Looking critically at sexualities across the world today entails hard empirical and theoretical work to transcend the problematic opposition between a fixed and inflexible traditional culture and a fluid and flexible individualist modernity, an opposition that has suff used much European sexual science for more than a century. New models that bifurcate our world— between the Global North and the Global South— can perpetuate earlier imperial oppositions between the civilized and the savage, the modern and the
traditional. The complex relation between individual and collective experience in sexual and reproductive life needs to be witnessed in all places and all times in human history. There have been dynamic fl ows between sexual knowledge and practice in different locales throughout human history, but these have intensifi ed with the hyper- connectivity of contemporary digital and virtual worlds. Thus, understanding and analyzing sexualities anywhere today has to acknowledge the interpenetration of local and global elements in diverse “glocal” situations. This volume amply reveals the diversity of glocal sexual literacies and attests to the critical importance of situated analysis.

In Gilbert Herdt, Michelle Marzullo and Nicole Polen Petit (eds) 2021, Critical Sexual Literacy: Forecasting Trends in Sexual Politics, Diversity and Pedagogy. London: Anthem Press, 195–204.