Researchers

The following is a partial list of Australian researchers conducting sexuality-related research which may of interest to pleasure activists. If you are aware of other researchers not listed here, please send an email containing the relevant details to:

Please note that the inclusion of a given research project and/or researcher in the below list should in no way be taken as implying endorsement by that research project and/or researcher of the aims, activities, opinions and/or publications of Pleasure Activism Australia and/or its members and representatives.

Researchers

• Dr Gail Hawkes, SRN, PhD. Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of New England, Armidale, NSW 2351

  

  (02) 6773 2277

  Gail Hawkes came to UNE from Manchester, UK in 2001. She brought with her a research and teaching speciality new to UNE – the sociological study of sex and sexuality. She was a pioneer in this area in the UK, publishing one of the first teaching texts in sexuality in 1996, five years after her PhD in the area. A Sociology of Sexuality (UCL Press 1996) has been reprinted twice since then, has been translated into Korean and remains a key teaching text in the area. Her second single authored book, Sex and Pleasure in Western Culture (Polity 2004) developed many of the ideas explored in 8 years of teaching and researching in sexuality. This book explores for the first time the connections between sexual pleasure and social order across a wide span of Western history, from Antiquity to the sex saturated early 21st century. It has been described by a real pioneer in the history of sexuality, Jeffrey Weeks, as ‘a fascinating anatomy of the pleasures and dangers that have long swirled around the erotic’. In the past weeks her third book, coedited with Dr John Scott, a colleague in the School of Social Science was published by Oxford University Press. This text, Perspectives in Human Sexuality (OUP 2004) brings together for the first time cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural research by scholars in Australia and New Zealand, and has already been adopted as a course text by universities in both countries in 2005. Gail is the Coordinator of UNESEX, A multidisciplinary Faculty Research Group at UNE. She is currently researching the experience of rural members of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) in North West NSW, and is collaborating with a visiting colleague from the US on issues of consent and sexual agency in children.