ABSTRACT
Anthropological work on human sexualities as well as on sexual, gender and reproductive health and rights has developed apace over the last hundred plus years. This chapter broadly reviews how anthropology has contributed to and influenced human sexualities discourse and research over this time. The advances reviewed are structurally correlated with the rising perception of sexual and gender rights as a part of human rights at state and corporate levels signalling broad acceptance of sexual and gender expression as a part of individual development and well-being. Yet anthropological work on sexualities and gender only recently began to answer what it means to undertake this work from non-white and non-Western perspectives. Such changes were and are contested: reproductive rights have recently been turned back in the USA, transgender rights have been refused or backtracked upon in various countries, and elders’ rights and the rights of younger children remain ignored. We consider the volume of this work and the century plus of explosive, hard-won changes in the field of anthropology – but apologise in advance for having to omit many fine critical contributions to the field given the brevity of this chapter.
