Sex
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Sex is everywhere and also elusive. This essay focuses on sex as it relates to physical practices, intimacies, and regulations, even as the parameters of these are always shifting. On the one hand, people’s ability to access sex has been considered a hallmark of personal freedom and societal liberation. On the other hand, sex is also a site of intense regulation, and the questions of what is permissible sex, who is allowed to have it, and what counts as sex have generated a lot of debate. As a keyword in gender and sexuality studies, talking about sex means talking about gender, subjectivity, sexuality, pleasure, privacy, race, colonialism, and the erotic. When one is talking about sex, one is always implicitly talking about power. In his analysis of power and subjectivity, the French philosopher Michel Foucault ([1978] 1990) argued that sexual practices have, since the late nineteenth century, been imagined to reveal the most essential part of each person. This means that sexuality, how one describes one’s sexual preferences, was intimately connected with one’s identity, and sex was believed to be an important way to express selfhood. This tight linkage has had many effects—chief among them the belief that sexual revolution...
This essay may be found on page 201 of the printed volume.