ABSTRACT
This book has argued that stories and narratives depend upon communities that will create and hear those stories: social worlds, interpretive communities, communities of memory. The telling of sexual stories that can reach public communities of discourse has been a central theme. Without lesbian and gay stories the lesbian and gay movement may not have flourished. Without the stories told by abuse survivors, the whole rape movement would probably have floundered. And recovery tales identified in their narratives a whole scenario of hitherto undetected concerns that have entered a public arena of debate. And these stories work their way in to changing lives, communities and cultures. Through and through, sexual story telling is a political process. Hence the analysis of sexual stories is not just a quirky interest, or
even a titillating, voyeuristic one. It is central to an understanding of the workings of sexual politics in the late modern world.
