CSS research: an overview
{"Image DocumentName": "CSS research: an overview", "Image ImageDescription": "CSS work is multifaceted and multidisciplinary, but: Always requires a focus on the shifting relationships of power, knowledge, context, and culture. CSS research tends towards qualitative inquiry. Needs to be theory-driven, usually empirically inductive. Many field methods, constantly evolving. Capable of generalisation: processes, practices, social dynamics (rarely population predictive) Critical Sexuality Studies is characterised by multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches. A multidisciplinary approach utilises theory and methodology from a range of research disciplines in an aggregative and complementary way. A good example is a mixed methods research approach where a study might, for example, include a survey of a population (or a sample of it) and then select some members of that population for intensive in-depth interviewing. The data sets produced are then often lined up side-by-side for comparison, illustration and amplification. Each adds value to the overall analysis. An interdisciplinary approach seeks to integrate theory and methodology to investigate phenomena that cannot fully be captured inside one disciplinary approach, e.g. as in gender studies or peace studies. One example in recent sexuality research is a study that investigated the relationship between private or domestic space (using ideas from architecture and design studies) and ethnographic field methods from the social sciences to investigate \u2018gay\u2019 sexual identity formation and (homo)sexual experience among a population of young South Asian men living in Australia (Smith, G. 2008). Whether Critical Sexuality Studies research is multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary, it requires a focus on the shifting relationships of power, knowledge, context and culture that surround and affect the issue being researched. Sexuality is also related to other aspects of identity and experience, and it often makes no sense to explore sexuality without reference to other issues related to gender, class, ethnicity and race, age and generation. For example, the sexual lives of working-class, rural men are likely to be quite different from those of middle-class, urban women in any cultural setting. Critical Sexuality Studies as a field is attentive to the ways these aspects of experience and identity inform sexuality, and seeks to avoid reductionist or generalist statements about sexuality. Thus, the methods used by Critical Sexuality Studies scholars tend to be innovative, reflexive, and critically and politically grounded in the communities in which they are engaged. The knowledge that emerges from such research is likely to be specific to the local setting in which the research took place, and broad generalisation or \u2018grand\u2019 theory is usually avoided in favour of complex, contextual analysis. Research in Critical Sexuality Studies tends more toward qualitative inquiry. There are several reasons for this. Because Critical Sexuality Studies have emerged, in part, from feminism and gay and lesbian movements, it tends to be critical of epistemologies that attempt to make objective truth claims about the nature of sexuality and social life. Rather, the humanities and social science disciplines in which Critical Sexuality Studies can be found are attentive to the ways in which such truth claims and appeals to objectivity can in fact support power relations and knowledge-making practices that marginalise or stigmatise some sexual behaviours, practices and identities, while legitimating others. For example, those researchers who draw on queer theory are attentive to the ways in which heterosexuality is often naturalised or normalised in relation to research findings that objectify the sexual practices and identities of sexual others. Research in Critical Sexuality Studies is not interested in determining the moral value of sexual practices, identities or behaviours, but in understanding how social structures and cultural discourses, including academic research, perpetuate such moral values, and how those who practise such sexual behaviours, or have such identities, negotiate and challenge those conventions. In this way, qualitative methods are more compatible with the political aims of Critical Sexuality Studies. Importantly, there is no one qualitative field method associated with Critical Sexuality Studies research. Rather, different disciplines have developed different qualitative approaches to pursuing knowledge about topics and issues specific to their disciplinary focus. Critical sexuality researchers in the humanities employ qualitative methods such as discourse analysis and genealogy to analyse the ways in which sexuality is embedded in language, culture and history. Critical sexuality scholars in the social sciences tend to favour empirical research with population samples, institutions or on specific social issues to explain the relationship between knowledge, power and social life. Frequently, critical sexuality scholars draw on ideas from across disciplines, but produce research that draws on the methods favoured in their discipline. This is not to say that critical sexuality researchers cannot use quantitative methods. However, such methods are likely to form one part of a broader research methodology designed to understand a social process or pattern rather than predict the nature of social life or explain sexuality as a fixed object. This does not preclude the identification of patterns that reflect the effects of large social structures on local settings, such as transnational economic policies or cultural attitudes to gender norms or sexual behaviours, but it aims to avoid the reductive tendencies of large-scale analysis that typifies quantitative approaches and which summarises the many complexities in sexual life as simply sexual behaviours. Such approaches are more likely to be found in those disciplines that dominate sex research internationally: sexology; sexual and reproductive health; and epidemiological and behavioural HIV/AIDS research. For example, recent criticisms of the HIV epidemic in Africa have noted that models of HIV intervention that favour clinical and medical knowledge of sexual behaviour fail to understand the social and cultural processes driving the transmission of the virus. Such approaches are in need of revision in light of the need for more contextualised cultural analysis of the social relations and power dynamics that inform sexuality in African settings (and in any other setting). The focus must be less on describing behaviour patterns, or devising large-scale solutions to the HIV/AIDS pandemic as if there is one coherent experience of the virus. This requires research methods that are more attentive to differences between social and cultural settings, and the specific experiences of those \u2018at risk\u2019 of the disease. 18.", "Image XResolution": "37", "Image YResolution": "37", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Centimeter", "Image Software": "SlidePlayer", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered"}