ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates current protocols for interpreting and managing women’s “low sexual desire.” Through dysfunction discourses and diagnostic technologies, women who lack desire or are “unreceptive” to initiating partners are understood as in need of affective regulation and management and are ultimately produced as a group or population. My analysis suggests an institutionalized feminized responsive desire framework that consists of four facets: (1) new sexual response models said to describe women’s “circular” sexuality; (2) technologies that measure women’s (“low”) psychological desire against their (“high”) physiological arousal, and proclaim many women “discordant” when these two measures are compared; (3) new treatment regimens designed to boost desire; and (4) a new woman-specific low desire diagnosis in the DSM-5: female sexual interest/arousal disorder (FSIAD). This framework exemplifies a trend toward positioning women as more sexually receptive, responsive, complex, nonlinear, disconnected, and “incentive motivated” than men. Contemporary treatments for low desire are increasingly promoted to help “discordant” women “bridge the gap” between their supposedly reluctant minds and their allegedly aroused bodies, including mindfulness and other “female-friendly” alternative methods. Such treatments – under the guise of promoting happiness, pleasure, health, and wellness – ultimately prescribe heteronormative feminized modes of embodiment, intimacy, and relationality.
