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The advent of HIV/AIDS as a subject of intense interest, across a broad range of scholarly disciplines, played a major role in promoting the study of sex and sexuality. As we explore below, however, early responses to the epidemic, which highlighted the need for behavioral change, predetermined the direction of much of the social science and epidemiological research for at least a decade. The inadequacy of this approach, with its dual focus on risk and behavior, has only been acknowledged relatively recently. It is therefore timely-not after the fact-that we now review anthropological research related to sexuality, thereby also to foreshadow possible directions of future research.
Studies of gender, sexual identity, and sexuality, and the inter-relationships of these categories, gained prevalence from the 1970s, partly in response to the women's liberation and gay liberation movements and related theoretical and empirical research. Despite these early roots in social movements, much of the research was predefined by medical discourse and dominated by particular disciplines concerned more with the individual than the social contexts in which individuals operate (e.g., psychology). This trend became clearer as social research expanded with HIV/AIDS, and the bulk of anthropological research concerned with sexual behavior in fact has been AIDS-related (Farmer, 1997). Scholarship on sex and sexuality remained a marginal field; this has been the case too, until recently, for more broadly defined studies of the sociology of the body (cf. Featherstone, Hepworth, & Turner, 1991; Turner, 1984). In addition, the field of the study of sexuality remains illdefined: It includes the social construction of sexuality (whether or not in antipathy to biomedical constructs) and of gender (Bolin, 1988), sexual community(ies) (for U.S. examples, see Herdt & Stoller 1990; Newton, 1993; Wolf, 1979; for Brazil: Parker, 1991; Mexico: Carrier, 1995; Prieur, 1997), identity (Herdt & Boxer, 1996), and sexual institutions such as prostitution (see below). Sexuality may refer, for example, to behavior and activities (being sexual or having sex) and to identity (i.e., with respect to having a particular sex), and thus may refer both to biological identity (maleness or femaleness) and to libidinous feelings and/or associated action. Wider definitions, including those used by anthropologists, include the social coordinates of sexual behavior, institutions, and structures. A third focus incorporates both orientation and preference...