ABSTRACT
In the last 10 years, a radical transformation has been taking place in scholarship on human sexuality, but only within certain disciplines. New theories “potentially explosive in their implications for our future understanding and behavior in regard to sex” 1 have been proposed, but psychology seems not to have noticed. The need for new ideas and research in the psychology of sexuality comes with some real-world urgency; the study of sexual discourses is no mere intellectual enterprise. As feminist anthropologist Gayle Rubin puts it,
There are historical periods in which sexuality is more sharply contested and more overtly politicized. In such periods, the domain of erotic life is, in effect, renegotiated… Periods such as the 1880s in England and the 1950s in the United States recodify the relations of human sexuality. The struggles that were fought leave a residue in the form of laws, social practices, and ideologies which then affect the way sexuality is experienced long after the immediate conflicts have faded. All signs indicate that the present era is another of those watersheds. 2
