ABSTRACT
By the time my first book was published in 2005, I had been conducting qualitative sexuality research with Mexican immigrant women and men for about eight years. During the formal review process in my third year as an Assistant Professor of Sociology, I revisited this work and the other publications that had resulted from the rich in-depth interviews conducted with many generous informants in the late 1990s. As part of the review process, my academic mentors were urging me to generate a proposal for my second major research project. Considering the question of my next project became a process of unexpected reflection and self-inquiry. In reviewing my previous work and thinking about what I would like to explore next as a feminist sociologist with a special interest in conducting sexuality research with populations of Mexican origin, I was reminded of my unfulfilled desire to create bridges between my professional career, my personal growth and my spiritual life. I kept wondering how these bridges are created. Where and how do I begin? Activist scholarship wherein researchers explore ways of becoming engaged with the communities they are studying has always been an inspiration for me. I had been exposed to several significant models of this approach through my own mentors and in the feminist sociological literature (e.g. Hondagneu-Sotelo 1993), but tensions regarding whether I had a future in academic life and, later, concerns about what kind of work counts in the tenure process prevented me from successfully incorporating a community-based paradigm into my initial sexuality research with Mexican immigrant populations. Despite my hesitations in this first project, my aspiration was to conduct sexuality research that was more deeply engaged with and beneficial to the informants and communities represented in my projects. I also suspected that this engagement would not only benefit the individuals and communities I was studying, but that it might help me become more whole as a human being. In this chapter, I describe how concepts such as ‘activist research’ and ‘spiritual activism’ have given me both the inspiration and the tools to practise these professional and personal goals in my most recent sexuality research.
