With examples from both the north and south of the globe, Women, Sexuality and the Political Power of Pleasure shows how positive approaches to pleasure and sexuality can enhance equality and empowerment for all.

This pioneering collection explores the ways in which positive, pleasure-focused approaches to sexuality can empower women.

Gender and development has tended to engage with sexuality only in relation to violence and ill-health. Although this has been hugely important in challenging violence against women, over-emphasizing these negative aspects has dovetailed with conservative ideologies that associate women's sexualities with danger and fear. On the other hand, the media, the pharmaceutical industry, and pornography more broadly celebrate the pleasures of sex in ways that can be just as oppressive, often implying that only certain types of people - young, heterosexual, able-bodied, HIV-negative - are eligible for sexual pleasure.

Women, Sexuality and the Political Power of Pleasure brings together challenges to these strictures and exclusions from both the South and North of the globe, with examples of activism, advocacy and programming which use pleasure as an entry point. It shows how positive approaches to pleasure and sexuality can enhance equality and empowerment for all.

This volume pulls the threads of sexual pleasure in a variety of directions as to charter connections and gaps between bodies, communities and discourses. Sexual pleasure is a domain of life, theory and research -- particularly in the case of female sexuality -- constantly torn between danger and jouissance, between objectification and empowerment. The editors and authors do not evade these minefields but rather address them as nodes to be de-constructed when articulating social, gender and erotic justice. The final result is also to be appraised as a rich, diverse and hybrid global South and North tapestry of live worlds and voices.