ABSTRACT
This chapter will seek to uncover some of the silences and omitted areas of sexual health and human sexuality, such as pleasure and desire, two key terms within human sexuality which nevertheless are all but absent in public policy discourse. The argument will be made that many national strategies that deal with sexual health in the SDG era proclaim they are holistic and human centered, yet desire and pleasure as part of human sexuality and well-being are glossed over and entirely omitted. Indeed, the argument can be made that sexual health as an object of health governance seems to foreclose any reading of pleasure as part of health and human sexuality. The question that remains, then, is: How sustainable is it to produce multiple strategies, reports, and commentaries on sexual health in the era of the SDGs while at the same time evacuating pleasure, a cornerstone and fundamental aspect of human sexuality, so completely?
