Abstract
Researching Sex and Sexualities, edited by Charlotte Morris, Paul Boyce, Andrea Cornwall, Hannah Frith, Laura Harvey, and Yingying Huang, is a product of the “Researching Sexualities” conference held at the University of Sussex in 2015. It is a methodological guide composed of researchers’ reflections on the joys and challenges of doing social science sexualities research. This collection is not a how-to guide for sexualities researchers, rather it is chock-full of ideas for how one might creatively approach research in the realm of a still silenced and stigmatized social phenomenon. The book serves as inspiration to those interested in sexualities research—novice and pro alike—and pays particular attention to the role researchers themselves play in the intimate settings of sexualities-related topics. The collection successfully achieves its goal to explore “the creative, personal, and contextual parameters of researching sex and sexualities” (p. 1) and will be useful to academics and practitioners conducting sexualities-related research and to graduate students designing thesis projects.
In addition to being well written and researched, the contributions to Researching Sex and Sexualities are transglobal in context and include discussions about research conducted in Australia, Brazil, China, Europe, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Each chapter begins with an abstract, which makes the volume useful as a reference source over time, and the chapters are long enough to be substantial without being tedious. The editors have organized the chapters into four topical areas: knowability, creative methodologies, negotiating research contexts, and researcher bodies, identities, experiences.
“Knowability” explores the act of creating knowledge about sexuality and provides a glimpse into the vast diversity of sexuality as a research topic. This section includes discussions on the subject of embodiment of sexuality, embracing ambiguity rather than imposing existing categories onto research subjects, ways to bridge qualitative with quantitative research in epidemiology, and the study of sexuality in commercial design settings.
“Creative methodologies” is about breaking away from methodological norms in order to get at more nuanced findings about sexuality. Examples include the use of body mapping—a creative endeavor meant to ease difficult conversations about sexuality; patchworking as method—supplementing traditional methods like interviews and focus groups with visual and textual collages, interview objects, mix tapes, and personal journals; using poetry as a tool in participatory research to help people describe their feelings about pornography; and ventriloquism—or the act of “covering” the songs and words of another—as a way to help open up dialogues about sexuality.
“Negotiating research contexts” explores the cultural, linguistic, and political contexts in which sexualities research takes place. Examples include appropriate ways to do sexualities research with youth that respect and protect their agency, challenges and advantages to doing sexualities research as a cultural outsider, the particular issues that arise in researcher/participant interactions in erotically charged research settings, and practices to help researchers avoid imposing western, imperialist notions of sexual norms on “at-risk” research participants.
“Researcher bodies, identities, experiences” focuses on researcher reflexivity, especially in erotic contexts where the research reveals the researcher’s own “desiring body” (p. 256). Examples include researching an erotic community one is also a member of, the experience of overcoming one’s own sexual inhibitions in the process of becoming a sexualities researcher, learning to recognize the value of what is left unsaid in research with marginalized groups who may lack “narrative capital” (p. 298), and using researcher reflexivity to shine light on one’s own blind spots and biases regarding queer sexuality in the field.
There is a great need for methodological volumes like Researching Sex and Sexualities to help develop this emerging field of study in sociology. For example, the sexualities section of the ASA has seen tremendous growth since its formation in 1997 (according to its website, the section now has almost 500 members, half of whom are graduate students), but it has long been a marginalized field of study in the discipline, which has left many novice researchers with minimal mentoring, training, and support. There simply aren’t enough advanced scholars to mentor the significant number of novice scholars entering the field. Researching Sex and Sexualities provides real talk about sexualities research, including the stigma associated with it, the challenges of getting research participants to disclose about such a silenced topic, and the embodied aspect of sexuality and the researcher. It’s a practical guide to help researchers think of new and creative ways to approach sexualities research in a reflexive manner, across cultures. Its greatest strength lies in the way it puts the sex back into sexualities research, in particular by centering the researcher and their own erotic experience in the process.
Researching Sex and Sexualities is largely about qualitative research; therefore, it may not be useful to quantitative researchers uninterested in mixed methods. Likely because of the way it accounts for sexualities research across disciplines—contributors include sociologists, anthropologists, historians, cultural and gender studies experts, activists, practitioners, and more—I found it to be esoteric in places. Rather than letting this be a deterrent, though, readers should seek out the parts of the book most useful to their own discipline and area of study. As a methodology volume, its biggest shortcoming is a lack of discussion of the intricacies of managing human subjects research and institutional review boards, arguably one of the key obstacles sexualities scholars face in their research process.
Finally, it must be acknowledged that Researching Sex and Sexualities is an affectionate tribute to the pioneering work of sexualities scholar Kenneth Plummer. All of the editors and many of the contributors engage Plummer’s foundational theorizing on sexualities in their accounts, and the book ends with an interview with Plummer by Charlotte Morris. Scholars who count Plummer as one of their foundational academic influences will appreciate the way this collection of essays demonstrates the profound impact he has had on our field.