ABSTRACT
Writers have delved deep into their imaginative prose to portray the age in which we live. Perhaps, as Hobsbawm (1994: 16) suggests, we are adrift on choppy waters where old maps and charts no longer help us to understand the landscape or find our way across the sea. Or maybe we are sailing in modernity’s wake, splashing around behind those sleek modernist liners that signalled romance and elegance until utilitarian flight made them hopelessly uneconomic (Phillipson 1989). A little nearer land, perhaps we are, as Bauman has suggested (2005), ‘learning to walk on quicksand’. He writes prolifically and evocatively about ‘liquid times’, ‘liquid modernity’, ‘liquid love’, suggesting the flux and insubstantiality of contemporary culture. If we venture too far inland, however, we are in danger of being overwhelmed by the juggernaut of modernity, going ever faster in this ‘runaway world’, as Giddens (1990) suggests. All these metaphorical excursions evoke speed, change, endings and beginnings, uncertainties, insecurities, high risks, producing anxieties, fears, anguish, sometimes an underlying sense of barely suppressed panic. A sense of an ending, I argued in an earlier book (Weeks 2000: 235-44), haunted sexuality in the run-up to the millennium, and now that we have safely negotiated that landmark (where very little affecting sexuality actually seemed to happen) the sense that something is afoot is signalled today by the proliferation of ‘post’ worlds: post patriarchal, post socialist, post liberal, post feminist, post gay, post AIDS, post sexual, post family . . . The list is potentially long. Just as long are the attempts to characterize more broadly the epoch we live in: postmodernity, late modernity, high modernity, post-Fordist, ‘new times’, a second modernity, reflexive modernity, risk society, the information age, network society, liquid modernity. All these are pointing to something new, even if we are not quite sure how new or where things are going, a coming after something that is definitely passing, with, as Bauman has argued, ‘a succession of new beginnings’ (Bauman 2005: 2) which are just as unsettling.
