ABSTRACT
We are living through a long, unfinished revolution that is transforming attitudes to sexuality, gender and intimate life. In both the Global North and the Global South, this change has provoked massive cultural shifts and political reactions. In the process, the meanings of sexuality and gender have been problematised and have become a battleground for conflicting values and interpretations. Morally conservative, ultra-nationalist, neo-liberal, feminist, LGBTQ+ and post-colonial perspectives each bring to bear radically different understandings that confuse as much as clarify what is meant by sexuality. These conflicts and confusions are the result of a ‘Great Transition’ since the 1950s which has fundamentally undermined the traditional sexual and gender orders and opened the ways towards new sexual freedoms, identities and possibilities alongside sexual risks, anxieties and threats. Neither Science with a capital ‘S’, nor History with a capital ‘H’ offer clues or prescriptions that can wish away our uncertainties or undermine rigid certainties. But a history that is pluralistic, reflexive and attentive to the agency and ‘experiments in living’ that millions of people are now involved in, can alert us to how far we have come and how far we still have to go.
