Global Sex - Softcover

The introduction of television to Fiji triggers an outbreak of bulimia, as young women try to emulate the stars of Baywatch. A German tourist in Bangkok solicits a prostitute whom he met on the Internet. Images of a tearful Monica Lewinsky are broadcast on CNN to the farthest reaches of the globe. We really do live in a borderless world. Transportation, mass media, emigration, multinational corporations, advances in modern communications, and new information technologies all bring populations within the scope of an interconnected consumer culture. But this rapid process of globalization changes more than just our world economy. It radically reshapes the way we conceive of ourselves and experience our sexuality.

Global Sex is the first major work to take both the issues of globalization and sexuality head on. Dennis Altman looks at how pleasures of the body are framed, shaped, commercialized, and even commodified in our new global economy, exploring the impact of globalization on gender relations, political power, public health, migration, and the ways in which we imagine our own sense of self and place. Ranging from U.N. debates over abortion, to the advent of cybersex, to the rapid spread of AIDS in Africa, to the sex scandals that rocked both Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim and President Bill Clinton, Global Sex sheds new light on how the personal and the political are now, more than ever, indistinguishable.

Dennis Altman is a professor in the School of Politics, Sociology, and Anthropology at La Trobe University, Australia. He is the author of eight books, including AIDS in the Mind of America and Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation.