ABSTRACT
Under conditions of late modernity, social life is characterised by high levels of reflexivity. New knowledge or information is routinely incorporated both by lay agents and by institutional environments of action that are thereby reconstituted or reorganised (Giddens 1990, 1991; Beck et at. 1994). Like the self and the body, sexuality has become heavily infused with reflexivity (Giddens 1992: 31). The constitution of identity in late modernity is thus closely bound up with religious, medical and especially scientific truth-claims, and accordingly with the production and incorporation of knowledge. It is therefore important to analyse how the discursive shaping of sexual identities is embedded in relations of knowledge as well as fields of power.
