Introduction

This work attempts to offer an introduction to recent debates in the study of sexuality. As a topic of academic discussion, sex seeps into a whole range of contemporary debates. From a position of relative marginality, now the study of sex has become quite respectable, part of the toolkit of any thoughtful understanding of modern life. This volume is a reflection of this rapid embourgeoisement – and the wide sweep of the work has been determined by the exponential growth of the field. However, rather than attempt a comprehensive survey, I have chosen to introduce key debates as part of a larger argument about the significance of all this varied sex talk. In this volume I argue that the particular and intensive concern about sex and intimacy that characterises our age is an indication of the everyday impact of economic restructuring and globalising forces. Learning to understand these various dilemmas offers both a means of comprehending the cultures of lived globalisation and a strategy for surviving this disruption. In the manner of so many other treatises on love, I present this as both an explanation and an injunction, a tale of what is and a promise of what might be. Throughout, I take the ancient and much maligned text of the Kama Sutra as a guiding lesson and organising framework. Most of all, what follows is an excursion into the West’s long obsession with sexuality as a place apart – another country to be longed for, yet never known. And the book charts the strange developments of this obsession. The use of the Kama Sutra echoes the West’s continued recourse to works of fiction and foreign conceptual frameworks when seeking to understand the rest of the world – the diversion through the Kama Sutra is a way of approaching the fictions and foreignness of sex from another viewpoint.