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Introduction
Critical Currents in Sexuality Studies
Joel Gwynne and Angelia Poon
A common thread running through critical scholarship on sexuality in the humanities and social science disciplines over the last five decades has been the attempt to dismantle essentialist notions of sexuality. The view that sex is unchanging, asocial and transhistorical was one disseminated by medicine, science, psychiatry and psychology for well over a century. In nineteenth-century Europe, for example, fear of the dangers of sexuality fed the field of sexology and led to essentialist investigations into human sexuality which advocated medical intervention to protect individuals from the destructive effects of their own desires. Essentialist arguments surrounding sexuality have historically cast the subject as a shameful and taboo one, and even within relationships where sex is sanctioned—namely heterosexual marital relationships—sexuality is often a difficult subject to navigate and negotiate. Michael Warner observes that “the possibility of abject shame is never entirely out of the picture,” for “if