Sex Division statement
The statement below, defining our division's official position, is also contained in the SSSP pamphlet, Working Toward A Just World: Visions, Experiences and Challenges, Pamela Roby, Editor. The division statement was prepared by Paula Rust and Lloyd Klein. They also prepared the accompanying book list, with input from Ira Fybish.
As members of the Sexual Behavior, Politics, and Communities Division, we see our division as being a "forum with a philosophy" rather than having a "mission" per se. We seek to be a particular type of network for our members rather than to accomplish a particular goal. We do, however, have a visionary goal for society in general, and that is the attainment of civil liberties regarding freedom of sexual expression and sexual being for people of all sexual orientations, genders, races, and classes. As an SSSP division, our role in attaining this goal is the production of responsible professional scholarship about sexuality, and the provision of a forum for the meeting of academia and social activism. Academia and activism meet in the form of persons whenever academics and activists, both SSSP members and community activists working in the city hosting our annual meetings, share a panel organized by the division. They also meet in the work division members do, because many of us are both academics and social activists whose social activism informs our academic work, and vice versa. For many of our members, scholarship flows from our sexual self-identities. Because the work of such scholars is often disparaged as "biased," as if all social scientific teaching and research were not influenced by the personal politics of the scholar, we seek to give special support to those who are honest about the influence their own life experiences with sexuality has had on their scholarship, and about their hopes that a their scholarship will have political influence. The division seeks to provide an accessible and open forum for the discussion of sexuality, a supportive atmosphere for those doing scholarship in sexuality including activist scholars who often lack support from other sources, mentorship for young scholars, networking for both activists and scholars. We do not believe that the society we envision, in which all individuals have freedom of sexual expression and freedom from sexual violence, has ever existed. There are particular places that might have accomplished specific aspects of this vision, e.g., in Denmark same-sex couples may marry—but cannot adopt children. Our vision remains a fantasy, and has been depicted only in representations of the imagination.
Difficulties: Because sexuality is socially constructed as shameful and privatized yet fascinating, our scholarship tends to be simultaneously trivialized and sensationalized both inside and outside academia. We encounter difficulties when we seek to have our work taken seriously and to advance in our careers. Funding for sexuality research, especially government funding, is difficult to find. Those of us who study stigmatized forms of sexuality often suffer from the contagion of stigma, a special problem for those of us who in fact share the stigmatized sexual self-identities or sexual statuses with our research subjects. Young scholars in the area of sexuality often have trouble finding mentors, sometimes because of a lack of support for their interest in the topic and sometimes because of the lack of a faculty member with knowledge of the topic. Because the field is relatively new (or rather, newly recognized as a serious scholarly area in the social sciences) the previous generations of scholars who would normally provide mentorship are small. They have been depleted even further by AIDS deaths.
Some classics and some new important books and articles in the area of sexuality