“Timely, authentic, and revolutionary.”
— J. DENNIS FORTENBERRY, DONALD ORR PROFESSOR OF ADOLESCENT MEDICINE, INDIANA UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE
Named One of NPR’s Best Books of 2020
Over five years, professors Jennifer Hirsch and Shamus Khan interviewed more than 150 Columbia and Barnard College undergrads about their sex lives. The research explored what students wanted out of sex, how troubling encounters unfolded and how layers of misunderstandings led to assault. This is the book to read to help lead conversations about sex. It reframes the dialogue and helps prepare young people for sexual relationships. Read it, share it. Empower the young folks in your life.
— Justine Kenin, editor, All Things Considered
A Groundbreaking Study
Sexual Citizens transforms how we understand and address sexual assault. Through intimate portraits of life and sex among today’s college students, Jennifer S. Hirsch and Shamus Khan spresent an entirely new way to understand sexual assault. Their insights transcending current debates about consent, predators in a “hunting ground,” or the dangers of hooking up.
Sexual Citizens reveals the social ecosystem that makes sexual assault a predictable element of life on a college campus. The powerful concepts of sexual projects, sexual citizenship, and sexual geographies, provide a new language for understanding the forces that shape young people’s sexual relationships. The result transforms our understanding of sexual assault and provides a new roadmap for how to address it.
Authors
Photo by Andres Oyuela
Jennifer S. Hirsch
Jennifer is a professor of socio-medical sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Her research spans five intertwined domains: the anthropology of love; gender, sexuality, and migration; sexual, reproductive, and HIV risk practices; social scientific research on sexual assault and undergraduate well-being, and the intersections between anthropology and public health. She is one of New York City’s 16 ‘Heroes in the Fight Against Gender-Based Violence.’ In 2012 she was selected as a Guggenheim Fellow. You can read more about her work here.
Shamus Khan
Shamus is a professor of Sociology and American Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of dozens of books and articles on inequality, American Culture, gender, and elites. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and many other media outlets. In 2018 he was awarded the Hans L. Zetterberg Prize for “the best sociologist under 40.” You can read more of his work at shamuskhan.com
Photo by Andres Oyuela
Our Story
We often joke that we’re an arranged marriage. When Jennifer first had the idea to do a study of sexual assault on Columbia’s Campus, she went looking for a partner to do the ethnographic research. Alondra Nelson said to her, “Shamus is perfect!” On the fateful afternoon of November 21, 2014, we sat down for coffee. And we’ve been in constant contact pretty much ever since.
Sexual Citizens emerged out of a much larger project: the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation, or SHIFT. Since the fall of 2014, we have been part of SHIFT’s research on campus sexual assault. Sexual Citizens primarily draws on the ethnographic component of the SHIFT research that Jennifer and Shamus led together. Our ethnographic research conducted between the late summer of 2015 and January of 2017 consisted of over 150 interviews (about two hours each) eliciting young people’s broad accounts of their lives and how sex fits into them. We combined these interviews with talking to students in groups, and having SHIFT research team members spend time with students in dorms, the bus to the athletic fields, fraternity basements, and spaces of worship.
SHIFT also included a large survey led by Claude A. Mellins of over 1,600 undergraduates’ histories, relationships, and experiences with sex and assault, and another that surveyed nearly 500 students daily for 60 days, asking them about stress, sleep, socializing, sex, sexual assault, and substance use in the prior twenty-four hours. Sexual Citizens builds on the work of others who have researched campus sexual assault using interviews and observations. But the design—deep ethnographic engagement, nested within the work of a large research team—has allowed us to contextualize and enrich our findings, yielding fresh insight
Jennifer and Shamus didn’t know one another before starting this project. Today we joke that because of all the time we’ve spent together researching and writing, we’ve become almost the same person. We cried a lot together, but we laughed more. That may seem macabre, given the topic, but being able to talk about anything and everything, showing up in the work and for each other with our full selves, made the research not just bearable, but maybe even better. For all our work on designing this research, all our attempts to adhere to the highest standards of rigor, and our drive to develop new theoretical and conceptual frameworks for other scholars to draw upon, it was this more humanistic dynamic that made our research what it was. A guiding feature of this book is empathy. Making that part of our research, we feel, made this project possible.
A NEW
PERSPECTIVE
01. SEXUAL PROJECTS
“What is sex for?” Most young people today can’t answer that question, in large part because few adults have talked to them about it. “Sexual Projects” are the answer to what sex is for (for example, for pleasure, to connect with another, to have children, etc.). These projects are formed by young people’s experiences, but also shaped by messages from family and community. Parents, organizations, and communities must talk openly about the kind of sexual projects they hope that young people will pursue.
02. Sexual Citizenship
People are “Sexual citizens” when they know they have the right to say “yes” and the right to say “no” to sex. They also must recognize that everyone else has the same rights. Sexual citizenship isn’t something we are born with. It is developed through education, and supported by communities.
03. Sexual Geographies
The spaces people move through are essential to understanding both sex, and sexual assault. Access to space, and control over who can and cannot enter that space is a critical way power works. And power is critical for understanding assault. Equality is a sexual assault prevention strategy.
Get A Copy
“A timely and sweeping reassessment of campus sexual assault. Hirsch and Khan bring rich data and trenchant insight to bear on one of today’s most urgent issues. This is an exemplary work."
— ALONDRA NELSON, PRESIDENT OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
“Excellent....Absolutely essential reading to prepare teens for what they’ll encounter in college on both the social and sexual fronts.”
— BOOKLIST
“Hirsch and Khan’s systematic public health approach to campus sexual assault not only urges empathic action but also outlines possible solutions to this communal problem."
— CLAIRE E. STERK, PRESIDENT AND CHARLES HOWARD CANDLER PROFESSOR OF PUBLIC HEALTH, EMORY UNIVERSITY
“Incisive....This detailed, practical inquiry should be mandatory reading for college administrators and parents of college-age children.”
— PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“This extraordinary book situates campus sexual assault in context. All of us with a responsibility for creating the campus spaces that can generate—or harm—health need to read this book.”
— SANDRO GALEA, DEAN AND ROBERT A. KNOX PROFESSOR, SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH, BOSTON UNIVERSITY
Changing the conversation
about assault on campus
jennifer hirsch | shamus khan
