[O]ne challenge for future work organized around the keyword “sex” may be to produce research that is more episodic than sequential, more local (and trans-local) than national. Such scholarship needs to focus both on those moments and places where “sex” becomes available as an isolable way of thinking about and experiencing oneself and one’s relations to others, and on those moments and places where “it” does not. The corresponding task, which may call for even greater inventiveness and creativity, involves the archiving and cultivation of alternative vocabularies for thinking and talking about bodies, pleasures, and the political relations between and among them.

This is an excerpt from Bruce Burgett’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (p. 221).