My name is Julienne, otherwise known as Jules, and I have recently come on board to work on the SexualityStudies website. The last couple of months have been a little quiet, both on our part and on the part of our website members, and one of our intentions is to breathe a bit of life back into SexualityStudies.net by encouraging more communication between members and by extending the information and resources we have available.

One of the main objectives of the website is to provide a networking forum for scholars studying or working in the field of sexuality studies, and an opportunity for them to participate in critical discussion and debate. It is sometimes difficult to know in which ways people imagine themselves participating or what expectations they might have. One of the first steps I would like to make in the following months is to generate dialogue between members by putting up regular blog posts and expanding our activities on the website. Some possibilities include:

• Regular interviews with international sexuality scholars and researchers in order to keep up to date with debates, issues and interests emerging in different parts of the world.
• A regular blog or debate based around a particular issue and hosted by a particular group or institution.

Now, a little about myself. I am a social anthropologist and my scholarly interests have changed somewhat over the years. My first ethnographic project was of the BDSM scene in Melbourne, Australia (BDSM is an acronym for three sets of practices – Bondage and Discipline, Dominance and Submission, and Sadism and Masochism). I was interested in a variety of issues such as power, gender, performativity, embodiment and alternative forms of eroticism. My second ethnographic project was in Montevideo, Uruguay, where I studied how economic crisis and new forms of poverty have transformed consumption practices and class and gender identities. More recently my interests have turned back to sexuality studies, and I am currently preparing a publication based on my BDSM research on some of the methodological and ethical implications of participation in ethnographic research.

That’s enough from me for now but keep an eye out for regular blog posts and materials added to the website in the following months. In particular, watch out for my first interview with a prominent international scholar to be posted on this site in the next few weeks.