Our work on sexuality, as researchers, educators, therapists, and advocates, has everything to do with race, ethnicity, gender, class, ability, age, spirituality, and nationality. If NSRC's most recent summer institute, Race, Gender, and Sexuality, wasn't evidence enough, the continued inequalities in sexual and reproductive health should be. See, for example, Michelle Chen's recent post on RaceWire: http://www.racewire.org/archives/2009/07/culture_wars_killing_reproduct.html
For those who are hip to black feminism, womanism, third world feminism, and/or other strands of feminism that emerged to challenge the exclusive, narrow focus of white, middle-class, heterosexual feminists of the West, I am not suggesting anything new. Audre Lorde and other feminist scholars have argued that all forms of oppression intersect, and thus efforts to eradicate one form of oppression must seek to eradicate them all. Sexuality, certainly, is included in this; homophobia, heterosexism, sexual violence, human trafficking, and sexual inequality generally all intersect with racism, xenophobia, nationalism, sexism, transphobia, ableism, ageism, religious intolerance, and classism.
Throughout the year I served as the chair of the Campus Coalition for Sexual Literacy at Indiana University, my understanding of sexual literacy evolved. I admit, from the start, I had a shaky idea of what sexual literacy is - often having to refer to a scripted definition when asked to explain. Toward the end of my term, I began to think more politically about the concept. Thinking about literacy as knowledge and access, and seeing knowledge as a form of power, I have come to think of sexual literacy as a form of empowerment. And, alternatively, I have come to think about sexual illiteracy as a form of disempowerment. We have plenty of research that highlights the way that sexual illiteracy is not randomly distributed; sexual illiteracy is clearly distributed along gender, race, ethnicity, class, nationality, spirituality, ability, and age lines. Sexual illiteracy, as a form of disempowerment, intersects with these other forms of oppression and disempowerment.
It's a bit exciting to think about the political implications our work has, particularly with respect to empowerment of forms other than sexual. But, this is no given. We, as researchers, educators, advocates, and therapists, must continue to be sure that we consider these other axes of domination in our work. We cannot realize genuine sexual equality without simultaneously working for other forms of equality.
