ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the development of research on the social and cultural dimensions of sexuality, highlighting what seem to be the kinds of questions that have asked. The understanding of sexuality as being socially constructed that had begun to emerge in the late 1970s and early 1980s thus refocused research attention on the social and cultural systems which shape not only people sexual experience, but the ways in which they interpret and understand that experience. For lack of better labels, and at the expense of some probable oversimplification, these are flagged as: Thinking sexuality: diversity, difference and the epistemology of sexuality research, Sexual cultures, identities and communities and Structure and agency: toward a political economy of the body. While the HIV epidemic, together with attention to women's reproductive health, had previously focused attention on sexual minorities and on heterosexual women, work on masculinity more generally had, for the most part, received little attention.
