'So few colleges and universities bother to teach human sexuality...so much stigma adheres even to scholarly investigation of sex,' Gayle Rubin lamented in her 1984 essay 'Thinking Sex'. But it was an academic conference on Rubin's work - 'Rethinking Sex', a lavish threeday event, held at the University of Pennsylvania in 2009 - that provided the initial impetus for Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman to enter into a dialogue on sexuality. The result is Sex, or the Unbearable, published by Duke University Press, the first in a series on queer theory edited by the authors.