Welcome to SEXTURES, a new critical hypertext in the arts, humanities and social sciences dedicated to exploring the translations of politics and cultures into sexualities. SEXTURES is a transdisciplinary space for new thinking about sexualities opened up by the development of queer, gay and lesbian, postcolonial, and feminist political, cultural and social thought in the Balkans, Central and Eastern Europe. While our primary focus is on attracting sexuality scholars from these regions, we welcome submissions from sexuality researchers from all over the world. One of our main goals is to challenge the Western hegemony of knowledge production in the field of sexuality studies.

SEXTURES is an inclusive, rhizomatic, organic and perennially unfinished network of the intellectual, social and sexual precariat of these regions coming together in a transdisciplinary examination of the junctures where theory encounters diverse sexual practices, social and cultural sites, identities, laws, policies, knowledges, disciplines and everyday life. SEXTURES is both a refereed international academic e-journal that aims to promote cutting edge research on sexualities, and a virtual gathering place for ideas, concepts, research projects and people vitally interested in the construction, experience and regulation of sex and sexual identities in the Balkans, Central and Eastern Europe. In both roles, we envisage SEXTURES as a giant, never-finished, and ongoing virtual conference on sexualities, presenting works in many thematic strands.

In a true hypertextual manner, we aim to blur the boundaries between academic disciplines, between fiction and non-fiction writing, poetry and journalism, reportage and high theory, political economy and queer theory, centres and peripheries, us and them. We aim to support new genres of academic writing and new forms of thinking in the humanities, arts and social sciences. Our driving force is emancipatory and our exploratory trajectories move from the personal and local to the regional and global.

Although our beginnings are very humble, we hope that with time we will live up to the networking, linking, storing, writing, reading and gathering potential of the hypertextual organization of information made possible by the World Wide Web and bring you fresh, exciting, incisive, powerful, provocative, bold, controversial, critical and influential texts and audiovisual artifacts on Balkan, Central and Eastern European sexualities that cut across and between politics, visual art, media, culture, philosophy, policy analysis, economics, film, history, law, sociology, comparative literatures, linguistics, public health, epidemiology, psychology, science, medicine, cultural studies, anthropology and music. We hope to cover and influence all the major contemporary sexuality debates, struggles and issues in these regions and globally.

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