#HotGirlScience: A Liberatory Paradigm for Intersectional Sex-Positive Scholarship

Abstract

What if being a hot girl was a way of life and a way of conducting science? In this paper, we propose a new sex-positive, liberatory, intersectional paradigm for sex science, #HotGirlScience. The #HotGirlScience paradigm invites sexologists to study the fun, sex-positive aspects of Black sexualities and move toward liberation-focused inquiry where pleasure is central. #HotGirlScience is founded upon hip hop feminism, hood feminism, and the work of Black feminist scholars past and present. The HotGirlScience paradigm differs from the previously-mentioned feminisms in its empirical potential. Four criteria of real #HotGirlScience apply to the entire research process and not just interpretation of results or theoretical foundations of the research. By explaining the four criteria: 1) doing me unapologetically, 2) having fun, 3) sex positivity, and 4) hyping up my friends, we present the #HotGirlScience paradigm’s ability to inform the empirical study of the pleasurable, sex-positive aspects of Black sexual lives as a necessary contribution to the current sexology canon that all too frequently presents a deficit view of Black sexualities. Descriptions of the four elements of the paradigm, as well as implications for the use of this paradigm with marginalized populations in sex science, are discussed.