It is easy to get carried away with the rhetoric of globalisation. From the established players of international capitalism through to the street protestors in Melbourne, Seattle, and Gothenburg, both sides of the globalisation debate agree on its pervasive influence. For good or ill, globalisation is remaking social life and transforming individual lives. Altman acknowledges this, but checks the rhetoric of globalisation with a sense of history and perspective. Globalisation is not quite as startlingly new or homogeneous as some popular accounts would have us believe. There is a long history of social forces that we now might call globalisation, stretching as far back as the fifteenth-century expansion of Europe, if not earlier. Nor does globalisation necessarily herald the demise of the local. Rather, while altering a sense of time and space, globalisation heightens the tension between local and global. Altman has a nice sentence where he describes the difference between reading the Melbourne Age at home and in an internet café overseas. It is a simple comparison, almost glib, but it is the enduring pleasures of the mundane that the rhetoric of globalisation sometimes misses.

From the everyday to the overblown, Altman gives short shrift to the neo-liberal optimism that sees globalisation paving the way for a universal order of democracy and prosperity. The ‘Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention’ it is called. Very crudely, it suggests that countries that have embraced late capitalism, epitomised by McDonald’s, are unlikely to wage war on each other. Altman archly notes that McDonald’s outlets didn’t prevent the NATO bombing of Serbia.

Despite the qualifications, Altman agrees that globalisation is radically transformative and that with the rapid advance of technology and communications, ‘no aspect of life remains untouched by global forces’. The aspect that most interests Altman is sexuality, and he makes a persuasive case that changes in sexuality reflect and are products of the broader process of globalisation. This should hardly come as a surprise to those who have followed his work. Well before the advent of Foucault, Altman was arguing that gender, sex, and the body were crucial sites of power. If, in Global Sex, Altman gets a bit cranky that this academic legacy has been forgotten in the 1990s rush to embrace discourse and textual analyses of sex and gender, then you can hardly blame him.

Read in this light, Global Sex might be seen as reasserting intellectual territory. To a certain extent it is. Postmodern theorists hover as intellectual opponents in this text, although their form is suitably vague. Still, you wouldn’t want to be caught reading the work of the Parisian set in one of Professor Altman’s seminars. The strength of this book, however, is that it goes beyond witty and often telling swipes at postmodernism to argue for a political economy of sexuality. In what may now seem an unlikely approach, Altman argues for the study of the material reality of sexuality. In his third chapter, he begins to outline what this might look like. His emphasis is upon the connections between the economic, the cultural and the political rather than representation, identity and discourse.

For theoretical inspiration, Altman returns to those two great theorists of modernity, Marx and Freud. This has been tried before, of course, not least by Altman in Homosexual (1970). A generation of feminist scholars followed, desperately trying to marry Marx and Freud. Most gave up, and some time in the 1980s a drove of feminist and gay/lesbian scholars became poststructuralists or therapists. A few brave souls tried both.

More postmodern than he is willing to acknowledge, Altman has relinquished the grand dreams of his youth and no longer hankers for the harmonious union of Marx and Freud. But if Altman has abandoned utopia, a persistent desire for a fairer and more equitable global division of wealth and dignity continues to drive his work. And he is reluctant, rightly so, I think, to relinquish the splendid modern tools of Marxism and psychoanalysis in his analysis of global sex. We need both materialist and psychoanalytic stories, he suggests, to better understand the forces and effects of globalisation. Likewise, harnessing globalisation to promote social justice – rather than widening the gap between rich and poor – requires an appreciation of inner and outer worlds, and their complex interrelationship.

How you read the rest of Global Sex may depend upon your sympathy for this sort of praxis, another unfashionable word. Altman takes us on a global tour of sex, from the AIDS crisis in Africa and Asia, where he denounces the hypocrisy of governments that cloak their inaction with appeals to ‘traditional Africanness’ and ‘Asian values’, back to the sexual contradictions of globalisation’s heartland, the United States. This is unashamedly big picture stuff, veering in the same sentence from the global to the miniscule. The links and exhibits of globalisation are occasionally idiosyncratic, more souvenirs of Altman’s global journeying than traditional political science, but I was more than happy to watch the slide show. You might quibble with his method, but Altman’s lucid passion for a more equitable world demands respect.