Main description:

Offering an entryway into the distinctive worlds of sexual health and a window onto their spillover effects, sociologist Steven Epstein traces the development of the concept and parses the debates that swirl around it.

Since the 1970s, health professionals, researchers, governments, advocacy groups, and commercial interests have invested in the pursuit of something called "sexual health." Under this expansive banner, a wide array of programs have been launched, organizations founded, initiatives funded, products sold-and yet, no book before this one asks: What does it mean to be sexually healthy? When did people conceive of a form of health called sexual health? And how did it become the gateway to addressing a host of social harms and the reimagining of private desires and public dreams?

Conjoining "sexual" with "health" changes both terms: it alters how we conceive of sexuality and transforms what it means to be healthy, prompting new expectations of what medicine can provide. Yet the ideal of achieving sexual health remains elusive and open-ended, and the benefits and costs of promoting it are unevenly distributed across genders, races, and sexual identities. Rather than a thing apart, sexual health is intertwined with nearly every conceivable topical debate-from sexual dysfunction to sexual violence, from reproductive freedom to the practicalities of sexual contact in a pandemic. In this book Steven Epstein analyzes the rise, proliferation, uptake, and sprawling consequences of sexual health activities, offering critical tools to assess those consequences, expand capacities for collective decision making, and identify pathways that promote social justice.

Contents:

List of Abbreviations
List of Illustrations

Introduction: Catching Sexual Health

Part One: Making Sexual Health: Invention, Dispersion, and Reassembly
Chapter 1: A New Definition and the Backstory: Inventing Sexual Health
Chapter 2: Proliferation and Ambiguity: The Buzzwording of Sexual Health
Chapter 3: New Projects of Health, Rights, and Pleasure: Recombining Sexual Health

Part Two: Operationalizing Sexual Health: Enabling Science, Medicine, and Health Care
Chapter 4: Sexuality in the Medical Encounter: Standardizing Sexual Health
Chapter 5: Diagnostic Reform and Human Rights in the ICD: Classifying Sexual Health
Chapter 6: Surveys and the Quantification of Normality: Enumerating Sexual Health
Chapter 7: The New Sexual Health Experts: Evaluating Sexual Health

Part Three: Under the Sign of Sexual Health: Beyond the Worlds of Science and Medicine
Chapter 8: The Pursuit of Wellness: Optimizing Sexual Health
Chapter 9: Social Risks, Rights, and Duties: Governing via Sexual Health
Chapter 10: Bridges to the Future: Repoliticizing Sexual Health

Conclusion: Whither Sexual Health?

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index