Liquid Love: Zygmunt Bauman’s thesis on sex revisited

In Liquid Love (2003) Zygmunt Bauman argued that within liquid modernity a consumer driven, adiaphoric, sexual free for all had emerged, rooted in an intense unregulated individualism. Sexuality was identified by Bauman as one of the areas of social life that had become privatised; that the state had withdrawn from regulation. Liquid Love is identified as one application too far for Bauman’s liquefaction thesis in that the book highlights the commonality that exists between solid and liquid modernity in terms of the regulation of personal life. In contrast to Bauman’s thesis, more sexual activities have become criminalised, people previously marginalised as sexually the Other are encouraged to incorporate their relationships within previously heterosexual arrangements such as marriage and more populations are regulated in terms of their most intimate of behaviours. Sexuality, state regulation, modernity, Bauman, sex and relationships education