ABSTRACT
From the outset, we have tried to locate our discussion of contemporary sexuality as it intersects with public health and policy in a larger frame of politics – global capitalism, militarism, neocolonial and race-ethnic conflicts, and the gender hierarchies that persist everywhere. At this point in time it is a depressing context, one in which every promise of liberal and emancipatory aspiration from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries seems to have crashed into a bleak landscape of violence, social division, and unrestrained military power that Zˇizˇek (2002) calls (after the popular 1999 film The Matrix) ‘the desert of the real’. Amidst this wreckage, will we also soon find human rights, including the fledgling concept of sexual rights and the UN mechanisms intended to codify and sustain these? Ironically, the convergence of globalization with the ‘war on terror’ that characterizes the current historical period has brought accelerated global exchanges (of capital, goods, people, ideas, information, and viruses) and a multitude of walls that separate off the abject, the less-than-human: the US offshore torture sites at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo and their secret counterparts (the CIA sites of ‘rendition’); the Israeli wall and its copies on the US-Mexico border; resurgent trade and aid barriers; and all the social and cultural walls that segregate ethnic, economic, and sexual outcasts within defined borders. For the growing throngs of the excluded, Zˇizˇek implies, human rights are little more than a cruel joke.
