ABSTRACT
All civilizations and cultures have to be concerned with the regulation, organization and ordering of sexuality and gender. In the West a preoccupation with sexuality has been at the heart of its concerns since before the triumph of Christianity. It has been a matter of political debate for something like two hundred years. Already, by the last decades of the nineteenth century, many of the preoccupations of second-wave feminism in the 1970s were on the agenda: concerning male power over women, sexual exploitation, the differences between men and women and the meaning of consent and choice. By the 1920s and 1930s, with the rise and fall of a world sex reform movement, the apparently irresistible rise of social authoritarianism and fascism, and a greater willingness even in
Western democracies to intervene in personal life, the intricate connections between sexual values and political power, especially in institutionalizing normative heterosexuality, were clearly visible (Canaday 2009; Herzog 2011). It was during this period, through the writings of such people as Wilhelm Reich, that a concept connecting sex and politics – ‘sexual politics’ – first came into being.
