Introduction

Abstract

The sexual subject is both a pervasive and elusive figure. It can be viewed in many different ways: as a therapeutic subject, a biological individual or as a historical subject, born in a specific time and space. What is clear is that, despite successive deconstructive moves, it seems we cannot do otherwise than presuppose that subjectivity necessarily has a sexual dimension. The sexual subject this book is concerned with is the subject who has become entitled to be sexual as a subject of rights. In other words, it offers a reflection on the production of the sexual subject within the tradition of political liberalism as a subject who, on the one hand, is entitled to become a subject of rights on the basis of having a sexuality; and on the other hand, is a subject that becomes sexual on the basis of the rights that such a subject is entitled to claim. What has been gained and lost by the re-inscription of emancipationist or liberationist ideals of sexual freedom and justice under the language of rights? In posing this question, the book is ultimately an invitation to try to find paths for imagining sexual freedom beyond the ontology of the liberal individual, and proposes that one path to do so is by paying attention to the psychosocial formation of sexuality. The reasons for this are twofold. My psychosocial approach to the sexual is intended to understand the rigid way in which hegemonic imaginaries attach desire to self-identity. But also, this approach is one that insists on those instances where desire and pleasure give us hints of their partial and unruly nature, as well as their constitutive liminality. In this interstice of the imaginary between matter and signification, soma and fantasy, between the subject and its otherness, both within and without, we may find the possibility of imagining sexual freedom in more democratic ways.