Sex and Sexual Identity

Abstract

The primary sources for this chapter are all fictional Utopias and this chapter focuses almost entirely on the content of these texts (rather than matters of style or textual/literary technique). Much of the popular culture of twenty-first-century western societies is highly sexualized and I want to explore the ways in which this is treated in contemporary Utopian texts. There are dozens of these and this century has seen an explosion of short stories that play with ideas about sex. We will encounter a number of different kinds of utopianism at work (and play) in this chapter. For example, sex as treated as a commodity and the body as a site of retail opportunity. The concept of disneyfication, or sham utopianism, introduced in Chapter 1 is writ large in some of these stories. Perfectionism arises once more and is rejected, again. This chapter is, in some ways, a piece of light relief. Many of the sources for this chapter fool around with the idea of sex and Utopia in the twenty-first century. These are naughty, playful and quite rude. They tweak and torment ideas, norms and practices, stretching them to extremes until they snap. But this is serious play.

But love is blind, and lovers cannot see the pretty follies that themselves commit.

(Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, Act II Scene 6)