Whereas ‘sex’ implies gender, the sexual act and/or sexual enjoyment, sexuality further implies gender and identity issues that themselves form a nexus of preoccupations, conscious or unconscious, on the part of travellers and travel writers. It is therefore sexuality as much as sex that is prioritized here. Like age, place of birth and nationality, sex or gender are supposedly factual details obligatorily entered on the European traveller's passport. However they are categories that may be quick to unravel or undergo transformation once the traveller is beyond the realm of home society and its shaping pressures and expectations. Indeed for some, the possibility of escaping native expectations – moral, sexual, cultural – is one of travel's keenest attractions. The scope for innovation in this area can be enhanced by chance encounters, an aesthetic project, a scientific investigation (ethnographic, sociological or political) or a combination of these and other factors.

Sex and sexuality in the modern (i.e., post-Renaissance Western) world has been linked with the exotic, in particular as viewed by Europeans, from the age of exploration onwards, becoming explicitly linked in travel writing and literature from the eighteenth century. The encounter of the human other or difference outside the realm of the known produced a shock to the sensual as well as rational categories that gave the exotic powerful sexual or erotic as well as cultural overtones. Such surprises are recorded in Louis-Antoine de Bougainville's exploratory voyages in the Pacific Ocean (Voyage autour du monde, 1771) and elaborated on with gusto by sensualist writers such as Denis Diderot in his Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1772).

The association of indigenous nakedness with European academic painting's representation of nudity was also a powerfully eroticizing dimension of exotic travel. The attractions and illusions of this (mis-)apprehension are nowhere better explored than in the travel experience, travel writing and painting of Paul Gauguin at the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century. For Gauguin, the nakedness of the Tahitians both enhanced and de-eroticized the prurient Western fascination with nudity, in particular as expressed in academic painting.