The Right to Sex

A Sunday Times Bestseller Blackwell's Book of the Year 2021

Essential lessons on the world we live in, from one of our greatest young thinkers – a guide to what everybody is talking about today

'Unparalleled and extraordinary . . . A bracing revivification of a crucial lineage in feminist writing' Jia Tolentino

'I believe Amia Srinivasan's work will change the world' Katherine Rundell

'Rigorously researched, but written with such spark and verve. The best non-fiction book I have read this year' Pandora Sykes

How should we talk about sex?

It is a thing we have and also a thing we do; a supposedly private act laden with public meaning; a personal preference shaped by outside forces; a place where pleasure and ethics can pull wildly apart.

To grasp sex in all its complexity – its deep ambivalences, its relationship to gender, class, race and power – we need to move beyond 'yes and no', wanted and unwanted. We need to rethink sex as a political phenomenon.

Searching, trenchant and extraordinarily original, The Right to Sex is a landmark examination of the politics and ethics of sex in this world, animated by the hope of a different one.

Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2022
Longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize 2022
Longlisted for the British Academy Book Prize 2022

About the Author

Amia Srinivasan was born in 1984 in Bahrain and raised in London, New York, Singapore and Taiwan. She is currently the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford, and has held permanent or visiting academic posts at University College London, Yale, NYU and UCLA. She has written on subjects as diverse as sex, death, octopuses, suicide, anger, education and many others for publications including the London Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor, the New Yorker, the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Times. She lives in Oxford.