This article argues for a more systematic inclusion of human sexuality in studies of ethnicity and nationalism. Reviewing key extant social science research on sexuality, it highlights how scholars can leverage its theories, methods, and findings to enhance our understanding of the ways people build imagined ethnic and national communities and draw symbolic boundaries around them. This research reveals that sexuality is not tangential to those activities. Rather, policymakers, religious institutions, local communities, families, and other organizations all participate in more or less obvious ways to define what kinds of sexual desires, behaviours, and identities are acceptable for legitimate citizenship and group belonging. Those decisions have ramifications on both the global scale of international relations and the local scale of personal self-understanding. For these reasons, this article argues that scholarship that elides sexuality may run the risk of painting an incomplete picture of social processes related to ethnicity and nationalism.

中文翻译：

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性对于种族和民族主义研究的重要性

本文主张在种族和民族主义研究中更系统地纳入人类性行为。回顾有关性的现存关键社会科学研究，它强调了学者如何利用其理论、方法和发现来增强我们对人们建立想象的种族和民族社区的方式的理解，并围绕它们划定符号界限。这项研究表明，性与这些活动无关。相反，政策制定者、宗教机构、当地社区、家庭和其他组织都以或多或少明显的方式参与，以确定合法公民身份和群体归属可以接受什么样的性欲、行为和身份。这些决定对国际关系的全球范围和个人自我理解的本地范围都有影响。出于这些原因，本文认为，忽略性的学术可能会冒着描绘与种族和民族主义相关的社会过程的不完整图景的风险。