SAGE Handbook of Global Sexualities (Vol. 1 and 2)

Abstract

The domain of sexualities has occupied the imaginary of the forbidden and the unspoken since early times. Taboo became an umbrella category to describe things best left unspoken, hidden behind closed doors or buried in the most intimate secret thoughts and desires. For decades and still today, medical doctors and spiritual leaders remain the guardians of that which we dare not speak. This book is about sexualities and it emerges at a time when the topic has acquired a recognizably new significance. For an array of reasons which will be explored hereunder, sexuality is – as it has been in other times – a key battlefield for the deep political cleavages of our time, a point of coalescence of current struggles on the fate of the modern subject and of a social organization based on gender binarism. Sexuality captures the powerful connection between the personal and the political, posing difficult questions and insisting on pushing people out of their comfort zone – even when inviting them to discover new zones for surprising comfort. The dynamic character of sexualities, starting from the very definition of what we mean by ‘sexual’, implies that, as humans, we are always in the process of becoming, of being interpreted and interpreting others according to both material and cultural tools that are contingent, context-based, and ongoing. The mutant nature of sexualities undoes the sheer possibility of a fixed truth, pointing to the inescapable fluidity of the embodied knowledge we produce. And, as such, scholars of sexualities cannot but fail in the aim of conceptually containing the wide potential of the human sexual experience. This two volume collection covers a wide range of sexuality studies.