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’ offices and specialized clinics. In public health campaigns around sexually transmitted diseases, members of the general population and specific targeted groups are given medical information and encouraged 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.