ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the features of the cosmopolitan sexualities. Cosmopolitan sexualities suggest new imaginations, imaginaries and institutions for living globally with gender, sexual and intimate variety. It starts with an awareness of a long history of debates about cosmopolitanism; and the facts of global sexual, intimate and gender variety. In the twenty-first century, the women's movement engages with a multitude of global issues from women's rights to education, health and work, child marriage, reproductive rights, sexual rights and sexual violence in countries as different as Zimbabwe, Poland and Mexico. Cosmopolitan sexualities bring a social imaginary, a sense of new institutions and as ever, a critical imagination. Much contemporary cosmopolitan talk depends on the language of human rights and its modern fashioning in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Ideas of rights have also been of widespread importance in the developing of cosmopolitan sexualities, providing a core, if contested, possible common ground.
