, actors in possession of sexual capital reap the rewards of the sexual field—including the ability to select desired sexual partners and the acquisition of social significance. Sexual fields are themselves distinguished by distinct "currencies of erotic capital" (Green 2005, 2008), the latter which are quite variable, acquiring dominance in relation to the collective preferences of players. For example, Green (2005, 2008) argues that the characteristics which confer sexual capital in one field may not in another. Thus , in a gay leather bar, a bearded, stocky white man in his late-thirties dressed in Levi's jeans and a leather jacket will possess an optimal form of sexual capital, whereas the same man in a swanky Martini bar catering to a twenty-something, high-fashion, urban gay customer base will face a sexual capital deficit. This variation in power and status occurs because a gay leather bar and a gay Martini bar are physical sites organized by the logic of two distinct sexual fields with contrasting currencies of sexual capital (Green 2005, 2008)—i.e., distinct "hegemonic systems of judgment