29 Sex and Power: Gapillailes, Capabilities and Capacities ELSPETH PROBYN INTROOUCTION Sex and power: what could be more compelling, and immediate? A once radical, now seemingly mandatory term within sociology and femi- nism, does the pairing of sex and power need rethinking? In theory, as in practice, the con- joining of sex and power reveals the intricacy of how subjectivities are ordered and identi- ties regulated. By linking sex with power it becornes possible to foreground routes of power that continually cross the macro, the micro, the structural and the subjective, differ- entially articulating the social, the cultural and the economic. While the question of sex and power is of crucial importance to sociology, in this chapter I argue that th€ dominant ways in which it is framed threaten to render it impotent. This is not to say that there have not been innovative ways of addressing the question of sex and power. Increasingly, however, the debate is divided by an insistence on the one side that we privilege a materialist analysis, and on the other that the question is best analysed in terms of discourse and representation. One camp follows a Marxist or a post-Marxist line that calls for - although it does not often deliver - a oolitical economv of sex. The other camp, which includes some feminisms and much of queer theory, argues that an analysis of the discursive realm of representations pro- vides the most acute understanding of the workings of sex and power. Dennis Altman's book Global Ser (2001) exemplifies and reproduces this division. Altman is a well-known and respected writer on homosexuality and he has been deeply involved in HIV research, especially in terms o[ the Southeast Pacific region. Given his exper- tise in matters of sexuality and his commit- ment to HIV/AIDS research one would think that he is ideally suited to guide us through 'global sex'. Unfortunately, in the stead of a 'thick description', we mcrely get polemic. The positions against which Altman argues are variously named as postmodern feminism, cultural studies, queer, or ludic theory. Altman's dismissal of discourse and repres€ntation, and the absence in his book ofa sustained argument for terms that might replace them, is deeply worrisome for the field of studies on sexuality. It is, as I have suggested, all too common. The deep antipathies that divide the field produce a bifurcated situation, with sociology on the side ofthe structural and economic, ignoring or repudiating analyses of how hegemony is constituted and maintained symbolically.