Irvine, Janice M., Professor

By Katherine Harrison on 23 Apr | 0 comments

Janice M. Irvine is Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts. She is currently a Fulbright Scholar in the Department of Sociology at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. Her most recent books are Talk About Sex: The Battles over Sex Education in the United States (2002) and Disorders of Desire: Sexuality and Gender in Modern American Sexology (2005, revised edition). She recently completed a three-year term as Director of the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center.

GEXCEL PROJECT
Sex Education, Sexology, and the Culture of Sexual Shame

This project examines the changing dynamics of sexual shame in the U.S. by exploring the paradoxes of sexology and sex education. If sexologists enjoy what Foucault called “the speaker’s benefit”—advantages that accrue to those representing themselves as liberating sex from repression through speaking about it—then they have also suffered from the speaker’s burden, that is, the enormous stigmatization that attaches to those with any visible connection to sex. This project explores the role that sex educators and researchers played in challenging this speaker’s burden and thereby shifting the dynamics of sexual shame in the U.S. over the decades since 1960.