ABSTRACT
If one wants to commence with the most common of beginnings, namely, with the claim that one would like to be able to consider sexual politics during this time, a certain problem arises. It seems clear that one cannot reference “this time” without knowing which time, where that time takes hold, and for whom a certain consensus emerges on the issue of this time. So, if it is not just a matter of differences of interpretation about which time this is, then it would seem that we have already more than one time at work in this time, and that the problem of time will affl ict any effort I might take to consider some of these major issues. It might seem odd to begin with a refl ection on time when one is trying to speak about sexual politics. My suggestion here, however, is that the way in which debates within sexual politics are framed are already imbued with the problems of time, of progress in particular, and in certain notions of what it means to unfold a future of freedom. That there is no one time, that the question of what time this is already divides us, has to do with which histories have turned out to be formative, how they intersect-or fail to intersect-with other histories, and so with the question of how temporality is organized along spatial lines. I am not suggesting here that we return to a version of cultural difference that depends on cultural wholism. The problem is not that there are different modalities of time articulated in different cultural locations. Of course, at some level, that is true, but it does not quite approach the problem of temporality at issue here, since politically, the question of what time we are in, and of who is modern and who is not, is raised in the midst of very serious political contestations. It is my view that sexual politics, rather than operating to the side of this contestation, is in the middle of it, and that very often claims to new or radical sexual freedoms are appropriated precisely by that point of view which would try to defi ne Europe and the sphere of modernity as the privileged site where sexual radicalism can and does take place.
