ABSTRACT
Sex and sexuality are inextricably bound up with medicine in the West today. Sexual desires,
sexual health, and sexual identities are both subjects for medical practice and objects of
extensive scientific study. This is evident in multiple ways. As a discipline, medicine has
developed a detailed language to describe and discuss sexual issues, and has established
numerous professional journals and societies to support the scientific and medical study of
sex. The medical knowledge produced in these journals and relevant textbooks and clinical
guidelines understands some sexual behaviors and identities as illnesses and produces treatments
to address these. These treatments, including pharmaceutical and behavioral interventions,
are offered to patients presenting with sexual problems in general practitioners’ and specia-
lized clinics. In public health campaigns around sexually transmitted diseases, members of the
general population and specific targeted groups are given medical information and encour-
aged to change their sexual behaviors in order to protect their physical health. In all of these
cases, particular versions of sex and sexuality are produced or performed in interactions
amongst medical professionals, scientists, patients, and members of populations. Sex and
sexuality, in other words, are not ‘‘natural’’ objects worked on or taken up by medicine, but
are produced in these interactions in particular ways.