Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The globalization of sexuality refers to the sexualized and embodied nature of processes associated with the movement of people, capital, and goods across national boundaries. It also refers to how the consciousness of the world as a single place is sexualized. The globalization of sexuality is manifest in a range of processes and phenomena that are often couched and approached in highly emotive terms (e.g., the trafficking of women into prostitution, mail-order brides, the development of the sex industry and sex tourism). It is also characterized by the AIDS pandemic, mass international tourism, and the development of cyberspace. Each of these has in turn intensified consciousness of the status of sexual minorities and the unevenness of their treatment across the globe. Key to our understandings of the globalization of sexuality is the relationship between sexuality and economics. While debates on the globalization of gay identity have been marked by an ambivalence over the development of gay identities and politicized communities outside of the West, work on the globalization of sexuality more generally has tended to have been marked by concerns with the worse excesses of what Smith (1997) has termed the “satanic geographies of globalization.” Here we are concerned with the trafficking of women forced into prostitution. Contemporary moral panics on the scale and extent of the ... log in or subscribe to read full text