In brief
Sari van Anders is a psychologist, professor of psychology, gender studies, and neuroscience at Queen’s University, and Canada Research Chair in Gender/Sex and Sexual Diversity. Her research programme includes sexuality, gender/sex diversity, social neuroendocrinology, sexual desire, orgasm, pleasure, fantasy, pornography, feminist science, and queer science.
Van Anders matters to the Sensual Institute because she challenges the habit of reducing sexuality to either biology or culture. Her work asks how bodies, social contexts, power, gender roles, relationships, and hormones interact. It also develops concepts and measures that can describe diversity without forcing people into binary or heteronormative categories.
Sexual Configurations Theory
Sexual Configurations Theory offers a way to conceptualise sexuality as multidimensional. Instead of treating sexual orientation as a single line based only on the sex or gender of partners, it can attend to dimensions such as attraction, behaviour, identity, intimacy, relationship structure, gender/sex, and the qualities that draw a person to another.
The value of a configuration model is that it can represent combinations that categorical systems miss. Two people may use the same identity label while differing in attraction, relationship practice, or gender experience. Another person may have a configuration that does not map neatly onto a familiar label.
A model is not a demand to disclose more. People have the right to use broad language, several labels, no label, or private language. Conceptual richness should increase self-understanding rather than create a new obligation to be measurable.
Desire beyond a single drive
Van Anders’s work treats sexual desire as multifaceted. Desire can vary in intensity, target, timing, quality, and context. It may involve fantasy, bodily urge, emotional longing, curiosity, pleasure-seeking, connection, novelty, or a wish for a particular experience. Measuring only “how much desire” may miss the more important question of what the desire is like.
This approach also helps challenge heteronormative explanations of low desire. When a woman partnered with a man reports low desire, the issue may not be an individual deficit. Gendered divisions of labour, objectification, pressure around initiation, caregiving expectations, or a narrow sexual script may shape what becomes possible or appealing.
The theory does not deny biology. It asks biology to be interpreted within the social conditions that influence attention, stress, safety, opportunity, and meaning. A person’s hormones are not a complete explanation of their intimate life.
Social neuroendocrinology
Social neuroendocrinology studies how social behaviour and context relate to hormones and other biological processes. Van Anders’s work examines how intimacy, gendered behaviour, power, competition, bonding, and oppression may be associated with hormonal changes, including testosterone.
The methodological lesson is important: hormones are responsive systems, not simple labels for masculinity or desire. A change in testosterone does not automatically mean a person is more aggressive, more sexual, or more “male.” Biological measures require a theory of context and careful attention to variability.
Social neuroendocrinology can therefore connect embodied and cultural analysis. A person’s body responds within a history of relationships and institutions. That does not make the response unreal; it makes the response situated.
Feminist and queer science
Van Anders’s feminist and queer science framework asks researchers to examine the assumptions built into questions, categories, methods, and interpretations. Feminist science is not simply research about women, and queer science is not simply research about LGBTQ+ people. Both can challenge the idea that dominant categories are neutral or universal.
A queer approach may ask what a category leaves out, how norms are produced, and whether a measurement treats variation as error. A feminist approach may ask who has power, whose labour is invisible, and how social inequalities shape the phenomenon being studied. Together, these perspectives can improve both justice and validity.
Such work still requires empirical discipline. Critique does not replace measurement; it improves the questions measurement is meant to answer. Inclusive science should be transparent about theory, sampling, uncertainty, and the limits of generalisation.
Measurement and public meaning
Van Anders and colleagues have developed tools and visual approaches for representing gender/sex and sexual diversity beyond binary categories. Measurement can make a population visible to care and policy, but it can also expose people or reduce them to administrative fields.
Researchers should explain why a question is asked, allow meaningful responses, protect privacy, and avoid treating a missing category as a personal failure. A measure that is technically complex but unusable may not serve participants. A simple measure that erases important difference may produce biased science.
Public communication must also resist the temptation to turn a nuanced model into a personality test. The purpose is not to tell people what they “really are.” It is to provide better language for understanding patterns, possibilities, and social conditions.
That distinction matters for education as well as research. A map can show routes that were previously hard to name, but it cannot decide which route a person should take or whether they want to travel at all. The traveller remains the authority on the journey, including the right to remain private and unclassified in public research and clinical education today.
Human-capacity bridge
Van Anders’s work supports sexual multidimensionality, allowing desire, identity, behaviour, and intimacy to differ; contextual embodiment, understanding hormones and bodies within social worlds; norm awareness, noticing how heterosexual and binary assumptions shape experience; and scientific justice, creating methods that represent people more accurately.
For the Institute of Inner Technology, the bridge is a refusal of false oppositions. Sensuality is bodily and cultural, personal and political, measurable and meaningful. A fuller map should open possibilities, not imprison the traveller.
What this changes
Sari van Anders has developed influential theories and methods for understanding sexuality, gender/sex diversity, hormones, desire, and social context. Her work gives feminist and queer science a rigorous place in the study of embodied intimacy.
The lesson is that better categories can create more freedom when they remain tools rather than verdicts. People deserve science that sees complexity without demanding exposure.
Related entries include Sexuality, Gender, Identity, Arousal, Context, and Evidence.
Related entries
sexuality, gender, identity, arousal, context, evidence.