HIV/AIDS
Particularly numerous were courses that addressed sexuality through the issue of HIV/AIDS. Unsurprisingly, public health frameworks overwhelmingly informed such courses, and these were particularly prevalent in developing countries or were aimed at developing country audiences. One effect of a public health approach is that sexuality is not understood as a cultural formation. Rather, attention is given to sexual behaviour—a way of conceptualizing sex that renders it primarily measurable. In relation to HIV/AIDS, the thing of most interest about sexual behaviour is sexual risk and things such as pleasure, or meaning are absent from these discourses. Sexual identity is also a difficult category for this paradigm and this is best captured in the way it deploys the term “men who have sex with men” or MSM. This term is a description of behaviour but is often used as a de facto identity descriptor. Sometimes, gay man would be more appropriate, and other times the fact that a man has sexual contact with other men has no bearing on his social and cultural identity at all. The category of MSM creates a false impression of homogeneity among men and sexual acts that have enormously varied meanings, effectively reifying identity through the category of risk. Absent from this paradigm were diverse sexualities not deemed to be at risk of HIV/AIDS, such as lesbians.
Sexology
Sexology research is perhaps best typified by the Kinsey Institute, the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex and the World Association for Sexual Health, but it also appears in certain university programs. While the Kinsey Institute website claims for sexology a broad multi-disciplinary basis, it also acknowledges that sexology has become highly medicalised in recent decades. The effect of this has been to concentrate the field on sexual pathologies and dysfunctions, which are then ameliorated by medical doctors and therapists trained in psychology. The shift to the term “sexual health” is a relatively recent one for sexologists and captures well the kinds of concerns they now have. Sexual risk is a central concept in the study of HIV/AIDS, but is not a significant concept in sexology, where “health” seems to be more positively imagined as fulfilment, rather than only an absence of disease or risk.
Within sexology there appear to be two broad strands of research. One might be characterised as searching for origins or explanations for sexual behaviour, for example when hormones or genes are investigated as influences in sexual orientation. The second is more behavioural and descriptive, and represents an attempt to capture the diversity of human sexual behaviour. This is what some refer to as sex research. The work of Kinsey was more closely related to this strand. Among sexologists and sex researchers there is an attempt to distinguish their work, which is scientific, from “sexuality research”, which is, by implication, regarded as less scientific and rigorous. Sex research in this scientific sense is probably best exemplified by those articles published in the Journal of Sex Research and the Annual Review of Sex Research.
Sexual and Reproductive Health
Another lens through which sexuality is frequently viewed is sexual and reproductive health. This field is radically split between what occurs in wealthy industrialised countries, where the emphasis tends to fall on issues of reproduction not on issues associated with sexually transmitted infections. For example, Assisted Reproductive Technologies are a focus, and fertility, per se, is a question viewed in highly individualised terms, as a personal issue that affects individuals and couples. Sexually Transmissible Infections are also conceived individually, as a burden to the individual and only more abstractly as an issue of public health. Sexual function is not an overwhelming preoccupation, although this has begun to change with the introduction of biological agents such as Viagra. Sexual pleasure or sexual meanings do not appear to be of any interest within this field.
Sexual and reproductive health in the developing world is a much broader vehicle. It covers the prevention of sexually transmissible diseases and questions of fertility, but also extends to social and political questions, including male and female circumcision, and sexual violence. This seems to be expeditious to the various NGOs that work in this field in developing countries. It could be argued that an effect of using this paradigm to address, for instance, circumcision, means that the historical and social meanings of such a profoundly cultural practice can be skated over in the pursuit of health outcomes. Think for instance of the indecent haste to circumcise men in Africa as a means of reducing HIV infection. A further feature of the field in the developing world is the overwhelming focus on women, to the point where, oddly, reproduction can sometimes appear to be a matter only concerning women.
Sexual and reproductive health is strongly marked by a particular sort of discourse about gender. Perhaps because of the ideology inherent in the flow of development aid from rich and powerful Western countries, to weak and resource poor developing countries, there is a tendency to represent gender as primarily a question of sexual inequality. The effects of this discourse also include portraying gender as natural and given rather than cultural and produced and as simply binary: male and female. Stereotypes of men as perpetrators of sexual violence, risk takers who put their female partners at risk of disease, and marginal to questions of reproduction (social and biological) are common, as are stereotypes of women as victims of men’s violence, sexually conservative, and primarily concerned with reproduction.
Gender
The most widespread courses in the West that purported to address sexuality were those explicitly concerned with gender. These were either in the form of Gender Studies or Women’s Studies. While such departments are a welcome result of forty or so years of academic feminism and its impact on the humanities and social sciences, there appear to be at least two limitations on the capacity of these departments to address sexuality. First, the primary concern of most Gender or Women’s Studies programs is in fact gender. Sex is discussed as an effect of gender or constitutive of it, rather than sex and gender as discrete and intersecting domains. Sexuality in this way of thinking is primarily concerned with relations of power that are produced through normative institutions, such as heterosexual marriage, and thus evidence of ideological structures such as patriarchy or capitalism. Second, there is a general absence of men and masculinity from gender and women’s studies. Not a problem in itself, but a significant barrier to a comprehensive understanding of sexuality.
Human Rights
There is limited attention paid to issues of sexuality within the field of Human Rights. The concept of Sexual Rights is a relatively recent one, however there are signs that this area is growing. See for example the Yogyakarta principles. Examples of training include the inclusion of sexuality within various courses on Human Rights law. Examples include the work done by the The François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, and the Initiative for Health and Human Rights at the University of New South Wales.
Critical Sexuality Studies Internationally
There is a great deal of eclecticism across the field as evidenced by a wide variety of understandings about what constitutes Critical Sexuality Studies, and indeed what constitutes sexuality across cultures. The consultations were particularly informative in this regard revealing a wide set of agendas. For instance one informant said that sexuality, to them, was a conceptual vehicle to address gender issues, which were in fact women’s issues. Several informants lamented that sexuality studies internationally seemed to overly stress gay and lesbian issues and not take into account heterosexuality, while some others saw sexuality as a means of advancing a gay and lesbian rights agenda. Taking this theme further some, especially in Africa, saw sexuality as a neo-colonial category imposed upon “traditional” African culture, while others saw this view as code for a form of homophobia traceable to colonial era legislation.
This contestation over the basic meanings of sexuality are, in our view, productive. Importantly they stress the fact that sexuality cannot be studied in isolation. Thus sexuality is intrinsically tied up with other issues such as kinship, gender, sex, political economy, globalization to name but a few. It also reveals that Critical Sexuality Studies is a field that is still being constituted, and indeed this lack of determinacy may be a strength.
Literature Review
The second part of this scoping study is a review of recent research literature. This will be published here during 2008.
Conclusions
It seems that only a minority of sexuality research conducted and published in the past six years is identifiably linked with the handful of training programs available internationally. Individuals located at institutions that are not a part of the usual geography of international sexuality training published much of this research. They were mostly humanities or social science academics, located within their home disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, philosophy, literature etc., who were, for one reason or another, interested in sexuality. And a good deal of these researchers were not concerned solely with sexuality or sexuality in itself. Rather sexuality was an issue among others that they integrated into their inquiries that concerned other issues and it seems unlikely that these sociologists, anthropologists etc., would regard themselves to be sexuality researchers.
Recognizing the inherent and persistent disciplinarity of academic work around the world suggests a number of challenges and issues to consider. First, the fact that teachers and researchers rarely seem to commit themselves to the field of Critical Sexuality Studies over entire careers suggests a challenge about how to create renewal as people leave for other endeavours. One way to look at this question might be ask how to retain quality researchers and teachers in the field, but another way may be to acknowledge that academics first and foremost regard themselves as located within disciplines and over the course of a career direct their disciplinary tools at a number of different issues or fields. This may suggest that renewal is about constantly creating opportunities for researchers, of various levels of experience, to move into the field of sexuality. Second, disciplinarity is usually thought of as a strength by academics, suggesting as it does rigorous training and research methodologies. In this sense a strong disciplinary commitment or location should be regarded as a strength rather than as a barrier to the development of this new field.
