Sex is everywhere in the modern world. We are surrounded by a cacophony of advice columns, celebrities, agony aunts, chat shows, TV evangelists, therapists, women’s and men’s magazines, and self-help literature which tells us how to conduct our intimate relationships. Sexual imagery is used to sell us everyday products such as cars or clothes, or to sell sex itself, while sex aids, porn, and potential sex partners — real or virtual — are just one click away on the Internet. Modernity is a world populated by people who define themselves as gay, lesbian, straight, bisexual, bi-curious, exhibitionists, submissives, dominatrixes, swingers (people who engage in partner exchange), switchers (people who change from being gay to being straight or vice versa), traders (gay men who have sex with straight men), born-again virgins (people who have, technically, lost their virginity but pledge to renounce sex until marriage), acrotomophiliacs (people who are sexually attracted to amputees), furverts (or furries — people who dress up in animal suits and derive sexual excitement from doing so), or feeders (people who overfeed their, generally obese, partners). The important point here is that we draw on these categories in order to make sense of who we are: we define ourselves in part through our sexuality. How have we come to believe that sex is so important to who we are? As we shall see in this volume, this linking of ‘sexuality’, understood as the way in which people experience their bodies, pleasures, and desires, with sexual
identity is in fact a modern phenomenon, which has emerged only in the course of the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe. That is not to say that people did not engage in sexual activities before modernity. Rather, the way in which people made sense of their erotic experiences was radically different from contemporary understandings of sexuality.
Sex is a cultural object. Just as the differences between men and women cannot be reduced to biological factors alone, but are more adequately understood in terms of the concept of ‘gender’ which takes into account the social meanings that different societies attach to masculinity and femininity, sexuality is not a natural, biological, universal experience. The ways in which different cultures and different time periods have made sense of erotic pleasures and dangers vary widely. Sexuality is shaped by social and political forces and connects in important ways to relations of power around class, race, and, especially, gender. Indeed, this book will demonstrate that sex, gender, and sexuality are closely intertwined; cultural understandings of sexuality have been structured by normative ideas about masculinity and femininity, in other words, ‘proper’ ways for men and women to behave.
Against this backdrop, this volume will explore social and political meanings and struggles around sexuality in modernity, primarily — though not exclusively — in the West. The main focus will thus not be on people’s concrete sexual practices, but rather on raising sexuality as a social and political question. Chapter 1 examines historical ways of thinking about sex, focusing on ideas developed in antiquity and Christianity, while Chapter 2 analyses theories, controversies, and disagreements around models of sexuality in modernity. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 further elaborate the main theme of sexuality as a site of social and political struggle, by focusing on challenges ‘from below’ in the form of feminist critiques of sexuality (Chapter 3), the regulation of sexuality ‘from above’ by the state (Chapter 4), and gay politics, religious fundamentalist mobilizations, and the future of sex (Chapter 5).