In my first job after graduate school as a visiting professor, I did not advise students officially, but happily mentored many of them. Because I was both out as a queer person—genderqueer lesbian at the time—and open about my own struggles as a first-generation college student, students often shared with me their own identities, questions, challenges, and longings. One day over lunch at a language-immersion table, a student told me that she was having a really hard time. She had long known that she was queer and recently had experienced her first relationship with a woman. Their time together was short-lived—the partner had graduated early and moved away—and the student didn’t feel like it was a serious relationship. She judged herself for the intensity of her feelings about it and its end. I listened, thanked her for sharing with me, and reminded her that relationships don’t need to be serious to be important.
I share this story to highlight the importance of supporting students’ discernment and pursuit of their callings in a way that is inclusive of the most capacious understandings of their sexualities. Established understandings of sexuality are often limited by the idea that sexuality is synonymous with sexual orientation, which many commonly understand as indicating the gender(s) of the people to whom we are attracted to in relation to our own gender (e.g., bisexual, heterosexual, homosexual, pansexual, or asexual). But sexuality is far more complex than gender dynamics alone.
As mentors and teachers, we ought to remember that this complexity bears on how our students seek, build, sustain, and terminate meaningful relationships—or not—both in the short- and long-term. Relationships of all types can impact our students, from their post-graduation plans to their desire to study away, or from their well-being during final exams to their day-to-day living situations. When we give students opportunities to explore their vocational trajectories, we should ask them to consider the roles that their chosen relationships—sexual, romantic, and platonic—play in the cultivation of lives of authenticity and purpose.
Sexual configurations theory (SCT) is one emergent framework that can help us and our students deepen our understanding of sexuality while also encouraging habits of reflection. Developed by social neuroendocrinologist Sari van Anders, SCT decenters sex and gender—two categories that can’t always be easily separated culturally or biologically—and recognizes a variety of factors that influence the kinds of people and experiences we are sexually interested in. SCT also considers that one’s orientation may or may not coincide with one’s current relationship status, and that our sexual identities might not capture the breadth of the attractions we experience. Moreover, SCT recognizes that our sexualities—both solitary and partnered—are dynamic and can change throughout our lives.
Sexual configurations theory prioritizes our individual lived experiences while asking us to think deeply about who we are—and who we want to be—in relation to others. For this reason, SCT attends not only to eroticism but also to nurturance as an aspect—sometimes distinct, sometimes overlapping—of sexual expression. Although there is scant research on the prevalence of asexuality on college campuses, The Trevor Project found in 2020 that 10% of LGBTQ youth surveyed identified as asexual (ace) or ace spectrum, which means that they feel little to no sexual attraction, unlike allosexual people who regularly experience sexual attraction. Asexuality is an intrinsic orientation and thus differs from the choice to be celibate. While some asexual individuals are also aromantic (aro), other aces do experience romantic attractions to people of one or more genders. These orientations can be designated by terms such as asexual hetero-romantic, which signals the possibility of romantic but not sexual attraction to a person of a different gender or sex. It’s worth noting that an asexual person might choose to be sexually active for a variety of reasons, including reproduction or intimacy.
Aligned with its foundations in feminism and queer theory, sexual configurations theory endeavors to center diverse lived realities instead of dominant cultural norms. It draws on theories of intersectionality first articulated by Kimberlé Crenshaw that recognize that our various identities function together within intersecting systems of privilege and oppression and coalesce in our lives in unique ways. By extension, SCT emphasizes the interplay of identities, values, and sexuality to demonstrate how an individual’s sexual configurations are informed by factors including race, ethnicity, age, class, disability, and religion. Accordingly, SCT helps us see that a person’s attraction to others could be influenced more strongly by, for example, a shared experience of racial marginalization than by gender, sex difference, or sex sameness. SCT invites us to consider what matters to us most, alongside or independent of gender and sex—whether this be religious affiliation, partner number, affinity for a given fantasy, or a particular cultural or political position.
Those interested in learning more about sexual configurations theory can access original publications and additional materials about it through the van Anders lab website. The zine Mapping Your Sexuality: From Sexual Orientation to Sexual Configurations Theory, which I have included in select courses I teach, is especially useful. I also keep print copies in my office and offer them to students who bring up related topics during meetings with me. Engagement with SCT allows students to think intentionally about their self and their relationships. And the zine is a wonderful tool to facilitate this engagement through its mapping exercises, versatile diagrams, and reflection prompts.
In my work with students, I have found that this approach to sexuality generates meaningful opportunities for reflection in ways that reinforce efforts to explore vocation more broadly. Mapping Your Sexuality inspires direct interaction with SCT through dynamic visual representations that encourage readers to contemplate their sexualities from multiple perspectives and through time. The zine depicts an individual’s sexual configurations as an island whose topography ranges from fields (erotic zones) to forests (nurturing zones) and comprises spaces that overlap. The island is surrounded by an “intersectionality sea” to remind us that we cannot isolate sexuality from other parts of our identities, nor from the contexts in which we live. Each area of the island allows for mapping of key elements of sexuality onto other diagrams, which gives readers the chance to reflect on the level of importance, specificity, and range for any given element of attraction, as well as space to identify attractions that resist, transcend, or challenge cultural norms. These activities invite us to create our own islands and terrains that capture our lived experiences, desires, and values. We can then explore them collectively and by region through questions like these, which have been adapted from the zine:
| ● How strong is this aspect of your sexuality? For example, do you want a specific number of partners or are you open to a range of options? ● How specific is this aspect of your sexuality? For example, are you open to partners of many faiths or are you only interested in partners who share your religious or spiritual beliefs? ● Within this element of your sexuality, are your responses the same or different for eroticism and nurturance? ● For this aspect of your sexuality, does your current relationship status coincide with your orientation? ● How does this aspect of your sexuality connect with other aspects of your identity? How does it intersect with your gender, sex, race, ethnicity, age, class, ability status, or religion? ● Does this facet of your sexuality mean that you’re considered to be within the norms in your culture or outside of them? How does this affect you and your partner(s)? |
It is my hope that this short introduction to sexual configurations theory has shown its usefulness as one tool we can all carry with us on our journeys, both to expand our own knowledge and to share with our students. Because college campuses are often sites of increased pressures to date or engage in sexual activity, giving students occasion to reflect on the specificity, intensity, and (in)consistency of their affections toward others can play an important role in supporting them as they explore—and develop language to articulate—their sexualities. In turn, this self-knowledge becomes part of the framework through which they learn to discern—and live more fully into—their callings.
Kiki Kosnick is associate professor of French, Francophone studies, and women, gender, and sexuality studies at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. K’s recent work on queer and feminist approaches to gender-inclusive poetics and language pedagogy has appeared in Modern & Contemporary France (2019), Teaching Diversity and Inclusion: Examples from a French-Speaking Classroom (2021), and The Modern Language Journal (2023). K is a NetVUE faculty fellow, having participated in the 2019 NetVUE faculty seminar, Teaching Vocational Exploration. To read more posts by Kiki, click here.