Modern individuals can in principle adopt sexual identities at will, but they do not do so in conditions of their own choosing. The social and political context of modernity sets the stage for sexual possibilities. For example, new communication technologies such as the Internet provide new sexual options, including the adoption of ‘virtual’ identities in […]

Recent controversies around sexuality thus further illustrate the intricate links between sexuality and the social relations of power flowing from gender, social class, and ‘race’ that have, historically, shaped it. As Michel Foucault put it, sexuality constitutes an especially dense transfer point for relations of power: between men and women, young people and old people, […]

Radically social models of sex as promoted by queer theorists and embodied by pomosexuals have competed with a major revival of both religious and biological models of sexuality over the past two decades. The Catholic Church, for example,still officially defines homosexuality as a ‘moral evil’. The rise of Christian and other religious fundamentalisms throughout the […]

Disagreements as to whether to focus efforts through ‘single-issue’ organizations or to pursue much broader aims have also given rise to separatist strategies. Indeed, this has been a recurring theme since the early days of homosexual activism. The very first movements for the rights of sexual minorities which arose in Germany around the turn of […]

The hesitantly speaking perverts of Krafft-Ebing’s medico-forensic pages, confessing their most intimate secrets to the new sexual experts, have walked out of the clinical text and onto the stage of history, the living proof of sexual diversity. Jeffrey Weeks, 1986 Coalition politics The 1960s and 1970s constituted a pivotal period of intensification of public discussion […]

The eminent Swiss sexologist and socialist reformer Auguste Forel (1848-1931), Member of the Advisory Board of the International Federation of Eugenic Organisations and Honorary President of the World League of Sexual Reform in 1930, thus presented the construction of a social and national order based on the scientific management of reproduction by the welfare state […]

Whereas state policies around Aids put the main emphasis on treatment, support, and transformation of sexual practices of individual citizens, other types of state action regarding sex have been primarily driven by collective concerns. At the collective level, sexuality carries particular symbolic importance, since it is through reproductive sexuality that the nation is biologically reproduced, […]

By the late 1980s, most Western governments had belatedly acquired a grasp of the urgent need for intervention, partly triggered by the rising numbers of heterosexual infections. The intensity of policy efforts varied across countries, however. Most Western countries introduced Aids-prevention measures in the form of poster and television campaigns and various forms of sex […]

The access to more reliable methods of contraception, the legalization of abortion, and the relaxation of moral controls on sexuality triggered by the sexual revolution opened up a small window of greater openness, legal freedom, and sexual experimentation from the 1960s which detached sexuality from its traditional associations with sin and disease. The consequences of […]

The complex problems now confronting America as the result of the practice of reckless procreation are fast threatening to grow beyond human control. Everywhere we see poverty and large families going hand in hand. Those least fit to carry on the race are increasing most rapidly. People who cannot support their own offspring are encouraged […]