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Abstract

Sex and sexuality are integral to social life. Sexuality intersects with major institutions such as family, law, religion, media, and education. Social norms regulate sexual behaviors, and categories of identity shaped by ideologies about sex and sexuality are deeply embedded in racial and imperial histories. Despite the pervasive nature of sex and sexuality in societies worldwide, the subfield of sex and sexuality remains marginalized within mainstream sociology. While progress has been made since Claude Bowman’s 1949 assertion that “a sociology of sex does not exist,” there is still much to be done in promoting the visibility and legitimacy of this field. The growing attention to the sociology of sex and sexuality is driven by both scholarly interest and significant social changes, which highlight the need for deeper understanding of social processes. Research has shed light on issues such as abortion restrictions and gender-neutral bathrooms, while also emphasizing the importance of pleasure and joy in sexual studies. This journal seeks to address the historical marginalization of sex and sexuality within sociology, envisioning a platform to explore its intersectionality and broader impact on communities. Through this journal, we aim to challenge existing frameworks and highlight innovative research in sex and sexualities.

Keywords

sex sexuality sociology gender reproduction LGBT

“The time has come to think about sex. To some, sexuality may seem to be an unimportant topic, a frivolous diversion from the more critical problems of poverty, war, disease, racism, famine, or nuclear annihilation. But it is precisely at times such as these, when we live with the possibility of unthinkable destruction, that people are likely to become dangerously crazy about sexuality . . . Consequently, sexuality should be treated with special respect in times of great social stress.” (Rubin 1984)

“Leave it to academics to ruin sex! Too often, sociologists either ignore actual sex or, when sex is actually present, they discuss it in a clinical way that equates it with disease, erases pleasure, and is boring. As a sexualities scholar and teacher, I have become increasingly frustrated with the absence of actual sex in sexualities research. Even in places where we would legitimately expect to see some discussion of actual sex, it is absent.” (Jones 2018)

Introduction

Sex and sexuality are a foundational part of social life. Like many of the topics studied in sociology, sexuality is not exclusive to private relationships between individuals. Instead, it plays a role in almost all social relationships, whether or not its presence is explicit. Sex is a practice that unfolds within a rich social, cultural, political, and historical context. In addition, it is enmeshed with major social institutions—families, the law, religion, the media, economy, and education—among countless other institutions, large and small. Social norms help structure and regulate sexual relationships (Dow et al. 2024; Fantasia 2011; Littlejohn and Weiss 2024), social categories shape and are shaped by ideologies about sex and sexuality (Schilt and Westbrook 2009), and our very own scholarly understandings of sex and sexuality are permanently embedded within racial and imperial histories (Patil 2022).

Given the omnipresence of sex and sexuality in societies around the world, it is perplexing that the subfield of sex and sexualities remains marginalized in mainstream sociology (Schnabel 2018). While much has changed since Claude Bowman argued in 1949 that “a sociology of sex does not exist,” we think it is fair to say that support for (and the visibility of) sex and sexualities could and should be much stronger in sociology (Bowman 1949). Thankfully, after a long history of neglect, there is growing attention to the sociology of sex and sexuality and growing acceptance of its legitimacy and importance writ large. This growth is motivated by intrinsic scholarly interest and dramatic social changes that underscore the need to understand the real-world impacts of the social processes unfolding in everyday life. From investigating the consequences of abortion restrictions and bans (Stevenson 2021) to explaining the hidden social forces operating in opposition to gender-neutral bathrooms (Westbrook and Schilt 2014), sociologists have used their research to shed light on issues taking center stage in the media and dramatically affecting people’s lives behind the scenes. Moreover, while researchers have focused on the problems associated with the social construction and regulation of sex and sexuality, they have also worked to center pleasure and joy (Jones 2018).

The impetus for the launch of this new journal came from the costs of marginalizing a crucial subfield and the lack of outlets for rich and rigorous research dedicated to its study. We begin by considering the history of marginalization and the uncredited importance of the sociological study of sex and sexuality in the discipline. Indeed, the marginalization of sex and sexualities coexists with the marginalization of other subfields and approaches in sociology, (namely disability, global and transnational sociology, and race, among others) and various critical approaches that challenge normative social science. Thus, after providing an overview of the history of the sociological study of sex and sexualities, we describe our vision for Sex & Sexualities as a place to consider how the study of sex and sexuality is profoundly intersectional and traverses all sociological subfields. We envision this journal as providing an opportunity to showcase research exploring the profound impact of sex and sexuality on communities, the innovative thinking happening around sex and sexuality in academia, and the work taking place to challenge sociologists to grapple with the legacy of our toolkits for the knowledge that we create not only about sexuality but also about the social world.

Historical Context of the Study of Sexualities

Knowledge about sex and sexuality has a history of being devalued and unrewarded within sociological work or generally within “erotophobic” academia (De Craene 2024). In U.S. society, persistent ideologies about sex include sexual essentialism, sex negativity, lack of a concept of benign sexual variation, and the appraisal of sexual behaviors according to a hierarchy of sexual value (Rubin 1984). These ideologies bleed into the study of sex and sexuality as well.

Yet, the study of sex and sexuality played an uncredited role in the development of essential theories about society in the history of U.S. sociology, and the sociological approach to studying sex provided the groundwork for queer theory and sexuality studies (Love 2021; Seidman 1994). Sociological research has systematically challenged biological and medical discourses about sex and sexualities to demonstrate both the profoundly social nature of sex itself and the ways that society produces sexuality (Irvine 2003). In this section, we consider the interesting tension between the marginalization of sexualities research within sociology on the one hand and the importance of its insights for the advancement of the discipline on the other.

Modern Understandings of Social Aspects of Sexuality

Frequently, narratives about the start of the sociology of sexualities focus on nineteenth-century European sexologists, such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Iwan Bloch, who coined the term Sexualwissenchaft, or sexology, to describe the sexual life of people (Irvine 2014). Michel Foucault (1990) argued that the formation of scientia sexualis in the late nineteenth century helped shape modern Western subjectivities through a shift from religion to science. Vrushali Patil (2022:92) argues that these canonical sexologies in Europe and the United States are “transnational texts that incorporate long histories of distinct but connected racialized–colonial knowledges.” European sexologists played a vital role in the spread of ideas about sexuality, but modern ideas about the social aspects of sexuality were proliferating globally, not just in Europe (Bauer 2015; Fuechtner, Haynes, and Jones 2018; Patil 2022). This study of sex popularized by European sexologists relied on the transnational exchange of ideas (Bauer 2015). Between the 1880s and 1930s, there were growing similarities between how sex was understood in countries worldwide (Bauer 2015). Yet, the ideas of European sexologists were translated in complex ways globally (H. Chiang 2010; H. H. Chiang 2010).

Early sexology emerged from broader patriarchal and racial–imperial power dynamics (Patil 2022; Somerville 1994). These works relied heavily on sexual essentialism and notions of biological sexual impulses, stigmatizing asexuality and other nonconforming sexualities. Sexology, with its attention to the categorization of heterosexual and homosexual subjectivities, emerged simultaneously with classification based in scientific racism and its obsession with racial differences (Somerville 1994). Thus, sexology reproduced existing racial–imperial structures and sexual essentialism, although canonical sexologists deliberately tried to frame their theories as independent of imperial and racial structures (Patil 2022). Sexology shored up settler colonialism and the reinforcement of monogamous, committed, heteronormative “settler sex” as normative (Glenn 2015; Sykes 2014; TallBear, Clarke, and Haraway 2018). It also supported broader movements happening at the time like the eugenics movement, which deployed narratives of moral, physical, and psychological “fitness” to stigmatize gender and sexual nonconformity (Cartwright 2022).

Psychiatric sexological theories were a radical shift from understanding sexual nonconformity as more social than sinful or criminal, contributing to more sociological approaches to studying sexuality. European sexologists like Sigmund Freud postulated about social and interpersonal events that impacted individual sexual development and behavior. These sexologists were best known for transforming nonconforming sexual behaviors like sodomy and sadism into subjectivities and ways of being, turning the proverbial sodomite into a homosexual (Foucault 1990; Oosterhuis 2000). These ideas impacted the start of sociological thinking about significant social changes, society, and urban life. Contemporary understandings of sex include investigation into the influence of the social on sexuality alongside framing sexuality as part of a person’s subjectivity.

The Study of Sexuality and Its Influence in Early U.S. Sociology

Both the Atlanta and Chicago School of Sociology cultivated sociological knowledge about sex, sexuality, reproduction, and the family. Scholars of the Atlanta School of Sociology and affiliated scholars working in the Black intellectual tradition conducted innovative work on the impact of enslavement histories on the reproduction and sexuality of Black Americans at the turn of the century (Grossman 1974). The Atlanta School of Sociology had its first origins in the development of the yearly Atlanta Conference in the late 1800s to study the transitions of formerly enslaved people into post-Reconstruction era urban life. This research was led by W.E.B. Du Bois when he began work at Atlanta University in 1897. Even now, Du Bois receives less attention for his complex theories about Black masculinity, sexuality, marriage, and heterosexuality, including scientific manhood (Barnes 2025; Lindquist 2012; Weinbaum 2001). Du Bois critiqued white sexual degeneracy and praised Black supermen (Allen 2021; Lindquist 2012). Du Bois’s theory of supermanhood was “expressed through its refusal to embrace and assimilate civilizing discourses that manipulated and controlled through sexuality, racism, capitalism, and imperialism” (Lindquist 2012:78). In addition, sociologist Anna Julia Cooper and scholar-activist Ida B. Wells analyzed the myth of rape as a weapon of racism in lynching justifications and the dynamics of interracial sexual relations (Furseth 2024; May 2009). Anna Julia Cooper engaged in embryonic theories of intersectionality and Black feminist theory (Guy-Sheftall 2009), which influenced Du Bois’ work.

The study of sex and sexuality was also a part of the formation of the Chicago School of Sociology in the early twentieth century. In the 1910s, University of Chicago sociology faculty were involved in research about prostitution and sex trafficking in the city, and this work played a formative role in the ethnographic approach used in the Chicago School (Heap 2003). In 1928, Chicago School scholar Ernest Burgess wrote that

Life all around us affords a great laboratory for research. Every conceivable experiment in the field of sex life and family relationships is now taking place and is available for observation and comparison. This behavior should be studied carefully and understandingly. (Burgess 1928:415)

Burgess trained scholars like E. Franklin Frazier. Franklin’s book The Negro Family in the United States chronicled the historical influences on Black family life (Curwood 2008). However, historian Chad Heap (2003) described most of this early ethnographic work on sexuality as “almost completely forgotten” in the histories of the Chicago School work, as these ethnographies remain unpublished. This omission is consistent with the historical exclusion of both Black scholarly contributions and scholarship dealing with sexualities writ large.

Despite the marginalization of sexuality research in early U.S. sociology, “sociology has an impressive history of denaturalizing sex and theorizing its social origins” (Irvine 2003:430). Theories about sexuality played an essential role in major theories about assimilation, deviance, and social disorganization popularized by the Chicago School. Chicago scholars like Robert E. Park used interracial intimacy as a measure of cultural assimilation while simultaneously stating that miscegenation symbolized the violation of U.S. racialized heteronormativity (Ferguson 2004). Heterosexual reproduction was also at the center of theories of social disorganization, a theory which in turn “worked to reinforce heteropatriarchal ideals” (Ferguson 2004:35). Early sociological research on deviance and social order not only targeted homosexuality but also what Cathy Cohen (2005) described as “heterosexuals on the (out)side of heteronormativity” and a broad understanding of sexual “degeneracy.” Sociologist Alexander Liazos (1972:103) famously complained that the sociology of deviance from its origins was too interested in specific forms of lower-class deviance, specifically “nuts, sluts, and perverts.” These theories of deviance also stressed the importance of deep ethnographic research and immersion in the social worlds of deviant ethnographic subjects (Irvine 2022) and the social construction of normality. The study of deviance and social constructionism within sociology provided an oft-overlooked foundation for the development of queer theory (Love 2021). Social theories in the symbolic interactionist tradition about symbols, stigma, and deviance challenged biological understandings of sex and yielded “sociological insights not only on how social factors shape sexuality, but perhaps more importantly, allowed some social scientists to argue that the social produces sexuality” (Irvine 2003:432).

These theories germinated within the messy context of early social science, theorizing a context rife with contradictions. Prewar anthropologist St. Clair Drake, for example, described the social sciences as simultaneously a “handmaiden” to colonialism and a liberatory social theory used for postcolonial revolution (Lindquist 2012). A look at the work at the time highlights this. Early sociological research reinforced New Deal policies and social reformers in the 1930s and 1940s attempting to establish heteropatriarchal family structures in minoritized racial and ethnic communities, enforce eugenics, and limit the reproduction of minoritized and disabled women (Ferguson 2004; Luna and Luker 2013; Mink 2018). At the same time, however, research methodologies developed during this time (like “life history” papers expanded the techniques for studying sexuality and explored the complex relationship between pleasure, sexuality, morality, and respectability in the early twentieth century (Simmons 2012). Although early sociology frequently reflected and reproduced scientific racism, it also created a “critical rupture to the cultural authority of [it], producing new forms of social knowledge” (Irvine 2022:xxvii).

Studying Sexuality as Dirty Work?

Despite the importance of sexuality for the development of U.S. sociology, sexuality researchers have long struggled to attain legitimacy for their work. The study of sex, like sex itself in Western societies (Rubin 1984), was treated with suspicion from the earliest writings of European sexologists. The suspicion of sex research often intersected with other forms of oppression. Many late nineteenth-century sexologists were German Jews and, with the rise of Nazism, were persecuted during the lead-up to World War II (Haeberle 1981), including the burning of books at sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin. Hirschfeld’s religion, homosexuality, and commitment to sexual liberation all played a role in this persecution (Dose 2014). In addition, early U.S. sexologists at times faced limitations on their funding, support, and publications because of unfavorable characterizations of sex research at the time. For example, William Masters, of the infamous Masters and Johnson, could not get his work published in medical journals because it was considered pornographic (Irvine 2014).

In 2014, Janice Irvine argued that in U.S. sociology, research on sex and sexualities is a form of “dirty work” as the work is deemed both socially necessary and stigmatized. This paradoxical situation includes public yearning and panic around knowledge about human sexuality that operates alongside disdain for the dirty work of collecting and writing about that data (Irvine 2014). The stigma associated with sexualities research as “dirty work” has contributed to a historical devaluation of the study of sex and sexuality even as sociologists have long urged the discipline to change. In 1994, Arlene Stein and Ken Plummer called for a missing “sexual revolution” in sociology. They noted that studies of LGBTQ life were secluded within research on “deviance, gender, and sexuality” and have “barely made their mark on the discipline as a whole” (Stein and Plummer 1994:178). Heteronormativity is a key part of the constitution of sexuality research as dirty work, as research on nonheteronormative sex can be more strictly regulated and stigmatized globally (Brown 2024; Cui 2023). Indeed, being a “sexademic” has historically come with barriers and consequences (Keene 2022).

The marginalization of sexualities research is exacerbated by the inequity that shapes the work that is funded and promoted—work that disproportionately focuses on United States and white sexual subjectivities. Sociological research on LGBTQ people historically has disproportionately focused on white city-dwellers living in the North and West Coast of the United States, particularly in the “great cities” (Stone 2018). Racialized sexualities and racial empires more broadly are undertheorized (Patil 2022; Vidal-Ortiz 2023). Instead, “the global north is still the unnamed center and universal, while sites outside are the particular” (Patil 2022:2). The global north continues to influence the work produced worldwide through financial funding, attribution of status, and regulation of publication processes (Msibi 2014).

The understanding of sex and sexuality scholarship as dirty work contributes to the subfield’s de-emphasis on sexual pleasure. Sexuality research in the broader social sciences often erases sexual pleasure, reproduces heteronormativity, and erases marginalized social identities (Hargons et al. 2021; Jones 2019; Wodda and Panfil 2018). In 2020, for example, research on Black women’s sexualities rarely used sex-positive or intersectional frameworks (Hargons et al. 2021). The science of sex in the contemporary United States also ignores the role of sexual pleasure in motivating sexual behavior. This is consistent with early reproductive health literature that used narrow definitions of sexual behavior and focused on risk or disease. This approach ignores the “sexuality connection” and creates a “pleasure deficit” in which researchers limit our understandings of pleasure as a motivation for sex (Dixon-Mueller 1993; Higgins and Hirsch 2007). The lack of focus on pleasure in sexualities research and sociology more generally (Jones 2019; Regan 2024) is also reflected in major social surveys in the United States, which rarely include questions about sexual desires (Westbrook, Budnick, and Saperstein 2022).

Despite the limitations of the discipline in the past, there have been dramatic changes in the nature of sexualities research in sociology within the last decade that raise questions about whether the study of sexuality is still dirty work. In a symposium on Levine’s article on sexualities as dirty work in the Sociology of Sexualities newsletter in Spring 2022, scholars noted both ongoing issues and progress. Several scholars in this symposium noted enduring pressures for respectability in their scholarship and the personal and professional risk involved in doing their work. Several scholars described experiencing pressures not to foreground sexuality research as graduate students and being given little education on navigating sexuality in graduate methodological training. According to Brandon Robinson (2022:14), “researchers often treat erotic and sexualized moments in fieldwork as non-existent or as inappropriate,” which leads to a lack of resources for students to navigate the “sexual terrain of research.” Sociologists of sexuality are also impacted by the surge in state legislative attention to what’s taught on college campuses, which reflects broader understandings of sexuality research as dirty work. In the Spring 2022 newsletter, for example, Katie Acosta wrote about a request from the Georgia Board of Regents about her work in social justice and anti-racism advocacy. Acosta (2022:7) noted that “This latest request is just one of the many attacks I’ve experienced this year to my academic freedom, research agenda, and personal sense of security as a queer Black university professor whose research centers on race and sexuality.”

Yet, several sociologists in this 2022 symposium on Levine’s research also described the joy and pleasure of their work, along with the growing strength of sexualities scholars and scholarship within the discipline. Alan Santinele Martino (2022:12) described being “re-energized” by the stories about sexuality told by his interviewees with intellectual disabilities due to the “transformative potential of sexual stories,” including the ways these stories transformed his sexuality. Angela Jones (2022:2) reassured graduate students that the dismissal of sexualities research as “me-search” is “used to denigrate the voices of marginalized scholars” and work on marginalized people “are not fringe work but rather valuable knowledge production that can help foster transformative social change in the academy and the world.” Shantel Buggs (2022:16) noted that the increase in queer scholars getting tenure and sexualities scholars in leadership roles “has given sexualities as a subfield a stronger position in sociology.” According to Buggs, the next step is “not just to prioritize gaining further access to the ‘table’ but to completely change the structure of the table. I believe sexualities researchers can lead the way.” As we discuss later, we see the launch of this journal as one way that we can contribute to these ongoing efforts to reshape the structures that undergird our work.

Our Vision for This Journal

We are delighted to serve as the inaugural co-editors of Sex & Sexualities—positions only made possible by the long-suffering efforts of numerous scholars that laid the groundwork for its launch. This work took place both within the Sexualities section and in the American Sociological Association at large as scholars advocated for sexualities research to take up the space it deserved in the discipline. While this journal was officially launched on January 1, 2025, discussions about a potential sexualities journal started in 2009 when it was raised at the section’s Council meeting. In August 2010, John Delamater and Elroi Windsor volunteered to investigate starting a section-sponsored journal to answer questions about the feasibility, value of being an ASA journal, and expected number of submissions. There was much progress on gaining momentum for sexualities research over the next few years. In 2011, a plenary session at the annual ASA meeting was dedicated to the theme of sexualities for the first time. In 2015, ASA president Paula England selected “Sexualities in the Social World” as the theme for the entire meeting. The theme centered on the ways that “sex usually occurs in private and is seen as deeply personal, yet it is also profoundly social,” underscoring the “importance of sexuality in people’s lives and its relevance to many areas of sociology.”

In the years since the first discussion of a new journal in 2009, the section has had several panels, conversations, and internal dialogues about ways to improve its practices and support critical scholarship. We do not have sufficient space to detail all the work that went into making this journal possible, but we know that the 2018 pre-conference and ASA sessions that year provoked critical conversations about race, equity, and leadership in the section, leading to a restructuring of the section’s processes around leadership, mentorship, membership, and awards. These conversations reflected ongoing criticisms that the sociology of sexualities has not adequately incorporated the co-constitution of race and sexuality and the embeddedness of U.S. sexuality research in ongoing dynamics of imperialism and settler colonialism (Patil 2022; Vidal-Ortiz 2023). Confronting these shortcomings and envisioning a better way forward was a central part of the memo “Proposal for a New Section Journal,” created by section Chair Angela Jones and the Sexualities Journal Task Force Committee throughout the fall of 2021. In June 2022, the Sexualities Journal Task Force Committee voted to pursue SAGE and ASA’s proposal for a new sexualities journal. Section Chair Theo Greene emailed the section listserv in July 2022, the week after Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court to announce the acceptance of the section’s proposal for this journal. Greene wrote that “we envision a journal that is not afraid of cutting-edge work, that values queer methods, and rejects the quantification of qualitative research.” We build on the groundbreaking work of those who made this journal possible to advance a critical sociology of sex and sexualities forward into the future. Our vision for accomplishing this is driven by several interconnected goals.

As editors, we will support a sociological approach to studying sex and sexualities with the understanding that the importance of sociology extends beyond academia. While doing “public sociology” is not the taboo it once was and has arguably become a buzzword, scholars still find it challenging to publish work considered appealing to a general audience. They often extract the nuggets of information relevant to general audiences from their published academic work and translate that information for a public audience via media interviews, blog posts, op-eds, and other work published in nonsociological venues. This process places a heavy burden on scholars committed to public sociology, because they must find additional time to dedicate to these efforts while recognizing that their work may not “count” as a measure of capital valued by their departments and universities. Our goal with Sex & Sexualities is to publish high-quality, cutting-edge work that allows researchers to incorporate insights relevant to general audiences and honors the importance of research on applied topics that have difficulty finding sociological outlets. Therefore, we will support sociological work on sex and sexualities that connects with general audiences and contributes to broader social, cultural, political, economic, and other discourses.

Another central goal is creating a home for empirical and theoretical approaches that challenge normative sociology through theoretical lenses used and advanced, the geographic focus of the research, and other approaches. Sexualities research is often marginalized not only by its focus on areas of life typically considered private, taboo, and stigmatized but also because the approaches that scholars often use are not necessarily valued or understood by the broader discipline and our many gatekeepers. Our goal is to provide a venue that prizes decolonial, transnational, intersectional, and critical sociological research. We hope that this work challenges us all to reveal our assumptions and work toward a more epistemologically just social science. In doing so, we hope to contribute to models of sociological research that grapple with power, inequity, and injustice while underscoring that just research and empirically sound, theoretically sophisticated, and high-impact academic research are entirely compatible.

Lastly, we also strive to provide a venue to showcase the value of sexualities research for answering core sociological questions about the social world. What distinguishes our approach from other fields that focus on sex and sexuality (like public health and psychology) is not only a departure from the risk framework that often characterizes health approaches but also the centrality of the sociological imagination in motivating readers to transcend the individual to understand how broader social and historical forces shape the social processes unfolding in the lives of the participants documented by the research featured in the pages of the journal. Before the creation of the journal, sexualities researchers often had to couch their research using broader frames that spoke to topics considered more centrally sociological—examining sex and sexualities as a lens to understand medical sociology, gender, labor, families, religion, etc. This is the case, even as research on sex and sexualities with a core focus on theorizing sex and sexualities itself can help us understand social organization writ large, that is, sex and sexualities is not just a site to learn about other sociological subfields. Sex and sexualities is a subfield where researchers who study other aspects of the social world can learn about how the core processes they are interested in work in areas that are often hidden and overlooked, although extremely important. In highlighting the value of sex and sexualities research for the broader field, the journal seeks to not only remove the stigma from studying topics in this area but also to honor the work being done that often has trouble getting published elsewhere.

Our Vision for the Culture of Publishing

Peer review is vital to scientific integrity but often fraught, confusing, and disheartening. Our vision for Sex & Sexualities is to interrupt the traditional academic publishing model to center an ethic of care in all journal practices. We will strive to create a culture that attends to the humanity of scholars first and foremost. We will be transparent about how we review manuscripts and determine which ones proceed to publishing and why. We will ensure that peer reviews are constructive and gracious. In addition, we will provide timely reviews so that scholars who rely on publications for tenure, promotion, and their livelihoods can expect an expedient response. In sum, our vision for Sex & Sexualities is that of a journal cultivating new norms of academic publication. We are both excited and equipped to establish a journal that is topically unique, procedurally innovative, and culturally committed to advancing the study of sex and sexuality.

Our vision for the journal is grounded in core and overlapping values that we explicitly discussed as the foundation of our working relationship as editors. Though values are less often a part of conversations about scholarly endeavors, our beliefs, priorities, and things we hold dear always influence how we do our work and how we expect others to do theirs. As such, we worked together to clarify the values we bring to our work and lives and think about how those values could and would shape the work we do for the journal. In the spirit of transparency, some of the values we bring to the table that will shape the way we manage the journal are excellence, equity, care and compassion, teamwork, learning and commitment to growth, innovation and curiosity, efficiency, mentoring, and well-being. These values shaped how we approached every aspect of launching the journal— deciding to have invited issues, onboarding our editorial team, working together as editors, and working with the authors of manuscripts. It will also influence how we handle all aspects of peer review and publishing not only ensuring that the journal adheres to the standards that we set for ourselves but also that we move forward with a clear sense of direction that will help us achieve our vision of having a publishing process that is nourishing and helpful, even if disappointing when outcomes are not in line with authors’ hopes.

While some might find the discussion of values and things like “care” or “compassion” incompatible with a rigorous peer-review process, we disagree. Moreover, we want to make our disagreement explicit to contribute to disrupting a peer-review process that so often robs scholars of the joys of improving and sharing their work on a false altar of “academic necessity” rooted in mean-spiritedness, not a commitment to scientific advancement. Our commitment to care and compassion in the peer-review process means, for example, that we have designed templates for reviewers to use. These streamline the way that they provide comments to reduce how unnecessarily onerous the task is for them and make it easier for authors to understand what they need to do to improve their work. It means that we are cognizant of the importance of flagging and redacting reviews that include inappropriate commentary and highlighting such comments for the reviewers themselves. It also means that we have intentionally designed our production process from the ground up, providing our team members with explicit guidance on the requirements of their roles and mentorship as they carry out their duties as editors. This might include our meetings with deputy editors as they carry out their first set of reviews, our onboarding process with step-by-step guidance and all the information needed to get started, and meaningful opportunities to contribute to building the journal from its inception as we developed the proposal.

In sum, we are excited to lead this journal together during our tenure as editors. As this editorial makes clear, however, we recognize the work that we do as part of a longer trajectory that we build on now and that others will continue to build on after us. Our work—like our lives—is grounded in community. We believe that we can and must do this together and look forward to advancing innovative sociological work on sex and sexualities with all of you.

Footnotes

ORCID iDs

Krystale E. Littlejohn

Amy L. Stone

Statements and Declarations

References

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Allen

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Nurturing a Sociology of Sex and Sexualities

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Historical Context of the Study of Sexualities

Modern Understandings of Social Aspects of Sexuality

The Study of Sexuality and Its Influence in Early U.S. Sociology

Studying Sexuality as Dirty Work?

Our Vision for This Journal

Our Vision for the Culture of Publishing

Footnotes

ORCID iDs

Statements and Declarations

References