UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Mia Hua, a Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology doctoral student, is the recent recipient of a competitive Scholars of Sexology Fellowship from the Kinsey Institute — a renowned source at Indiana University for critical issues in sexuality, gender and reproduction.
The fellowship will enable Hua to conduct human sexuality research at Kinsey Institute to advance her dissertation, which explores the intersection of design, visual art, technology and human sexuality. Specifically, Hua explained, her dissertation leverages methods and practices of visual art and art history to design for women’s masturbation as a political act of sexual independence as well as a legitimated pathway to sexual pleasure.
In Hua’s previous work, she curated a collection of more than 150 contemporary vibrators and, using a social design history approach, expounded on the links to their forms, sociocultural environments and historical processes. Through the Scholars of Sexology Fellowship, Hua said she aims to work with Kinsey Institute art and artifacts collection — a resource of works of art and objects related to human sexuality that span more than two thousand years— to study the design of digital and non-digital sex toys beyond the contemporary time period to identify patterns of how their forms have changed over time. She will explore the design of vibrators in their social, historical, aesthetic, cultural and political contexts.
“With such a focus, this research is concerned with ways that design intentions, speculation, aspirations, significations and power help to give form to sex toys for women,” said Hua. “Ultimately, this study is concerned with social factors that shaped female sexuality through material artifacts. It will contribute to my dissertation insights into design for women’s sexual pleasure, especially masturbation from a perspective that is challenging existing political, social and cultural prejudice, discrimination and marginalization of female sexuality.”
The Scholars of Sexology Fellowship is awarded annually to up to three exceptional graduate student candidates in the field of sexology and is intended to support the use of the library and archival materials at the Kinsey Institute. The fellowship was established in 2002 by John Money, who was internationally known for his work in psychoendocrinology and developmental sexology and defined the concepts of gender role and identity.