Gender and Sexuality. Stevi Jackson

of complex and intersecting local and global inequalities. This situation also raises questions of culture, of the meaning of sex and gender and beliefs about them in different cultures, and of the western racialized image of Thailand in general, and Thai women in particular, as exotically other. There are also questions of agency and identity: our male sex tourist makes a choice to go to Thailand, and his choices reflect his masculine identity; the women who service him have fewer choices, but are not necessarily lacking in agency and may be acting in terms of their own identities, for example as filial daughters sending money back to their rural families. These issues will be addressed in Parts III and IV. For now it is worth noting that in any social situation, structural, cultural and subjective aspects of sociality are all in play.

      In Part II, however, we are concerned with social structure and systematic gendered and sexual inequalities. These include not just those evident in our example, but the inequalities within our own modern western societies, which are so much part of our social landscape that they are frequently taken for granted as ‘just the ways things are’. We will also be considering the social institutions that shape and regulate gender and sexual relations, from the global commodity market that features in our example to institutionalized heterosexuality. We will therefore be dealing with sociological perspectives that seek to analyse the structure of societies, explain how particular structural arrangements arise, persist and change, and how they have shaped gender and sexuality.