Reading Review
Makia McFarland 11: 00 AM
The Privilege of Perversities:
Race, Class, and Education among Polyamorists and Kinksters
Reading Review # 3 This article focuses on “Kinksters”, people who engage in what some people may call “perverted” or “kinky” sex practices and relationships. The authors started their research by investigating people who celebrate the moniker “pervert” but noticed the lack thereof diversity in research samples and questioned: Is this lack because of added stigma of race, class and educational status? The method used to obtain the data for this article came from three sources: the authors own original research (study of intersecting sexual identities, ethnographic studies of Canadian lesbian/queer bathhouses and longitudinal study on polyamorists), others’ studies of “kinksters” and “polyamorists”; and communications with other researchers online. The authors main discussion is the basically the question of why people of color that live alternative sexual lifestyles are missing from research studies; is it omission or that they rather not participate? In conclusion, the authors understand that they must consider that there is probably nothing that anyone can do about the lack or maybe exclusion of diversity in sex research as a whole. The authors agreed that this issue is way more complex than omission or self-exclusion. A major strength of the article is the way that the data was obtained. Although both authors engaged in more centralized research on different aspects of sexuality; their research basically gave birth to this article. Using other researchers’ data as well as communicating with other researchers not only helped identify the underrepresentation of certain groups in all sorts of research as well helped to start defining some of the reasons why. A major weakness of the article is that the reader is given possibly too much information. The article jumps around from research methods, to data and to
The Privilege of Perversities:
Race, Class, and Education among Polyamorists and Kinksters
Reading Review # 3 This article focuses on “Kinksters”, people who engage in what some people may call “perverted” or “kinky” sex practices and relationships. The authors started their research by investigating people who celebrate the moniker “pervert” but noticed the lack thereof diversity in research samples and questioned: Is this lack because of added stigma of race, class and educational status? The method used to obtain the data for this article came from three sources: the authors own original research (study of intersecting sexual identities, ethnographic studies of Canadian lesbian/queer bathhouses and longitudinal study on polyamorists), others’ studies of “kinksters” and “polyamorists”; and communications with other researchers online. The authors main discussion is the basically the question of why people of color that live alternative sexual lifestyles are missing from research studies; is it omission or that they rather not participate? In conclusion, the authors understand that they must consider that there is probably nothing that anyone can do about the lack or maybe exclusion of diversity in sex research as a whole. The authors agreed that this issue is way more complex than omission or self-exclusion. A major strength of the article is the way that the data was obtained. Although both authors engaged in more centralized research on different aspects of sexuality; their research basically gave birth to this article. Using other researchers’ data as well as communicating with other researchers not only helped identify the underrepresentation of certain groups in all sorts of research as well helped to start defining some of the reasons why. A major weakness of the article is that the reader is given possibly too much information. The article jumps around from research methods, to data and to