Blackwell Reference Online

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“Sexual politics” refers to the contestation of power relations with respect to sex, gender, and sexuality. The concept originates in the second-wave feminist movement which emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s in western societies. Its definitive textual origin is Kate Millett's Sexual Politics , first published in 1970, one of the founding works of the emerging women's liberation movement which provided a social and political analysis of “patriarchy” – the social system of rule by men. For Millett, “sexual politics” expressed the idea that “sex is a status category with political implications,” and this implied challenging the distinction between public and private which reproduced inequality between men and women by consigning concerns about sex and sexuality to a non-political private realm. The concept is now widely used in academia and in popular culture to refer to a range of struggles over sex, gender, and sexuality, although the scope and implications of sexual politics remain highly contested. The idea of sexual politics was revolutionary for sociology. Power relations between men and women which had previously been interpreted as the appropriate expression of biological differences (e.g., in the work of Talcott Parsons) were acknowledged as the products of society, history, and culture, and hence as politically accountable. Feminists sought to distinguish sex, understood ... log in or subscribe to read full text