Framing the Sexual Subject: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Power

By Richard Parker, Regina Maria Barbosa and Peter Aggleton

This collection brings together the work of writers from a range of disciplines and cultural traditions to explore the social and political dimensions of sexuality and sexual experience. The contributors reconfigure existing notions of gender and sexuality, linking them to deeper understandings of power, resistance, and emancipation around the globe. They map areas that are currently at the cutting edge of social science writing on sexuality, as well as the complex interface between theory and practice. Framing the Sexual Subject highlights the extent to which populations and communities that once were the object of scientific scrutiny have increasingly demanded the right to speak on their own behalf, as subjects of their own sexualities and agents of their own sexual histories.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 2000.
This collection brings together the work of writers from a range of disciplines and cultural traditions to explore the social and political dimensions of sexuality and sexual experience. The contributors reconfigure existing notions of gender and sexualit

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Apr 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520922754

Book preview

FRAMING THE

SEXUAL SUBJECT

FRAMING THE

SEXUAL SUBJECT

The Politics of

Gender, Sexuality, and Power

Edited by

RICHARD PARKER,

REGINA MARIA BARBOSA,

AND PETER AGGLETON

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2000 by

The Regents of the University of California

Framing the sexual subject: the politics of gender, sexuality, and power / edited by Richard Parker, Regina Maria Barbosa, and Peter Aggieton.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-520-21836-1 (cloth: alk. paper). — ISBN 0-520-21838-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Sex—Political aspects, cross-cultural studies. 2. Sex role— Political aspects, cross-cultural studies. 3. Power (Social sciences), cross-cultural studies. 4. AIDS (Disease)—Patients— Civil rights, cross-cultural studies. I. Parker, Richard G.

(Richard Guy), 1956- . II. Barbosa, Regina Maria. III. Aggieton,

Peter.

HQ23.F76 2000

3053—de 21 99-38466

CIP

Printed in the United States of America 987654321

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

In memory of Jonathan M. Mann 1947-1998

Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction Framing the Sexual Subject

Chapter One Bodyplay Corporeality in a Discursive Silence

Chapter Two Masculinity in Indonesia Genders, Sexualities, and Identities in a Changing Society

Chapter Three Male Homosexuality and Seropositivity The Construction of Social Identities in Brazil

Chapter Four Sexual Rights Inventing a Concept, Mapping an International Practice

Chapter Five Cross-National Perspectives on Gender and Power

Chapter Six Gender Stereotypes and Power Relations Unacknowledged Risks for STDs in Argentina

Chapter Seven AIDS, Medicine, and Moral Panic in the Philippines

Chapter Eight Survival Sex and HIV/AIDS in an African City Eleanor Preston-Whyte, Christine Varga, Herman Oosthuizen, Rachel Roberts, and Frederick Blose

Chapter Nine Cultural Regulation, Self-Regulation, and Sexuality A Psycho-Cultural Model of HIV Risk in Latino Gay Men

Chapter Ten Gendered Scripts and the Sexual Scene Promoting Sexual Subjects among Brazilian Teenagers

Afterword The Production of Knowledge on Sexuality in the AIDS Era Some Issues, Opportunities, and Challenges

Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the contribution of many institutions and individuals. It brings together a number of the papers originally presented at a conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1996, organized by the Program on Gender, Sexuality, and Health at the Center for Research and Study in Collective Health (CEPESC) of the Institute of Social Medicine (IMS), State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), with support provided by the Ford Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

For their help in preparing the manuscript, we would particularly like to thank Ana Paula Uziel, Juan Carlos de la Concepcion Raxach, Vagner de Almeida, and Rita Rizzo at the Institute of Social Medicine; Charles Klein, Delia Easton, and Chris White at the HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies, New York State Psychiatric Institute and Columbia University; and Helen Thomas and Paula Hassett at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of London.

The final manuscript has also benefitted greatly from suggestions by the three outside reviewers who commented for the University of California Press: Margaret Connors, Jonathan Mann, and Steve Epstein. Those suggestions were crucial in revising and rethinking the volume.

We particularly wish to dedicate the book to Jonathan Mann, whose tragic death occurred as we were finalizing our work. Jonathan was both friend and mentor to many of the editors and contributors. As most readers will know, he was tireless in his work against the HIV/ AIDS pandemic and for health and human rights. What many may not know is that he was also fundamentally committed to research on sexuality and sexual health. His work as founding director of the World Health Organizations Global Programme on AIDS had convinced him that one of the greatest barriers to responding to the HIV/ AIDS epidemic globally was the remarkable silence, stigma, and discrimination so often associated with issues related to gender and sexuality around the world. When he left WHO and moved to Harvard University to found the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, he worked with Richard Parker to create an international working group on sexuality research that is in many ways the direct precursor to the project leading to the current volume and involved many of its contributors—and he continued to support and defend sex research until his untimely death. His was, as Rosalind Petchesky, one of the contributors to this volume, put it, a vital and powerful voice for what we are all working for. He will be sorely missed.

Introduction

Framing the Sexual Subject

Richard Parker, Regina Maria Barbosa,

and Peter Aggieton

For the greater part of the twentieth century, human sexuality was largely ignored as a focus for social research and reflection. Perhaps because the experience of sexuality seems so intimately linked to our bodies, it was relatively easy to relegate the subject matter of sexuality to the realm of the biomedical sciences, where it became the focus for obscure medical tomes and arcane psychiatric practices but seemed to have little to do with the more crucial and immediate problems of social life. Indeed, only in recent years, during the closing decades of the century, has this marginalization of sexuality and its submission to the biomedical gaze begun to give way to a more far- reaching social and political analysis. And it is only over the course of the last decade, from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, that a veritable boom in social research on sexuality seems to have taken place (Parker and Gagnon, 1995).¹

The reasons for this recent explosion of interest are of course complex and diverse. They clearly have much to do with a set of reconfigurations taking place in the social sciences more broadly in the late twentieth century, as disciplines such as history, sociology, and anthropology have struggled to find new ways of understanding the rapidly changing postmodern world, placing new emphasis on domains once considered relatively ‘ private"—that is, outside the realm of serious social scientific investigation—but increasingly understood as socially shaped (Vance, 1991). Perhaps most important, this growing attention to sexuality as a key field for social analysis has been mandated by a set of changes within society itself since the 1960s, including the growing feminist and gay and lesbian movements and their impact on academic disciplines, university practices, and even, in some instances, government policies (Parker and Gagnon, 1995; see also Lancaster and di Leonardo, 1997).

At the same time that these social movements have been crucial in calling attention to questions of gender and sexuality, growing international concern with issues such as over population, reproductive health, and, perhaps especially, the emerging HIV/AIDS pandemic, has intersected with the research agendas constructed around feminist and gay and lesbian concerns. Indeed, while social and moral conservatives might have preferred to dismiss questions related to gender, sexuality, and sexual rights as little more than the private concerns of progressive (or perverse) minorities, the broader social implications of global issues of overpopulation, reproductive health, and AIDS have guaranteed that the study of sexuality, and of its social and political dimensions, would necessarily emerge as central to many important debates taking place in late-twentieth-century society (Correa, 1994; Ginsberg and Rapp, 1995; Lancaster and di Leonardo, 1997; Parker and Gagnon, 1995; Petchesky and Judd, 1998).

As part of broader global social change, these emerging issues have taken shape at a moment when many boundaries between the so- called developed and developing worlds (and their social, political, and intellectual concerns) have broken down—or at the very least blurred—bringing what may once have been different currents into increasing contact and creating dialogue around issues of sexuality and politics on a truly transnational scale. Feminist concepts and gay, lesbian, and queer theory have become moving forces behind research and social movements in many developing countries; the impact of structural violence in shaping HIV/AIDS vulnerability and a range of reproductive health problems has become as apparent in the cities of the First World as in those of the Third; reproductive and sexual rights movements have taken on global dimensions; and demarcations between academic researchers and social and political activists have become increasingly unclear. Ultimately, the current volume situates itself, as do most of the researchers represented here, within a broader rethinking of issues related to gender, sexuality, and power in the late twentieth century. The book seeks to contribute to the growing dialogue taking place today both north and south of the equator (Parker, 1999) about the social organization of sexual experience and the social imagination of the sexual subject—a sexual subject that is both the subject-matter for politically committed investigation and the subject-agent of conscious struggles for social and sexual change.

Shifting Paradigms

It is important to remember that this interconnected set of concerns has not always been dominant, or indeed even present, in much research carried out on sexuality, particularly in relation to health, even in quite recent times. On the contrary, the concerns most strongly represented here might be described as something of an alternative current, evolving in important ways over time but nonetheless largely marginal (and often marginalized) in relation to the approaches that have tended to dominate the general field of sexuality research (in terms of both research funding and institutional legitimacy). Indeed, throughout much of the twentieth century, sexological research (and similar approaches presenting themselves as objective sciences of sexual fife) have largely avoided direct engagement with politics, as if avoiding the subject might somehow spare sex researchers from engaging in political debate, leaving them safe in their laboratories to continue seeking natural truths of sexual function.² Even with the veritable explosion in sexuality research since the mid-1980s—particularly as a consequence of the global HIV/AIDS pandemic—the vast majority of research attention has focused less on the kinds of political questions considered in the current volume than on a far narrower attempt to construct a science of sexual behavior valid independent of vagaries of time and place, much less of the shifting sands of political struggle.

The problematic epistemological and political status of such a scientific project had of course been obvious for some time—unmasked and critiqued by feminist, and by gay and lesbian, studies seeking to deconstruct the working of scientific discourse in relation to gender and sexuality so as to uncover the relations between knowledge and power within the sexual field (see for example Foucault, 1978; Snitow, Stansell, and Thompson, 1983; Weeks, 1985; Vance, 1984, 1991). While the gradual but progressive demedicalization of sexuality in social research had been an important achievement of social constructionist approaches since the late 1970s and early 1980s, there can be little doubt about the profound remedicalization of sexuality in the wake of the HIV/AIDS pandemic (Vance, 1991; Parker and Easton, 1998). Indeed, much social research activity that emerged in response to AIDS in the mid-1980s focused not on the social construction of sexual experience, let alone its political dimensions, but on surveys of risk-related behavior and on the knowledge, attitudes, and practices that might be associated with the risk of HIV infection. Most studies sought to collect quantifiable data on sexual partners, specific sexual practices, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), and similar factors understood to contribute to the spread of HIV— and, on the basis of this documentation, to point the way for policies and intervention programs aimed at reducing behavioral risk of infection (see for example Carballo, Cleland, Caraël, and Albrecht, 1989; Chouinard and Albert, 1989; Turner, Miller, and Moses, 1989; Cleland and Ferry, 1995).

Particularly in the United States, a longstanding focus on behavioral research in public health on what were understood as individualistic determinants of health behaviors and on what was believed a rational decision-making process associated with behavioral change in response to perceived health threats, meant that many of the earliest research initiatives in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic were designed to provide an empirical basis for behavioral interventions (understood as a social equivalent to surgical or biomedical interventions in the physiological body) aimed at modifying activities understood as posing the risk of infection.³ Based on theoretical models such as the Health Belief Model (Becker and Joseph, 1988), Theory of Reasoned Action (Ajzen and Fishbein, 1980), and Social Learning Theory (Bandura, 1977), intervention research aimed to produce behavioral change by providing members of target population groups with adequate knowledge and information about the risk of HIV infection, and by increasing their perception and awareness of such risk, to stimulate the rational decision-making process believed to lead ultimately to significant risk reduction. It was assumed that, by focusing on links between sexual behavior and individual psychology, more broad-based prevention programs could eventually be developed, based upon further intervention research findings, to persuade individuals to change their behaviors so as to not only reduce HIV infection risk but also make it possible to respond to other problems presumed linked to sexual conduct, such as the spread of other STDs, the epidemics of teenage pregnancy in the inner cities of industrialized countries, and the population explosion believed taking place in the developing world (see for example Turner, Miller, and Moses, 1990; Turner, Miller, and Moses, 1989; Bancroft, 1997).

While this basic approach was most pronounced in the United States (where the size of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the availability of resources, and the individualistic behavioral research tradition were also most pronounced), similar initiatives took place throughout the 1980s and early 1990s in many parts of the Anglo-European world and—particularly under the auspices of bilateral or intergovernmental agencies such as USAID and the World Health Organization—in a growing number of developing countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (Carballo, Cleland, Caraël, and Albrecht, 1989; Cleland and Ferry, 1995; see also the discussion in Aggieton, 1996b). Increasingly, however, as behavioral research and behavioral interventions developed in a growing range of social and cultural settings, the relative effectiveness of research instruments and intervention strategies came into question. The difficulties of translating or adapting research protocols for cross-cultural application quickly became apparent, in the face of often radically different understandings of sexual expression and drug use in different societies and even in different subcultures of a broader society (Aggieton, 1996b; Parker, 1994). And the inefficacy of behavioral interventions based on information and reasoned persuasion to stimulate risk reduction became evident almost immediately. Study after study showed that information, in and of itself, was insufficient to produce risk-reducing behavioral change, and the relative limitations of using individual psychology as the basis for intervention and prevention programs became (even in the United States) apparent (Aggieton, 1996b; Cohen, 1991; Parker, 1994,1996). By the late 1980s, therefore, on the basis both of research findings and of practical experience around the world, it was becoming clear that a far more complex set of social, structural, and cultural factors mediate the structure of risk in every population group, and that the dynamics of individual psychology could never explain (or stimulate) changes in sexual conduct without taking these broader issues into account (Aggieton, 1996b; Aggieton and Coates, 1995; Parker, 1994, 1996; Sweat and Dennison, 1995; Watney, 1990).

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, a range of broader forces had begun to be understood as central to a more adequate understanding of the social dimensions of the HIV and AIDS epidemic, as well as of related aspects of sexual health; at the same time, the limitations of traditional behavioral research approaches were becoming apparent, particularly with regard to developing interventions. Strongly influenced by changes within interactionist sociology and cultural anthropology, by moves to radicalize social psychology, and by insights from new fields such as womens studies and gay and lesbian studies, attention turned to the broader social and cultural structures and meanings shaping or constructing sexual experience in given settings. Stimulated by social constructionist concerns, an important shift began from a focus on individual psychology to a new concern with intersubjective cultural meanings related to sexuality, and with their shared and collective qualities not as the property of atomized or isolated individuals, but of social persons integrated within distinct, and diverse, cultures. Such research has increasingly sought to go beyond calculation of behavioral frequencies and identification of statistical correlates of sexual risk behavior to examine what sex means to the parties involved, the contexts in which it takes place, the structure and scripting of sexual encounters, and the sexual cultures (and subcultures) present and emergent within particular societies (see for example Aggieton, 1996b; Herdt and Lindenbaum, 1992; Kippax and Crawford, 1993; Parker, 1994, 1995; Parker, Herdt, and Carballo, 1991)⁴

The focus of much important sexuality research over the past decade has thus moved from behavior to the cultural settings within which behavior takes place—and to the cultural rules that organize behavior (Parker and Aggieton, 1999). Special emphasis has been given to analyzing the indigenous cultural categories and classification systems that structure and define sexual experience in different social and cultural contexts. It has become increasingly apparent that many key categories and classifications (such as homosexuality or prostitution) hitherto used to describe sexual behaviors in Western medicine and public health epidemiology are far from universal—and far from unchanging in meaning even where they exist (see for example Alonso and Koreck, 1989; Aggieton, 1996a; Daniel and Parker, 1993; Herdt, 1997; Herdt and Lindenbaum, 1992; Lancaster, 1992, 1995, 1997; Parker and Aggieton, 1999; Parker, 1994,1995; Parker and Carballo, 1990; Parker, Herdt, and Carballo, 1990; Patton, 1990; de Zald- uondo, 1991). By focusing more carefully on local categories and classifications, the cultural analysis of sexual meanings has sought to move from what, in anthropology or linguistics, might be described as an outsider perspective to what is described as an insider perspective—and from the experience-distant concepts of science to the experience-near concepts that members of specific cultures use to understand and interpret their own reality (Geertz, 1983; Parker, 1989, 1991, 1994,!995)-

This shift of emphasis from study of individual behaviors to research on cultural meanings has drawn attention to the socially constructed identities and communities structuring sexual practice within collective fife (Aggieton, 1996b; Kippax and Crawford, 1993; Parker, 1991, 1994, 1995). On the basis of such work, an important reformulation of the very notion of intervention has begun—indeed, it has become increasingly apparent that the idea of behavioral intervention may be a misnomer, that preventive interventions almost never function at the level of behavior but, rather, at the level of social or collective representations, and that new knowledge about perceived sexual risk is always necessarily interpreted within the context of preexisting systems of meaning, which mediate the incorporation of such information into action (Kippax and Crawford, 1993; Parker, 1994, 1995). Precisely because action has increasingly come to be understood as socially constructed and collective, earlier forms of behavioral intervention have increasingly given way to community based, culturally grounded, education and prevention programs aimed at transforming norms and values and reconstituting collective meanings to effectively promote safer sexual practices (Aggieton, 1996b; Kippax, Connell, Dowsett, and Crawford, 1993; Parker, 1994, 1996).

While the work emerging on the social and cultural construction of sexual meanings has thus provided important new insights on the factors shaping sexual health, and has increasingly offered the basis for more culturally sensitive, community based programs, it has also become evident that the factors influencing the construction of sexual realities are more complex than originally perceived, and that the social, cultural, political, and economic dimensions of sexual fife are more complicated than once imagined. Perhaps in consequence, attention has more fully focused on the ways different communities structure the possibilities of sexual interaction, thereby defining a given range of potential sexual partners and practices. Whom one is permitted to have sex with, in what ways, under what circumstances, and with what specific outcomes are never random; such possibilities are defined through explicit and implicit rules imposed by the sexual cultures of specific communities, and by the underlying power relations. This increasing awareness of the ways sexual communities structure the possibilities of sexual contact has drawn special attention to socially and culturally sanctioned differentials in power—particularly between men and women (see for example de Zalduondo and Bernard, 1995; Rao Gupta and Weiss, 1995; Heise, 1995; Lancaster, 1992; Parker, 1991; Parker and Barbosa, 1996; Stein, 1990), but also, in some instances, between different types of men (see Aggieton, 1996a; Lancaster, 1992, 1995, 1997; Parker, 1991, 1999; Prieur, 1998).

Because sexual cultures organize sexual inequality in specific ways, cultural rules and regulations place specific limitations on the potential for negotiation in sexual interactions—and in turn condition the possibilities for sexual violence, for patterns of contraceptive use, for HIV/AIDS risk-reduction strategies, and so on. The dynamics of gender power relations have thus become a major focus for contemporary research, particularly in relation to reproductive health and to the rapid spread of HIV infection among women in many parts of the world (see for example Ginsberg and Rapp, 1995; Rao Gupta and Weiss, 1995; Heise, 1995; Parker and Gagnon, 1995).

This increasing confrontation with issues of power, and with the relationship between culture and power, has forced social research on sexuality to address broader structural issues than previously— issues that, in interaction with culturally constituted systems of meaning, play a key role in organizing the sexual field and defining the possibilities open to sexual subjects (Parker and Easton, 1998). New theoretical approaches are reaching beyond postmodernism, while still embracing postmodernist problematizations of sex, gender, race, and class, to offer more grounded and politically relevant research agenda within the context of rapid social change characterizing the processes of late-twentieth-century globalization (see, in particular, Harvey, 1990. See specifically in relation to sex research, Lancaster, 1995, 1997; Parker and Gagnon, 1995; Parker, 1999).

Work casting the body as both a symbolic and a material product òf culture has provided an especially important way of reframing recent sexuality research (see for example Lancaster, 1992; Parker, 1999; Bishop and Robinson, 1998). Engaged activist research in response to AIDS, for instance, has insisted upon the necessity of evaluating class and ethnicity (see for example Dowsett, 1996; Patton, 1990; Watney, 1994; and Treichler, 1992). More broadly, a growing critical literature has begun to emerge examining colonialism and neocolonialism as contexts of power shaping regimes of sexuality (see for example Hyam, 1990; Manderson and Jolly, 1997; Stoler, 1995; Young, 1995). Contextualizing sexuality within political economy has underscored how extensively prevailing notions about sexuality, gender, and desire are fueled by a colonialist mentality that presumes a cross- cultural rigidity and consistency of sexual categories and the durability of geographic and cultural boundaries imposed by Western scholars (Manderson and Jolly, 1997; Parker and Gagnon, 1995; Parker and Easton, 1998). One key challenge confronting sexuality research has thus emerged as the urgent need to rethink the effects of colonialism and neo-colonialism not only on the construction of sexuality (both North and South), but on the ways research has been conducted and the voices that have been allowed to speak. Perhaps most important, a new wave of researchers working from a range of subaltern contexts has begun to make itself heard: feminist, and gay and lesbian, researchers, to be sure, but increasingly researchers not only from the Northern, Anglo-European world, but also from the countries and cultures of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

By the mid-1990s, then, just as social and cultural analysis emerged as an important corrective to the perceived limitations of earlier behavioral approaches, a new focus on political and economic analysis of the factors associated with the social construction of sexual experience, and structuring the possibilities for social and sexual change, thus emerged as central to an evolving field of research focusing on gender, sexuality, and power in the contemporary world. Taken together, such recent studies have also suggested important reformulations in the ways research might feed into intervention, prevention activities, and struggles for political and social change. Perhaps most important, the studies have called attention to the community base necessary for intervention programs, and to the importance of understanding the relationship between sexuality and health in political as well as technical terms. They have also brought attention to the need for structural and environmental programs and activities aimed at transforming the broader social, cultural, political, and economic forces that structure vulnerability (whether to unwanted pregnancy, HIV infection, or sexual oppression and violence), and at enabling members of affected communities to respond more adequately to these forces (Aggieton, 1996b; Sweat and Dennison, 1995; Parker, 1996). In particular, such studies have focused attention on the extent to which struggles for sexual health and sexual well-being, like struggles for sexual rights and sexual citizenship, in cultures around the world must be understood as part of broader processes of social transformation aimed not merely at the reduction of sexual risks but at the redress of social and economic inequality and injustice (Altman 1994; Parker, 1996; Parker and Barbosa, 1996).

The Politics of Gender, Sexuality,

and Power

Taken together, these recent developments in sexuality research, and growing interest on a range of issues impacting the politics of sexuality in specific communities, as well as at a global level, provide the background and foundation for the essays brought together here. While die various chapters explore a range of directions and theoretical perspectives, they are united by a common concern to understand the rapidly changing shape of sex and sexuality around the globe as the twentieth century draws to a close, and by commitment to apply this understanding to concrete struggles for sexual rights, health, and wellbeing. Through their contributions, the authors seek to reconfigure existing notions of gender and sexuality so as to fink them more effectively to understandings of power, resistance, and emancipation. The concept of the sexual subject (and of sexual subjectivity) as a focus not only for investigation but also for action (HIV/AIDS prevention, sexual and reproductive rights advocacy, or related programs of social change) thus lies at the very heart of these texts—and is central to the more general and collective intellectual and political project to which this volume seeks to contribute.

In organizing Framing the Sexual Subject, we have divided the chapters into three major parts that reflect not only the major research directions present in the essays themselves but also three of the most productive areas of current work in the field. Part One, Bodies, Cultures, and Identities, derives from a research tradition informed by social constructionist approaches in gay and lesbian studies, but seeks to reframe and recontextualize questions of sexual identity in new and important ways. In chapter 1, Bodyplay: Corporeality in a Discursive Silence, for example, Gary W. Dowsett builds upon recent work in postmodern theory and criticism to rethink not merely the social con- structíon of sexual identities but the sexual construction of society itself. By focusing on the erotic body and its sexual practices, and by exploring what he describes as the relationality of gay sex, Dowsett draws powerfully on his own positioned experience as both researcher and gay man, and seeks to move beyond the reductionisms of a simplistic positivist sexology, as well as of an overly mechanistic social constructionism in which sexuality emerges as little more than the product of social relations. He argues for a more complex, nuanced understanding of sociality as produced through the enactment of desire—and, by placing sexuality at the center of the creation of sociality, opens new possibilities for understanding the sexual construction of social space, of identities and subjectivities, of desiring collectivities and sexual cultures.

In chapter 2, Masculinity in Indonesia: Genders, Sexualities, and Identities in a Changing Society, Dédé Oetomo focuses on male sexualities and sexual cultures in Indonesia, examining the complex ways the construction of masculinity takes place, not only vis-à-vis women and femininity, but also in relation to the waria gender category and to a variety of types of men who, whether homosexually identified or not, have sex with men. Developing, like Dowsett, an engaged reading of gender based heavily on his own experience as both an academic and a gay activist, Oetomo is able to expand upon the significant attention given to third gender categories in much recent anthropological and cross-cultural research (see for example Garber, 1992; Herdt, 1993; Nanda, 1985, and the critiques in Kulick, 1998, and Prieur, 1998). He can move beyond the obvious risks of objectifying and exoticizing alternative gender realities—the risk, for instance, of adding them as yet another in our collection of exotic sexual butterflies—precisely because he can speak from his own situated position within Indonesian society, and is able to use the waria category to illuminate broader interactive patterns in the construction of gendered subjectivities in Indonesian culture. Oetomo demonstrates the extent to which gender power and sexual domination are not simply a function of gender differences in what he describes as the mainstream sense, but are functions of class distinctions, age differences, and unequal power relations in society.

In the last essay of this section, chapter 3, Male Homosexuality and Seropositivity: The Construction of Social Identities in Brazil, Veriano Terto Jr. extends recent work on emerging homosexual and gay identities and communities in countries such as Brazil (see for example Parker, 1999; Parker and Terto Jr., 1998), to examine how these new forms have been linked to the experience