Richard G. Parker - Böcker

First Published in 1995. After widespread neglect over many years, the study of human sexuality has recently come to the forefront of many of the most important debates in contemporary society and culture. The continued development of feminist theory, the emergence of gay and lesbian studies, and the impact of the international AIDS pandemic have combined to focus new attention on the ways in which gender and sexuality are shaped in different social and cultural settings, and on the complex interactions betwen sexuality and health in the late twentieth century.Edited by two of the leading figures in contemporary sex research, ConceivingSexuality brings together the contributions of writers from a wide range of social science disciplines and cultural traditions who are working at the cutting edge of contemporary sex research. Focusing on key areas of concern such as gender power relations, the formation of sexual identities, the dynamics of sexual desire, and the social construction of sexual risk, the essays in Conceiving Sexuality provide an important overview of the most pressing topical and theoretical issues currently shaping debate in international and cross-cultural research on sexuality.

Discussions of globalization usually focus on political, economic, and technological transformations, but fail to recognize how we experience these processes in our daily lives, including our most intimate acts and practices. In this volume, anthropologists and sociologists draw on long-term ethnographic research on love, gender, and sexuality in a broad range of regions to discuss how global forces shape marriage, commercial sex, the political economy of intimacy, and lesbian and gay expressions of companionship. The richly-textured ethnographies provoke a series of questions about emerging vocabularies for friendship and romance; the adoption of cultural forms from faraway places; the emergence of new desires, pleasures, and emotions that circulate as commodities in the global marketplace; and the ways economic processes shape public and private expressions of sexual intimacy.