Summary

Sexualities: Personal Lives and Social Policy explores the choices that we make about our sexuality and how these can transform our personal lives. It analyses how social policy informs and responds to such choices through an examination of normative assumptions about sexuality and its role in forming, regulating and constituting welfare subjects, discourses, theories, provisions and practices.

Drawing upon a number of analytical tools and theoretical perspectives, the authors illustrate that sexuality is simultaneously central and marginal to the concerns of social policy. They place particular emphasis on social policy as a site of regulation that restricts and constrains our personal lives, but also highlight how social policy might be used as an instrument of positive change.