Research
Find out what we are working on.
Critical Sexuality Scholarship
A critical sexuality studies perspective guides our work. This approach addresses the ways sexology and popular discourses produce specific gendered modes of sexual subjectivity, sexual norms and meanings, sexual representations, and sexual wellbeing. We examine the construction and constriction of sexual concepts and practices, by tracking the culturally – and historically – specific epistemic and empirical foundations and implications of sexuality research.
Feminist Epistemologies and Methodologies
Feminist epistemologies and methodologies – with feminist poststructuralism and discursive approaches as central analytic tools – direct our theoretical and empirical work. We critically examine sexuality scholarship, with attention to assumptions about normality, health, desire, agency, pleasure, and the conduct of relationships.
Sexual Meanings, Messages and Practices
We have studied sexual meanings, messages and practices in the context of health issues, such as: sexuality in women living with HIV/AIDS; masculinity and sexuality in men with testicular cancer; lesbian and bisexual women’s health resources; and the role of sexual health education in sexual norm development. The theoretical and epistemic parameters have focused on: the epistemological location of bisexuality within queer theory; self-labeling decisions among bisexual women; traversing affect scholarship, post-Lacanian feminist psychoanalysis and feminist poststructuralism to examine how sexual messages and ideologies permeate and persist across social and psychic spaces; and psychology’s perpetuation of queer men’s body dissatisfaction imperative.
Sexual Technologies
We join a body of feminist scholarship directed at expanding epistemic and empirical conversations beyond sexual empowerment/oppression oppositions (e.g., Gavey, 2012; Jagose, 2010; McClelland 2010), by addressing the ways social meanings, symbolic representations, affects, and fantasy about sexuality cohere in subjectivities. Specific sexual technologies examined include: recreational sexual enhancement medication (e.g., Viagra, STAXYN), penile rehabilitation techniques following prostate cancer, women’s pornography experiences within relationships, women’s male erotica use, and sexual expert discourses.