ABSTRACT
‘Sexual health’ has become a general-purpose banner for a bewildering assortment of initiatives. Even as the ideal of achieving sexual health remains elusive and subject to debate, the benefits and costs of promoting it are unevenly distributed in society. While the ambiguities in the meanings of sexual health pose challenges for those who wish to work with the concept, they also provide opportunities to connect the concept more forcefully to a programme of social justice that emphasises issues of agency, pleasure, equity and collective self-determination. To promote justice in the face of the social inequalities that structure the different worlds of sexual health, I argue for applying specific criteria to the social evaluation of sexual health campaigns. Initiatives that extend agency to those historically treated as objects, promote the voices of those more often silenced and support the extension of community-based sexual health expertise are most likely to advance health in the broadest sense while also articulating with goals of promoting pleasure, rights and justice.
