This chapter provides an overview of Buddhist sexualities ranging from monastic celibacy in India, China and Japan, to Buddhist lay sexualities, to altruistic sexuality in Indian Mahayana Buddhism. It then examines religious sexuality in tantra in India and Tibet, including transgressive discourses in Indian Buddhist liturgies and sexual yoga techniques in Tibetan Buddhist literature. The chapter argues that these diverse and contradictory discourses all represent a shared concern with regulating sexuality and harnessing it for soteriological purposes. Both the renunciation of sensual experience in Indian monastic literature and the embrace of sensual experience in Tibetan sexual yoga have been framed as means for relieving suffering and attaining soteriological success. With examples from Vinaya literature, yogini tantras, premodern and contemporary literature, this chapter highlights the rich diversity of Buddhist sexualities and gender constructs.

In this chapter, we examine the evolving definition of sex tourism. Through a comprehensive literature review focusing on Latin America and the Caribbean, we assess the long history of commodified sex and travel and the difficulties in defining the practice as exclusive to heterosexual men purchasing sex or as a phenomenon exclusive to the Global South. A case study of Havana, Cuba, contributes to a deeper understanding of how colonial cities benefitted from commodified sex connected to travellers and racialized bodies. In analyzing the scholarship on sex tourism, we appreciate the heterogeneity of arrangements, identities, ambiguity, and fluidity of relationships. Both hosts and guests are looking for opportunities to enhance their lives and to challenge the gender, sexual, and racial dictates of their society. Tourist-related intimacies, therefore, are used for personal and familial gains and mobility in the global political economy. The findings reveal that while some studies have adopted narrow definitions, a more comprehensive approach argues for understanding sex tourism as part of a spectrum of intimate encounters that combine sex and money, encompassing everything from marriage to sex work.

Although Spanish-speaking lands are often imagined as lands of sexual intolerance, Buenos Aires is better characterized by ineffectual repression and by its recent celebration of sexual diversity. In this chapter we analyze sexuality in Buenos Aires against the backdrop of economic, socio-demographic, cultural, and political transformations that often undermined the regulations of authorities. The decades between 1880, when Buenos Aires became the capital, and the overthrow of President Juan Perón in 1955 were crucial for the formation of modern Argentina and constitute its focus. We begin with some preceding historical trends in the colonial and early independent era, and end with a succinct analysis of a few salient trends after 1955, especially those leading to Buenos Aires becoming a leader of LGBTQ+ rights in the twenty-first century. We discuss immigration, class differences in sexual behaviours, commercialized sex, sexual diversity with marica and homosexual identities, the rise of family sociability, and the push for sexual ‘normalcy’.

The ‘sexual body’ is at once the sexed body identified as male, female, or non-binary, and the body that engages in sexual acts, experiences desire, and is perceived as an erotic object. This chapter explores a wide range of ideas about and experiences of the sexual body in pre-modern European, Native American, Chinese, Islamic, Jewish, Pacific, Māori, and West African cultures. It argues that to take a global historical perspective on sexual bodies it is necessary to consider a wide range of discourses and representations. It begins with sexual bodies in mythology: narratives of human origin from ancient Greek, Native American, Judeo-Christian and Islamic, Chinese, Māori, and West African cultures. Creation stories purvey ideas about sexual difference, desire, beauty, and gender relations that reflect a culture’s deepest belief-systems. Second, it examines sexual bodies in the medical discourses of Western and Chinese history, summarising ancient Western concepts of sex difference as a matter of moisture, heat, and anatomy, and ancient Chinese theories of qi, yinyang, and beauty. Third, it examines sexual embodiment in lived experiences of gender roles and puberty rites, showing that many Indigenous cultures historically accepted people of nonbinary gender.

Domestic violence is a major cause of social exclusion and human rights violations affecting millions of human beings around the world, making them victims of murder, physical, sexual and psychological violence, subjected to humiliation and various types of abuse.The vast majority of these acts of violence are committed against women in intimate relationships. In recent decades, the reflection produced by multiple studies has challenged and encouraged international organizations and governments to develop measures to prevent and combat the phenomenon. However, despite some important steps taken and innovative legal frameworks, there is still a large gap between the law and practice. This chapter presents a critical analysis of the phenomenon considering three dimensions: the contribution of theoretical approaches to its social and political unveiling and to the development of new conceptual paradigms; the evolution of the international political and legal agenda; and, based on the experiences of two countries, Portugal and East Timor, the challenges to public policies and the role of the courts in preventing and combating domestic violence against women.

This chapter reviews what can be gleaned about human sexuality from the evolutionary and ethnographic record. Ancestral human sexuality leaves neither fossil nor archaeological evidence, but inferences about how humans mated, consorted, parented, formed partnerships, and aggregated into families can be drawn from two large and growing bodies of work, both discussed in this chapter. The first are anatomical and biological indicators of ancestral mating patterns inferred from fossil evidence as well as observations from nonhuman primates. The second is ethnographic research across an array of contemporary human societies, which highlights variation in mating, marriage, and family structure. Together, biological indicators and cross-cultural patterns shed light on the legacy, constraints, and possibilities carried forward into the diverse and variable expression of human sexuality today. Humans have a deep ancestry in a social structure of males and females living in social groups together, although how humans organize themselves is structurally different from anything observed in our closest relatives. Not only do families form around long-term pairbonds in all societies, but there is also a great deal of flexibility in who constitutes the pairbond, the families that surround them, and in the prevalence of extra-pair relationships.

Eugenics suffused the medical field through its convergence with hygiene and ideologically underpinned governmental policies of national health, maternal health, and venereal disease control in many countries globally, including in Romania and China. This resulted in the creation of Institutes of Social Hygiene in different countries, including in Romania. The writings of Dr Iuliu Moldovan, founder of The Institute of Hygiene and Social Hygiene in Cluj, Romania, offer insights into eugenics and its connection to veneral disease control in Romania. One case study of applying eugenics to public health is the work against venereal disease at the Model Sanitary Station in Gilau between 1924-33 in Transylvania, Romania. This chapter also uncovers transnational medical cooperation to create public health in China by following the international training of Dr Yang Chongrui, a renowned specialist in maternal health. The details of Yang”s Euro-American study tour attest to how she encountered important elements for eugenic public health: hygiene, venereal disease control, lectures on “the mentally defective”, puericulture, facilities for syphilitic children, prisons, and hospitals for indigent women. Yang”s interaction with Andrija Štampar, who arranged her global tours sponsored by League of Nations Health Organization, was also formative in shaping her eugenic beliefs.

This chapter first looks at the primary sources available for the study of sexuality in Tenochtitlan in the sixteenth century, including paintings, sculptures, buildings, prayer books, legal codes, letters, chronicles, and judicial documents. Among the sources, the work directed by the Franciscan Fray Bernardino de Sahagún is the most prominent. The chapter then addresses Nahua principles of sexuality, which were linked to fertility, pleasure, and moderation in sexual activities. When the principle of moderation was not followed, the consequences could be fatal for the community. The differences between social classes in regard to how people should conduct their sexual lives are looked at next; then, the different sexual practices, paying particular attention to attitudes towards these in moral discourses and texts written shortly after the Spanish conquest. In particular, abundant information is given about adultery, prostitution, gender identity, and same-sex relations. Finally, discourses aimed at women exalted virginity before marriage and fidelity to one’s spouse afterwards. By contrast, discourses addressed to men acclaimed the early self-discipline that would be rewarded with a successful marriage and beautiful children.

The main aim of this chapter is to show that sexuality and capitalism are intrinsically related. Such an endeavour demands extracting sex from the domains of nature, reproduction, and the private, and relating it to the intricate norms of capitalism. The first part of the chapter looks at why capitalism and sexuality have been articulated as belonging to separate spheres of life. How did it come to seem that “being a sex” and “having sex” is so entirely removed from the “investment of money to make more money”? The second part of the chapter provides an overview of the historical evolution of capitalism and its relationship to sexuality, focusing on the nineteenth-century transition from the household family-based economy to a fully developed capitalist free labour economy. The main characters of this chapter are homo economicus and his economically invisible wife, the producers of valuable social relations, as well as various “reformable” or “irreformable” others whose sex is deemed of no value or even against value. The chapter presents social relations as capitalist and sexual, and treats the dichotomies social–natural, public–private, and economic–cultural as interwoven in the (de)politicization of both sexuality and capitalism.

Sexuality is one of the few curricular areas so constrained by policy that it often fails to resemble the topic students are interested in learning about or address the pressing concerns to which it was supposedly oriented. Focused on prevention of various sorts – and this often means prevention of all sexual activity, especially for youth – the more positive lessons about what sexuality can be for self-identity, relationality, community-building, and political life remain unaddressed. Though sexuality education has attempted to address the public goods of population health and individual development, too often it has done so without making clear concepts of gender, sex, ethical relationships, pleasure, and community. This chapter traces tensions in sexuality education from the start of its status as part of the official public school curriculum in the late nineteenth century to current debates that continue to shape how sexuality is defined and taught. We highlight continuities and ruptures that have characterized the global spread of sex education, showing how much of what happens in the Global South is shaped by legacies of colonialism and American political priorities. The chapter concludes by considering emerging challenges and opportunities for progress in sex education.

The decades since the Second World War have seen dramatic shifts in the approved varieties of sexual experience in liberal democracies. Sexuality, once regarded as an intensely private matter, is now on display everywhere, on large and small screens. Effective contraception has made what was once primarily a procreative act into a form of recreation, available to both heterosexual and same-sex couples. From being regarded as a privilege of marriage in the 1950s, today access to sex might be regarded as a right. An extreme form of this belief might be seen in the “Incel” movement. Cohesive community ideals about sexuality within marriage disintegrated in the post-war world responding to growing demands to respect a diversity of individual desires. Democracies which hold to faith traditions promote a more traditional view of sex as contained within marriage. The promotion of a responsible sex life has become part of the commitment of many secular liberal democracies to ensure the health and welfare of citizens, particularly in light of AIDS and HPV. Countries have put laws in place to protect citizens from sexual abuse. The global nature of the digital realm, however, makes sexually exploitative visual material difficult to police.

Histories of both emotion and sexuality explore the ways that bodies and embodied practices are shaped by time, culture, and location. This chapter uses the theoretical and methodological insights from the History of Emotions to consider the emotions associated with sexuality and how these have taken cultural form at different moments. It first considers the emotions related to sexual function and desire, noting how different biological models informed what emotions were expected and experienced. It then turns to love as the predominant emotion connected with sexual practices, considering the boundaries of who and what should be incorporated within such feeling. The chapter then turns to an exploration of the emotions, particularly intimacy, of reproductive labour, acknowledging sexual practices, including those are contractual and exploitative, that sometimes sit uneasily within a framework of love. Finally, the chapter highlights some of the emotions produced by the management and policing of sexuality, such as shame and loneliness, recognising that sexuality has been a contested moral domain for many groups. Using diverse examples across time and space, this chapter seeks to denaturalise the emotions of sexuality and to provide a framework upon which further research can build.

Relying on a spectrum of sources tackling sexual practices ranging from the normative and historical to the didactic and entertaining, this chapter approaches sexuality in ninth- and tenth-century Baghdad as an organizing principle in Abbasid society. It focuses on prescriptive sexuality and sexual ethics as they were regulated and delineated in early Islamic religious texts. Sexual practices, depicted mainly in literary texts, are discussed within the context of the institution of the harem. Finally, nonconformist sexuality is addressed through the lens of an eclectic collection of genres ranging from literature and poetry to medical manuals. A comparative appraisal of the sources shows that while in the caliphal harem concubinage eventually replaced marriage, in elite and common urban households marriage appears to remain the dominant institution. Nonconformist heterosexual and homosexual behaviour was generally depicted as part and parcel of the lifestyles of the urban and ruling elite. A main conclusion is that the influx of enslaved women granted the institution of female slavery a prominent historical and discursive role in shaping the contours of normative and nonconformist sexual relations.