Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Is sexuality research
dirty work?
Institutionalized stigma
in the production
of sexual knowledge
Sexualities
2014, Vol. 17(5/6) 632656
! The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1363460713516338
sex.sagepub.com
Janice M Irvine
University of Massachusetts, USA
Abstract
Sexuality research has a long history of controversy in the USA. This article examines
sexuality research as a form of dirty work, an occupation that is simultaneously
socially necessary and stigmatized. Using survey data of contemporary sociologists
engaged in sexuality research, historical data on 20th century sexologists, and content
analysis of top-tier sociology journals, I focus on the university system and its related
functions of publishing, funding, and ethical review boards. I argue that sexuality
research is constructed as dirty work by systematic practices of the university
system, and further suggest that these practices impose stigma effects that are not
simply individual but represent persistent patterns of institutional inequality. Further,
I show how these institutional practices are shaped by cultural schemas regarding
sexuality, enacted through cognitive and affective bias of institutional actors. The construction of sexuality research as dirty work affects not only researchers themselves but
shapes the broad production of sexual knowledge.
Keywords
Dirty work, inequality, sexuality research, stigma
Sexuality research has long struggled for academic and professional legitimacy.
Sexologists in the 19th century faced derision, while mid-20th-century researchers
like William Masters and Virginia Johnson conducted their early studies in secrecy.
Their laboratory was vandalized once their work became public. In addition to
constrained training opportunities, funding sources, and job prospects, sexuality
Corresponding author:
Janice M Irvine, University of Massachusetts, 200 Hicks Way, Thompson Hall, Amherst, MA 01003, USA.
Email: irvine@soc.umass.edu
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dirty work by systematic practices of the university system, and further suggest that
these practices impose stigma eects that are not simply individual but constitute
persistent patterns of institutional inequality. In this way, sexuality research is
dierent from most social science elds in that it must not only negotiate the
disciplinary politics of knowledge production, but also the institutional and
social opprobrium associated with dirty work.
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sexuality and gender, and the emergence of new forms of the commodication of
the self, sexology in the USA built a market by addressing cultural fears about the
survival of heterosexuality and marriage. The anxiety associated with instability of
traditional gender and family structures produced a ready focus for sexology, while
an increasingly public ideal of erotic satisfaction generated consumers readily
enticed by promises of more and better sex. This is the promise at the heart
of the speakers benetthat, as Foucault (1978) put it, tomorrow sex will be
good again.
On the other hand, sexologists also suered from what I have called the speakers burden (Irvine, 2005), that is, the stigmatization that attaches to those with
any visible connection to sex. Stigma burdened sexual science even from its earliest
years. For example, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, obscenity controversies arose over publication of sexology texts. In May 1933, Nazis raided the Institut
fur Sexualwissenschaft, and removed books and papers, which they later burned in
the streets of Berlin. Within a short time in Germany, sexology journals folded,
institutes were closed, and many sexual scientists were arrested or went into exile,
many of them to the USA. In the USA, the National Research Council established
the Committee for Research in Problems of Sex in 1921, and sought to confer
scientic legitimacy to a subject which languished in dispute. Yet controversies
continued, including over the work, in the mid-20th century, of Alfred Kinsey,
Masters and Johnson, John Money, and others. The speakers burden manifested
in diverse forms ranging from the absence of employment opportunities to volatile
controversies such as those examined earlier in this article.
Today the landscape for sexuality research has changed. The towering gures of
20th-century sexology are gone, either retired or deceased. Contemporary sexology
lacks a comparably prominent researcher, and the pharmaceutical industry now
dominates the eld (Tiefer, 2004). Moreover, sexology is no longer the only
professional rubric for sexuality researchers. Sexuality research within the academy
and medicine has expanded.
Sub-elds within the social sciences and humanitiesin particular sociology,
history, literary and cultural studieshave created new academic space for critical
sexual inquiry. In addition, interdisciplinary (and overlapping) elds of sexuality
studies, LGBT studies, and queer studies have burgeoned over the last two decades,
inextricably bound with the intellectual inuences of poststructuralism and feminist
theory, as well as feminist, queer, AIDS, and trans activism. These various sites of
contemporary sexuality studies examine sexuality as an analytic domain rather
than as an ascribed characteristic. This diers from mainstream US sexology in
the critical interrogation of sexuality as a broad social domain involving multiple
elds of power, diverse systems of knowledge, and sets of institutional and political
discourses. The constructionist argument that sexuality is best studied as a domain
whose meanings change across cultures and history, rather than as the universal,
biological drive posited by sexologists, prompted rich studies on varied levels of
analysis: the nation, institutions and workplaces, communities, public cultures,
embodiment, and more. This research challenged the biomedical and essentializing
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question of why certain occupations are stigmatized and through what broader
dynamics.
Sociological literature widely accepts the social construction of dirtiness.
However, few studies examine the mechanisms of this construction. The stigma
that dirty workers manage is derived from social factors and cultural discourses
specic to their occupations, which are largely unexplored in the literature. Its
focus on individual and collective-level identity management obscures broader systematic practices of stigma production, leaving it unclear how stigma emerges and
translates into institutional disadvantage and occupational bias. By contrast,
I examine institutional structures of stigma in dirty work, along with their reinforcing cultural schemas. If sexuality research is a form of dirty work, then how is it
dirty? And how have sexual scientists been constructed as dirty workers?
Methods
This article is based on historical evidence, survey data, and content analysis. Most
of the historical data are archival or derive from secondary sources such as biographies and autobiographies. I worked in three major archives for earlier projects
related to this topic, and rely here on these data: The Kinsey Institute (Indiana
University) and the Schlesinger Library (Harvard University/Radclie). Archival
material consists of letters, personal documents, and media coverage. In addition, I
draw historical evidence from a series of autobiographies and biographies of sexologists. There are no survey data of earlier sexologists; I use evidence from archival and other sources to examine potential continuity in occupational stigma.
The data on contemporary sociologists in this article derive from a survey of
sexuality researchers. In 2011, I conducted an online survey with members of the
American Sociological Association Section on Sexualities. I inquired about aspects
of their academic careers, such as graduate training, access to funding, promotion
decisions, Institutional Review Board experiences, and controversies. The section
had approximately 450 members at the time of my survey. The data pool consists
of 169 responses, a response rate of 38%. The nal sample matched the section
population almost identically in terms of degree-date, gender, race, and regional
distribution, lending condence to the conclusion that these survey data do a good
job of describing this ASA Section on Sexualities. This is the rst survey to examine
the career experiences of sociologists who study sexuality and therefore represents
the only sample of its kind. The quotations in this article from sociologists currently conducting sexuality research are from the open-ended comment boxes in
the survey.
I also conducted content analysis of top-tier sociology journals to determine the
number of sexuality-related articles published in two time periods. The analysis
revisits an earlier gender-related study of sub-eld publications during 19951997
in the American Journal of Sociology (AJS), American Sociological Review (ASR),
and Social Problems (SP) (Karides et al., 2001). My analysis returned to this
studywith sexuality research in mindreplicating the initial 19951997 time
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period and also comparing publications in the three journals 10 years later, 2005
2007. Two coders reviewed all the journal articles in these three journals during the
two time periods, examining title, abstract, literature review, and discussion. For
the 19951997 period, we analyzed 338 articles (159 from ASR, 81 from SP, and 98
from AJS) and in the 20052007 period we examined 321 articles (125 from
ASR, 85 from SP, and 111 from AJS). There were so few sexuality-related articles
published that we could analyze a complete census of these articles (rather than
a sample).
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These include the absence of comprehensive graduate training; systematic challenges by Institutional Review Boards; and barriers to funding, publication, and
promotion. Tenure is a particular source of anxiety for sexuality researchers who
fear uncomprehending or trivializing evaluators. Moreover, sociologists who study
sexuality report challenges to their professional and personal identities. These take
the form of snide comments, jokes, assumptions about their sexuality, and challenges to the legitimacy of sexuality research overall. While sociologists referred to
these dynamics as stigma, the stigma of dirty work is best analyzed as structural
inequality in the form of systematic barriers and practices by those with institutional status. In the following, I focus on their role in training scholars, and their
organizational practices as workplaces themselves. I also examine the universitys
related professional functions of ethical regulation of research, funding of research,
and the publication of disciplinary journals.
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Stigma may be conveyed early to students with an interest in sexual science. For
one, there is scant graduate training in sexuality research. A 1995 report on sexuality research by the Social Science Research Council criticized the absence of
formal research training and noted that graduate mentoring opportunities often
occur through serendipity and rarely represent a thorough and sustained approach
to the subject matter (di Mauro, 1995). The sheer absence of mentors is among the
barriers that have faced graduate students. Within interdisciplinary elds such as
sexuality studies or queer studies, graduate training is contingent on whether or not
there is a faculty member in the disciplinary department. Despite the expansion of
sexuality research across the disciplines over these last 20 years, there has been
no systematic study of current university experiences. My survey of sociologists
provides a systematic glimpse into one discipline, sociology.
My respondents suggest that some sociology departments have addressed this
problem. Of all respondents, 65% said that sexuality is a recognized area of
research in their department, while 70% of graduate students found mentorship
within their departments. They noted:
I teach a graduate course in sexualities and have many graduate students writing their
dissertations in this area.
Students can take a comp in sexualities and students who do sexualities and GLBT
courses are allowed to teach special topics courses without issues.
Faculty hired me enthusiastically based on my sexuality studies experience.
Generally colleagues and administrators are supportive. I am very lucky to be in a
feminist department where gender and sexuality research is highly valued and
respected.
The department voted to tenure me, unanimously. Everyone has been respectful of me
and my research thus far.
Overall, this department has been quite supportive of my research. I have things all
over my oce, do colloquia, and routinely share my data with colleagues.
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In addition, 35% of graduate students said they did not nd mentorship in sexuality studies:
Finding committee members for my dissertation was quite dicult and working with
non-judging faculty has been a challenge.
My mentor left this institution and I do not currently have a mentor in my grad
program.
Sexuality studies is recognized in my institution but not highly regarded. [Ive had]
diculty in nding a mentor and someone to agree to oversee my grad work.
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I was unable to pursue sexuality research since I did not have mentorship in the area.
I joined a Queer Theory Research Group and took classes outside of the department,
but this was looked at as merely an interest, not a signicant area of study within my
department.
Some researchers found it dicult to discern precisely which factors shape departmental responses to their work. In some cases, sociologists suspected that methodological preferences inuenced how their departments evaluated their sexuality
research. There was a sense that quantitative methods lent legitimacy to sexuality
research. One representative comment was: I think because I am using quantitative methods it is respected. I am not sure what the situation would be if I was using
qualitative methods.
Finally, it is worth remarking that a number of survey respondents reported that
they have needed to abandon either sex research, the discipline of sociology, or
academia:
Sometimes I think it would be much easier to commit my energy to a dierent subject
area that is not stigmatized in the way that human sexuality is. While I think that the
trend in this research area is good (its getting better), I recognize that my subject area
has a lot more baggage than some of my colleagues or supervisory faculty members.
Its certainly not the path of least resistance.
I had to switch my primary appointment from Sociology to Womens Studies.
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Im continually nervous given what I saw happen to a mentor of mine when she was
denied tenure for being a sexual minority who researched sexual minorities. It still
haunts me. And it, in part, shaped my decision to avoid research universities as places
of employment.
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published four sexuality articles. Ten years later, the numbers are little changed. In
the 20052007 period, AJS published two articles on sexuality, ASR published four
articles, and SP published four articles on sexuality (and a 2006 symposium on
feminism and sociology that included an article on sexual assault and an article on
abortion). These negligible publication rates are signicant given the pressure
experienced by sociologists who conduct sexuality research. Although my survey
did not ask about journal publication, many scholars mentioned departmental
pressures to publish in mainstream sociology journals:
My colleagues are ne as long as I publish in major sociology journals, as opposed to
interdisciplinary sexuality journals.
Ive felt defeated, my publications have been slowed given the scarcity of wellrespected venues for publishing sexualities research and my desire to place my work
in mainstream journals (which often requires multiple extensive revisions if these
journals will send the pieces out for review at all), a slower publication track record
means a poor placement in terms of employment.
I have been advised to change titles of my articles so my other colleagues would not
know what I was writing about.
I do know that tenure evaluators are often confused by journals such as The Journal of
Homosexuality, Journal of Lesbian Studies, Sexualities, etc. They dont know how to
evaluate publications in these journals.
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Golden Fleece controversy, Not long after Proxmire carried out his shameless act,
a program ocer at the National Science Foundation told me that studies of
romantic love, even if cloaked in scientic jargon, could not and would not be
funded by the agency. In April 2003, the New York Times reported that the
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) might apply unusual scrutiny
to grants with key words such as gay, sex worker, anal sex, and men who sleep with
men (Goode, 2003). A designated spokesperson for HHS denied this, although an
anonymous federal ocial conrmed the practice (Goode, 2003). Anxieties about
these types of political attacks persist.
Sexuality researchers in my survey reported similar funding diculties in the
current climate. Some respondents perceived scant funding resources (There are
few fellowships available, and in response to a question asking whether they had
ever applied for an external fellowship: Are there any? and Im not aware of
any currently for advanced scholars.) Still, 51% of sexuality scholars applied for
an external grant during their career, to federal funders such as NSF or the
National Endowment for the Humanities or private funders such as the Williams
Institute. They reported a range of experiences. Some described negative responses
from funders:
I was told by a program ocer at the Ford Foundation that they were not willing to
consider funding research on a topic this controversial.
One reviewer said that research on gays and lesbians in the Midwest was uninteresting.
Again, I think that Sexuality Studies is not thought of as being serious and therefore
not deserving of funding.
I did not receive a large internal grant due to these assumptions [of stigma]. The
verbatim message said, We do not wish to support research that will land [the university] on the front page of the newspaper.
Of the pool of respondents who had ever applied for a grant, 18% said a funder
had asked them to modify the grant proposal in a way that downplayed its focus on
sexuality. This included eliminating dirty words in their proposals:
I received an NSF Sociology Dissertation Improvement Grant. The program sta at
the time redacted the word sexual from the project title, presumably so as not to
arouse the ire of conservative Republican lawmakers. The program sta did not notify
me that they were going to make this change. I stumbled on it when looking up
information on the grant on the NSF website.
After the fact, I was asked to change the title of my NSF grant to make it less sexy.
I expect that my applications to other, private funders have been less successful
because of the topic.
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We often have to mask public submissions with titles like traditionally underrepresented or diversity, rather than using terms that convey that the research is about
LGBT individuals.
I was asked [by a funder] to change the title, which included sexual orientation.
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There is always concern about how the legislature will respond to courses that overtly
deal with LGBT sexuality.
When I was applying to graduate schools, I spoke with a faculty member at another
department who told me that his department doesnt do sexuality studies. I got
the impression that he didnt think sexuality studies were valuable or important
in sociology, and it made me question whether sociology was the right disciplinary
home for me.
I am about to have my third year review and I suspect I will be told that I should
speak more to mainstream sociology. People also make jokes about my research a
lot. It is supposed to be in good fun but it is denitely seen as strange.
The sexual harassment enacted by some of my respondents is no fun either.
[I have felt] kind of creepy, actually. Made me realize that its a stigmatized and
misunderstood area of research that men, especially, have a hard time understanding.
These examples illustrate the myriad practices through which specic institutional
agents, whether mentors, promotion committees, or colleagues, can systematically
generate and sustain inequality.
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Williams put it, not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as
thought (Williams, 1977). This mix might manifest in various ways, for example
anxiety and embarrassment about sex research. Sociologists currently doing sexuality research reported these reactions in my survey. One respondent said, about
her IRB: They were concerned that my topic would be embarrassing to participants. Other responses include: No one at my university will even talk about the
work. They seem to think its shameful, and Audiences from outside my department have suggested that my research is oensive. Implicit in Michele Lamonts
(2009) analysis of funding decisions is that decision-making is also deeply shaped
by how professors feel. Institutional practices, then, are not merely cognitive but
entail both understanding and feeling. And, as Laura Stark (2012: 28) argues in her
study on IRBs, the visceral responses of board members could exercise a powerful inuence on board decisions. This aective aspect of institutional bias is important when considering sexuality research.
This meld of cognitive and aective biases may manifest as moral judgment in
academic bureaucracies. Lamont (2009: 195), for example, found that judgments
about grant applicants moral qualities was part of the normal order of things on
peer-review panels. Laura Stark (2012) found that one key aspect of IRB decisionmaking was the members assessment of the researcher. They read proposals like
tea leaves for signs of good character. This strategy, unfortunately, disadvantages
sexuality researchers, who have historically been vulnerable to mischaracterizations
such as pervert and sex-crazed. As noted earlier, many respondents in my
survey reported such stigmatizing experiences. A typical comment: Ive been
called obsessed with sex in a derogatory and judgmental manner. As Stark
notes, group process in IRB meetings can elicit both the strengths as well as the
most unsavory biases of individual members. It would not be surprising, given
broader cultural suspicion about sex, if some board members gazed with mistrust
upon sexuality researchers. Other survey respondents reported suering various
moral judgments: Sta member refused to work with me on course development
because she believed the course was immoral, and Im continually afraid that I
will be accused of some sort of unethical or immoral practice.
As Stephen Fineman (2010) notes, emotionologiespolitical, social, and cultural constructs of emotionshape the values accorded to specic occupational
groups. One aspect of such cognitive and aective bias is the belief that sexuality
should not be a eld of academic inquiry. From this perspective, sexual knowledge
is inappropriate, since sex should remain in the realm of enchantment rather than
rationality. This bias is clear in a case described earlier. In awarding the Golden
Fleece to psychologist Elaine Hateld, Senator Proxmire objected to funding sexuality research, saying: Im also against it because I dont want the answer. Indeed,
Proxmires action, as chair of the Senate subcommittee that oversees the NSF,
shows the states role in the stigmatization of sexual knowledge. Proxmire awarded
the Golden Fleece to federal agencies which he saw as wasteful, noting, I think it is
time the National Science Foundation put a stop to this Federal version of The
Love Machine and rearranged its research priorities to address our scientic, not
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our erotic curiosity (Shaer, 1977). Mockery of sex as a topic of study re-emerged
in later years, as right-wing religious groups targeted the federal funding of sexuality projects, casting this research as ridiculous, even disgusting. Today, some of
my survey respondents still suered from this bias, such as one who said, My
research is not considered, by many, to be a credible PhD research topic or social
science topic, people tend to wonder why someone would waste their time studying sexualities. As a subject of social research, sex, like dirt, is out of place
(Douglas, 2002). These diverse cases show how culture matters. Cultural anxieties
related to sexuality can produce cognitive and emotional bias, which, when enacted
through the practices of institutional actors, naturalizes the inequality of
dirty work.
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of a certain scientic rationality and therefore less stigmatized, even rewarded for
sexuality research? And my project has focused on researchers in the USA. How do
dierent sexual cultures and institutional arrangements shape sexuality research?
Finally, it bears remembering that many sexuality researchers reported positive
experiences at their universities; what conditions foster such acceptance, for example geographical region or university status?
If university-related practices construct sexuality research as dirty work, what
are the implications? This article presents preliminary answers to this question. For
one, institutional inequality impacts researchers themselves, imposing a speakers
burden in the form of diminished career outcomes. In earlier sections, for example,
we saw how faculty and graduate students lacked institutional support and were
blocked by IRBs or discouraged by funders or colleagues. Some sociologists abandoned sexuality research outright.
While university practices shape the careers of scholars and teachers, they also
shape and constrain what knowledge can be produced about sex. And so this article
extends contemporary research in the history and sociology of sexualities. New
research foregrounds the crucial role of the state and its institutions in the production of modern sexuality, such as Regina Kunzels (2008) study of the sexual culture of prisons over the last two centuries, and Margot Canadays (2009) study of
the production of sexual citizenship through 20th-century federal policies of immigration, the military, and welfare. My article examined the institutional location in
which studies such as these are conductedthe modern bureaucratic universityarguing that stigmatizing practices shape and constrain sexuality researchers
in the wider university workplace. Therefore, the production of sexuality research
as dirty work aects not only the researchers themselves but shapes the broad
production of sexual knowledge.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to my astute readers: Sarah Babb, Kathy Davis, Don Tomaskovic-Devey,
Steve Vallas. I could not have completed this survey without the help of Don TomaskovicDevey, Michelle Roseneld, and Abby Templer. Thanks to Ken Hou-Lin for graphic
assistance.
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Janice Irvine is a faculty member and Chair of the Department of Sociology at the
University of Massachusetts. Her most recent book is Talk about Sex: The Battles
Over Sex Education in the United States (University of California Press, 2002). She
is currently co-editing a volume entitled, Transnational Queer Activism, and also
conducting research on the history of the sociology of deviance.