Communicative Sexualities: A Communicology of Sexual Experience - Hardcover

Martinez, Jacqueline M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0739125354 ISBN 13: 9780739125359

Publisher: Lexington Books, 2011

Synopsis

Communicative Sexualities: Queer and Feminist Theories in Practice, by Jacqueline M. Martinez, provides an argument for and illustration of how to pursue the direct study of students' lived-experiences of sexuality in a classroom or academic setting. It illustrates how communicology, and its methodological practice of semiotic phenomenology, allows for a sustained and rigorous study of the meaningfulness of sexual experience as it becomes manifest in the immediate, concrete, and embodied realities in the lives of those taking up such a study. The generous use of extended examples from actual classroom experience allows for a detailed consideration of the applied research methodology, as well as the ethical issues involved in making students' lived-experience of sexuality the main subject matter of the course. A major concern of Communicative Sexualities is to make explicit the many presuppositions about sex, gender, and sexuality that students and professors bring into the classroom. Martinez's text features detailed discussions of how to study lived-experience sexuality as the subject matter of research. It considers the steps necessary in suspending presuppositions regarding sexuality and gender, and focuses particular attention on the many presuppositions associated with the heterosexual-homosexual binary. Sexuality is understood as inherently good, yet also capable of becoming a means of perpetuating human isolation and degradation as much as an experience of tremendously shared human intimacy and mutual recognition. Discussions of historical context, the fact of temporality, and the intersection of person and culture provide a basis for explicit discussions of semiotics and phenomenology in communicology. As an introductory text, Communicative Sexualities: Queer and Feminist Theories in Practice, by Jacqueline M. Martinez, is an excellent primer for the advanced study of communicology and semiotic phenomenology. It one of very few texts that provides both a theoretical or philosophical discussion of phenomenology with the study of sexuality and gender as an explicit subject matter.

About this title

About the Author:

Jacqueline M. Martinez is associate professor of communicology at Arizona State University, Phoenix.

Review:

Theoretically sophisticated and grounded in the lived realities of sexual experience, Communicative Sexualities provides readers with important tools to examine and understand their own embodied sexualities within larger social, cultural, and political contexts. The volume is a significant contribution to the study of sexualities in the communication discipline. (Gust A. Yep, San Francisco State University)

It is rare to come across a genuinely daring book. Communicative Sexualities is just that. Martinez, one of the most creative theorists of communication, addresses problems across the communicative life of sexuality, its practices and orientation of the sexual self, with breathtaking honesty, insight, and care. Her treatment, intrepid and erudite, makes bare what many of us paradoxically see yet fail to see. Born out of pedagogical communication, this book is a major contribution to communicology, phenomenology, queer theory, and the continued quest for human understanding―a must read for anyone interested in these areas of study. (Lewis R. Gordon, Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies, University of Connecticut)

It is exciting to see this valuable new textbook on sexuality and communication from Jacqueline Martinez. The central role of communication in the interrelationships of the personal and cultural is highlighted throughout and the concluding chapter guides the reader to a deeper recognition of the individual, interpersonal, and societal implications of ethical communication of and in sexual experience vs. the violence of communication that is unethical. It is a message we should not ignore. (Karen E. Lovaas, San Francisco State University)

About this edition

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0739125354
• ISBN 13: 9780739125359
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 164