Background
The twentieth century might, among other things, be characterized as the century of sex. In that period, human sexuality came to occupy a central place in our endless fascination with ourselves as a species, and provided some of the most vexed questions facing modern societies. Arguably, this began with the anxieties arising from the trial of Oscar Wilde and extended to the HIV pandemic, which dominated the last twenty years of the century and forced a significant rethinking on human sexuality and the cultures in which it is embedded. Moreover, HIV/AIDS has mainly affected developing countries, with complex sexual cultures previously regarded merely as sexual behaviours. Yet, HIV/AIDS was not the cause of this fascination or this rethinking.
Earlier efforts in science (particularly medical science), in legal and religious debate, and in social activism coming from various sources (first-wave feminism, social hygiene movements, and early sexual reform movements) all contributed to a volatile century of discovery and deliberation. On the scientific side, sexology provided what was thought to be an objective account of human sexual functioning. And it is this tradition that has informed most training in the area of human sexuality research in the last fifty years.
In the late 1960s, the emergence of second-wave feminism and new sexual liberation movements contributed to a growing critique of the approach sexology followed. New theories of sexuality emerged, constituting a multifaceted field that can loosely be described as Critical Sexuality Studies. Now, over thirty years of research, theoretical development and sexual politics have provided a rich field of ideas, its own empirical legacy, and a set of questions that continue to fascinate us about human sexuality.
Undoubtedly, HIV/AIDS has provided the greatest recent stimulus to the debate about sex. The pandemic has demanded not only that we reconsider all we know about human sexual activity, but also requires innovative research methodologies to investigate it, as the complexities of HIV transmission have revealed very diverse sexual practices, wide-ranging meanings and values about sex, and far greater variation in sexual relationships than had hitherto been recognized.
Moreover, differences regionally, within countries, and across cultures have now been recognized as superseding the simple taxonomies that Western sexology used in the 19th and 20th centuries, which were framed by a set of binary opposites such as: heterosexual/homosexual, normative/deviant, innocence/experience, nature/nurture, natural/social, good/bad, right/wrong, God-given/profane, and so on.
It is our hypothesis that the training of sex researchers has yet to keep pace with this remarkable shift in knowledge and research. In the industrialised West, university level courses in human sexuality, in critical sexuality studies, in innovative research methodologies, indeed in HIV/AIDS itself as a human sexual problem, receive small attention and resources. In the developing world, even less is available and most training opportunities are dominated by medical, biological, behavioural and/or psychological accounts of human sexuality. According to Diane Di Mauro, sexology has dominated this educational frame internationally until now.
Methodology
In order to develop this website we employed two search strategies and a series of consultations.
First, we focused on advanced training opportunities in sexuality theory or research methodologies. We defined “advanced” as post-graduate study or beyond, within the academy, or outside it, including training that is aimed at people with professional or prior academic experience that would place them at a level equivalent to post-graduate, or higher.
This search was conducted via the Web using Google. A wide range of English terms were used, for instance: sexuality + graduate; sexuality + short course etc. A total of ten such searches were employed and then repeated for each of six different regional or national areas.
These searches were arbitrarily limited to 1000 results each, thus a total of 60,000 results were obtained from 60 different searches. These were examined for relevance by two researchers, who then compared their findings with each other and compiled a single list of approximately 1,200 web addresses, each deemed possibly relevant. Each of these sites was then checked for its relevance, then coded, where possible, according to geographic region, type of institutional location, level, pedagogical approach, delivery mode, theoretical orientation, epistemological underpinnings, and prospective audiences.
Second, the audit also consisted of a literature search for material on sexuality theory, sexuality research and sexuality research methodologies. As the purpose of the search was to map the contemporary sexuality field including salient debates and issues, we decided to limit results to articles published from 2000 to 2006. The study was further limited to articles published in English. The search was conducted by initially identifying a set of keywords and checking the validity of these across several academic databases and journals. Search terms were refined throughout a series of sub-searches. Four databases were searched: Current Contents; ProQuest; Web of Science; and JSTOR; and 18 international journals that we regarded as key publications in the field.
These journals were:
- AIDS Care
- AIDS Education and Prevention
- Annual Review of Sex Research
- Archives of Sexual Behaviour
- Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality
- Critical Public Health
- Culture Health and Sexuality
- Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide
- Global Public Health
- GLQ
- International Journal of Sexual Health
- Journal of Homosexuality
- Journal of Sex Research
- Journal of the History of Sexuality
- Sex Education
- Sexualities
- Sexuality Research and Social Policy
- Sexual Health
Two people read references and abstracts and then compiled a list of articles to obtain in their full text form. Most of these were available through electronic desktop delivery. Articles were then read for relevance and coded. 375 articles were collected. Our codes were only somewhat commensurate with keywords employed by authors and journals, which were sometimes poor descriptors of article content.
The results from all searches were culled in order to focus on material that related to what we term “Critical Sexuality Studies”. For instance we have not attempted to summarize the biomedical literature or the strongly biological end of sexological research.
Third, we have conducted a series of consultations and field visits with people working in Critical Sexuality Studies. These have included visits to and/or discussions with various institutions and individuals in Sub-Saharan Africa, South-East Asia including Australia, Europe, and North and South America.
The field of Critical Sexuality Studies
The field of Critical Sexuality Studies includes both training and research, and both activities are essential to the growth and maintenance of the field.
If we can regard the total number of published articles in a six-year period as an indicator of the level of research activity conducted over that period, somewhere in the order of 370 articles, then we can say that research in this field is strong.
In relation to sexuality training understood very broadly, we found a plethora of undergraduate and basic professional courses offered worldwide; however, advanced courses, which we deemed to be post-graduate level or beyond, were far fewer, less than twenty worldwide. When we focused on training in Critical Sexuality Studies, there was only a handful.
