ABSTRACT

Until the late twentieth century, human sexuality was largely marginalized as a focus for social enquiry, scholarly reflection and academic activism. Perhaps because the experience of sexuality appears to be so intimately linked to our bodies, it was relatively easy to relegate matters of sexuality to the realms of the biomedical and population sciences. While it had served, through much of the nineteenth century, as the subject matter for obscure medical tomes or arcane psychiatric practices, sexuality seemed to have little to do with the more crucial and immediate problems of social and political life. It was really only during the closing decades of the twentieth century and the early part of the twenty-first century, that this marginalization of sexuality – and its submission to the biomedical gaze – began to give way to more far-reaching social and political analysis. And it is perhaps only over the course of the past two decades, from roughly the late 1980s to the present, that a boom in social sciences research within this field seems to have taken place, transforming the study of sexuality into one of the most active areas of investigation today in both social and cultural studies (see Kimmel and Plante, 2004; Parker, Barbosa and Aggleton, 2000; Seidman, 2003; Williams and Stein, 2002).