Sexuality, Race and Culture

Study of Sexuality, Race and Culture

The Strategic Initiative for the Study of Sexuality and Race supports and promotes advanced research concerning sexuality and race, including their intersections, as communicative phenomenon. As an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary effort, this Initiative brings together multiple perspectives to generate knowledge, transform knowledge production, and encourage critical engagement with the topic. The Initiative welcomes participation by scholars from all disciplinary and methodological perspectives.

One of the unique qualities of this Initiative is that it supports the study of sexuality and race, including their intersections, in comparative, critical and cross-cultural contexts to further a wide variety of research agendas, perspectives and methods. The initiative promotes scholarship in individual and comparative cultural research contexts. Specifically, it is important to simultaneously study US American cultural presumptions in our everyday communication and research practices as well as how sexuality and race are enacted and interact differently in other cultural contexts.

Studying the intersections of sexuality and race allows for an interrogation of the interconnectedness of these two deeply important aspects of social and cultural self-understanding. Commonly accepted categories of dichotomous thought such as masculine/feminine, black/white, homosexual/heterosexual are profoundly consequential in our everyday communication within the U.S. American cultural context. As such their meaning and significance are often deeply taken for granted. Not only do we need to understand how these categories function and organize everyday life, we also need to know how these categories leak and the ways that people negotiate around them in everyday life. The initiative promotes the interrogation of various categories in relation to their deployment and their adequacy to account for the complexities of sexuality and race as they impact the lives of people from a variety of cultures in their everyday lives. The Initiative’s focus on intersections allows for the examination of the normative conditions of meaning production across a range of communicative contexts. In this way, the Initiative supports the interrogation of the social and cultural presuppositions about the nature and experience of both sexuality and race.

Some examples of scholarly dialogue encouraged by the Initiative include:

the adequacy of cross-cultural translations of the meaning of “sexuality,” “race,” and/or their intersection
the performative deployment of sexuality, race, and/or their intersection within specific historical, cultural, and social contexts
the strengths and limits of critical efforts to usurp trajectories of social power and status related to sexuality, race, and/or their intersections
the education of community groups seeking to understand and/or modify communication behaviors regarding sexuality and race.

For more information contact Dr. Jacqueline Martinez (jmartinez@asu.edu) or Dr. Paul Mongeau (Paul.Mongeau@asu.edu)