Saskia E. Wieringa is honorary professor at the University of Amsterdam, holding the chair on Gender and Women's Same-Sex Relations Crossculturally. She has a long experience of activism in both the women's and Third World solidarity movements. Since the late 1970s she has done research on women's movements and same-sex relations in many parts of the world, particularly in Indonesia. Her latest books include: Female Desires: Same-Sex Relations and Transgender Practices across Cultures; Sexual Politics in Indonesia; Lubang Buaya, a novel; Tommy Boys, Lesbian Men and Ancestral Wives: Women's Same-Sex Experiences in Southern Africa; Engendering Human Security (co-edited with Thanh-Dam Truong and Amrita Chhachhi); Women's Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia (co-edited with Evelyn Blackwood and Abha Bhaiya); Traveling Heritages and the Future of Asian Feminisms (with Nursyahbani Katjasungkana). She has received various awards for her scholarly work, most recently the 2011 award for Best Paper from the Journal of Contemporary Asia.Horacio Federico Sívori, PhD, is an Argentinean anthropologist, a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Social Medicine, State University of Rio de Janeiro, and the regional coordinator for the Latin American Center on Sexuality and Human Rights. He trained in Argentina, the USA, and Brazil and taught in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru. He is the author of Locas, chogos y gays, as well as journal articles, book chapters, and collective volumes on gay sociability, sexual rights, and AIDS activism. He is co-editor of Sexualities, a working paper series by CLAGS/CUNY's International Resource Network, and has acted as co-chair for Sexuality Studies Section of the Latin American Studies Association. His current research looks at LGBT rights activism in Argentina and Brazil.

This is an exciting collection that delivers what it promises: a truly transnational investigation of sexuality from the perspective of scholars from the Global South. Much more than a history of sexualities, or an exploration of sexual diversity cross-culturally, it offers compelling insights into the close interaction between political and social histories and ideologies of sexuality. It gives the reader a broad view of the colonial, the post-colonial, and the often reactionary ways that new and modernizing states shored up heterosexuality while condemning other types of gendered and sexual expressions. This will undoubtedly be a foundational text in sexual histories of the global South.

• 1. Sexual politics in the global South: framing the discourse - Saskia Wieringa and Horacio Sívori2. The rise of sex and sexuality studies in post-1978 China - Huang Yingying3. The obscene modern and the pornographic family: adventures in Bangla pornography - Hardik Brata Biswas4. Sexing the nation's body during the Cuban republican era - Abel Sierra Madero5. Government and the control of venereal diseases in colonial Tanzania, 1920-60 - Musa Sadock6. Violence and the emergence of gay and lesbian activism in Argentina, 1983-90 - Diego Sempol7. Sexuality and nationalist ideologies in post-colonial Cameroon - Basile Ndjio8. The 'lesbian' existence in Arab cultures: historical and sociological perspectives - Iman Al-Ghafari9. 'Public women' and the 'obscene' body: an exploration of abolition debates in India - Nitya Vasudevan10. Male homoeroticism, homosexual identity, and AIDS in Mexico City in the 1980s - Alberto Teutle López11. Canons of desire: male homosexuality in twenty-first-century Keralam - Rajeev Kumaramkandath12. Female criminality in Brazil: a study on gender and sexuality in a women's prison - Fabíola Cordeiro13. Sexual pleasure and premarital sexual adventures of young women in Zimbabwe - Tsitsi B. Masvawure