Description:

In recent decades, the idea that people may aspire to something called “sexual health” has traveled widely in both professional and lay domains. My book project examines the rise of new conceptions and formal definitions of sexual health in the 1970s; the remarkable proliferation and diversification of sexual health meanings and projects beginning in the 1990s; and the implications of these new ways of conjoining sexuality and health for science, politics, and selfhood. My talk draws on material from one chapter of the book to consider scientific and bureaucratic projects that seek to operationalize the concept of sexual health in formal ways—in particular, to measure, standardize, survey, and classify it. I examine the development of a number of rationalizing efforts—including sexual health assessment tools, sexual health surveys, and sexual health taxonomies—all of which are intended to produce new truths of sex. I describe three fundamental tensions embedded in these projects that complicate their enactment: between the appeals of simplicity and complexity; between the will to know and the will to not know; and between the goal of defining normality and the urge to destigmatize sexuality. Together, these tensions shed light on how sexual truth-making is transformed by its conjunction with the imperative of health.