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.