The special issue of the journal Psychology and Sexuality on asexuality that I co-edited with Mark Carrigan and Todd Morrison was recently released as an edited collection, Asexuality and Sexual Normativity: An Anthology (2014), by Routledge.
The book is available through Amazon and through Routledge, although the price is quite steep.
The LSE Review of Books just published a favorable review of the book.
Not too long ago, I came across this news story about lab grown vaginas. Apparently, a team of researchers from the U.S. and Mexico grew vaginal organs in a lab for four teenage patients who had “underdeveloped” or absent vaginas.
The Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine has posted materials about the study here and here.
The story raises interesting questions about whether this new medical technology will serve to enforce gender and sexual norms or whether it could serve to enable gender and sexual play; however I argue in this post that these questions are not all that easy to answer.
Vaginal Scaffold (Credit: Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine)
I am happy to announce that the edited collection, Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, has been published by Routledge. The volume is a wonderful collection of essays exploring the feminist and queer politics of asexuality. I have a chapter in the collection titled “Asexuality and Disability: Mutual Negation in Adams v. Rice and New Directions for Coalition Building.”
Here is a brief excerpt from the book description: “Together, these essays made out of a residency personal statement writing service challenge the ways in which we imagine gender and sexuality in relation to desire and sexual practice. Asexualities provides a critical reevaluation of even the most radical queer theorizations of sexuality. Going beyond a call for acceptance of asexuality as a legitimate and valid sexual orientation, the authors offer a critical examination of many of the most fundamental ways in which we categorize and index sexualities, desires, bodies, and practices.”
For more information about the book, and to order, please visit the book page on the Routledge website.
If you are affiliated with a college or university, please ask your institutional library to purchase a copy for their collection. A library recommendation form is available here.
Thank you very much to the editors, Karli June Cerankowski and Megan Milks, for their hard work on this volume and for their leadership in the field of asexuality studies.
Pharmaceutical companies have been working for years in order to secure FDA-approval for Flibanserin, a drug intended to treat female desire disorders. Recently, there have been a number of new developments in the Flibanserin saga, involving drug companies, the FDA, feminist activists, and the media, which I analyze in this post. Here’s a quick preview of my judgment on each of these actors: pharmaceutical companies = profit driven (what else?); FDA = differential treatment of drugs for men vs. drugs for women; feminist activists = doing some good, but efforts have limitations; media = totally dropping the ball.
Background on the Flibanserin
Flibanserin is a drug that increases levels of the neurotransmitters dopamine and noradrenaline and lowers levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin. It was originally developed and tested as a treatment for depression by the German pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim, but it was not found to be effective in treating depression.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
In 2010, Boehringer Ingelheim applied to the FDA for approval for Flibanserin as a treatment for Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD) in women. HSDD is defined by the American Psychiatric Association in the DSM-IV as “persistently or recurrently deficient or absent sexual fantasies and desire for sexual activity” which must cause “marked distress or interpersonal difficulty” [1]. In clinical trials, women diagnosed with HSDD who took Flibanserin reported an increase of around 2.5 “sexually satisfying events” per month, while women diagnosed with HSDD who took a placebo reported an increase of around 1.5 “sexually satisfying events” per month. The FDA panel that reviewed Boehringer Ingelheim’s application recommended against approving Flibanserin, citing modest benefits and long-term safety concerns (the transcript of the hearing is available online).
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The Guide to Getting It On (6th Edition)
I am happy to report that my co-authored article with Thea Cacchioni, “Sexual improvement as if your health depends on it: An analysis of contemporary sex manuals,” has been published by Feminism & Psychology. In the article, we review seventeen U.S. sex manuals published between 2000 and 2010. We argue that in addition to positioning sexual activity as a biological, essential (albeit gendered) human need, and as the ultimate path to individual fulfillment and empowerment, a new rationale for the importance of sex (and working on sexual improvement) is now prominent in contemporary sex manuals. Reflecting the “healthicization” of sex in the post-Viagra era, authors frame frequent pleasurable sexual activity as an important factor in the maintenance of health and wellness while enjoy harder erections, an argument that gives further weight to the importance of “sex work” as a fundamental aspect of particularly women’s work in heterosexual relationships.
In a previous post, “The Sex-Glutted Marriage: A Couple’s Guide to Reducing Their Marriage Libido,” I parodied what I still consider to be one of the worst manuals we reviewed, The Sex-Starved Marriage: Boosting Your Marriage Libido: A Couple’s Guide by Michele Weiner Davis. This manual was relentless in promoting the idea that if one member of a couple is disinterested in sex, the relationship will inevitably fail; and, therefore, that person must do everything in her or his power to become more interested in sex.
In honor of our article coming out (and in case you are looking for gifts to give this holiday season), I decided to reveal which sex manuals I would actually recommend. The truth is, out of all the ones we reviewed (including several that were explicitly positioned as feminist and/or queer), the only one that I would really recommend is the Guide to Getting It On by Paul Joannides (I read the 6th edition). The reason why I would recommend this manual is, frankly, because it actually doesn’t give much in the way of advice. It’s really more of an encyclopedia of sex and sexuality (and, at 900+ pages, quite an extensive encyclopedia). Rather than implying that there is one right way to be sexual (or not), the book gives information about different sexual desires, practices, identities and other topics, and allows readers to decide what might work for them.
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In this short clip (filmed in the summer of 2013), I share my experience with the graduate certificate program offered by Emory’s Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture. The Center’s mission is “to foster inquiry, research, and teaching from multiple explanatory perspectives concerning issues and phenomena associated with mind, brain, and culture and their relations.”
Mark Carrigan, Todd Morrison and I co-edited a special issue of the journal Psychology and Sexuality on asexuality. I am happy to announce that the issue has been published!
Please see the announcement from Routledge (note: the editorial and the “virtual discussion” between all of the contributors are free to read online until May 31, 2013).
A member of the asexual community has written excellent summaries of all of the articles.
Thank you to my co-editors, all of the contributors, and our anonymous reviewers.
Cross-posted with permission from the Neuroethics Blog.
Dr. Sari van Anders
After attending the Neurogenderings Conference in Vienna, where participants debated whether it would be possible to conduct feminist neuroscience research, I decided it would be useful to interview an actual practicing feminist neuroscientist – and I knew just who to talk to. Dr. Sari van Anders is an Assistant Professor in Psychology and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. She earned her Ph.D. in Biological & Cognitive Psychology from Simon Fraser University. In her social neuroendocrinology lab at the University of Michigan, she conducts feminist neuroscience research on a variety of topics, with a principle focus on the social modulation of testosterone via sexuality, partnering/pair bonding, and nurturance. She has received grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the American Institute of Bisexuality and has published articles in Hormones and Behavior, Archives of Sexual Behavior, and Psychoneuroendocrinology, among others.
I asked her to talk about what she sees as feminist about her own behavioral neuroscience research, how she has secured support for her work from other behavioral neuroendocrinologists, and what advice she would give to early career scientists who want to incorporate feminist concerns into their research. Read on for Dr. Van Anders’ thoughtful and thought-provoking answers.
Cross-posted with permission from the Neuroethics Blog.
Sara Freeman
Graduate Student
Department of Neuroscience
Emory University
In this post, I would like to highlight the work of another Emory graduate student, Sara Freeman. Just when Cyd Cipolla and I (in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies) were coming up with our plan to teach an interdisciplinary course bringing together gender studies and neuroscience, we found out that Sara (in the Neuroscience Graduate Program) was developing her own interdisciplinary course bringing together developmental biology and the sociology of gender.Sara’s course, which she is teaching this semester, is called “Intersex: Biology & Gender,” and is cross-listed in the departments of Biology, Sociology, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. “Intersex” is a general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with physical reproductive or sexual characteristics that cannot be easily classified as male or female (for more information, visit the Intersex Society of North America or the American Psychological Association’s page on intersex). FYI: October 26th was Intersex Awareness Day! In Sara’s course, she is teaching about both the developmental biology of intersex in humans and the social, political, legal and ethical issues related to intersex.
I wanted to interview Sara about her course because I see her work as highly relevant to the field of Neuroethics. First, Neuroethics benefits from interdisciplinary collaboration between scientists (especially neuroscientists) and researchers in the social sciences and the humanities, and by including material from the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and by bringing together students from all of these fields, Sara’s course is fostering exactly the kind of interdisciplinary collaboration that Neuroethics needs. Second, Sara’s course is encouraging her students to grapple with important neuroethical and bioethical questions, including ethical issues related to the medical treatment of intersex individuals (see Dreger for a review) and ethical issues related to the use of intersex individuals as research subjects in scientific studies on sex/gender development. Read on to find out more about Sara’s course!
Cross-posted from the Neuroethics Blog.
Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending the NeuroCultures – NeuroGenderings II Conference at the University of Vienna. The conference brought together an international group of scholars to discuss brain research on sex and gender from a feminist perspective. The conference was a treat for me, as I was able to meet a number of leading scholars in the field, including some of the people I have mentioned in previous blogs. I presented a poster on the course, “Feminism, Sexuality, and Neuroethics,” which Cyd Cipolla and I co-taught last spring, and also presented a paper reviewing contemporary neuroscience research on transsexuality.
Although it is difficult to summarize two days’ worth of keynote speeches, panels, and poster presentations, I would say that two main themes emerged within the conference: the first was a critique of neurosexism both within scientific research on sex, gender, and brain and in how this research is communicated to the public through the media. The second was an attempt to explore whether it would be possible to conduct feminist neuroscience research on sex and gender and, if so, what such research would look like.
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