EDITORIAL

The eighth issue of Sexuality Health and Society - Latin American Journal assembles a collection of articles representative of some of the main investments in sexuality in the current research landscape of the Region. Among them, the one about the construction and dissemination of the principles of sexual and reproductive rights stands out. The texts that analyze that process do not merely advocate for such rights, but address them as a new language through which subjects perceive themselves, their desires and practices, and position themselves vis-à-vis crucial issues in the current political agenda, such as the right to abortion or the social integration of homosexualities. In different ways they analyze how the language of rights is embodied in the everyday, how it becomes intertwined with other social values, threading a close-knit web of meanings and representations. To that end, the scholars whose reflections we present in this issue master different research techniques and articulate important frameworks of sociological thought, like the ones deriving from symbolic interactionism, and from the anthropology of performance and of emotions.

We also highlight the fact that the texts published here echo dialogs either potential or in progress among scholars, as an invitation to enhance the exercise of comparison between different local and national contexts. Besides bringing new data for an urgent reflection, the article by Mónica Petracci on opinions and representations about abortion by men residing in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area was produced in the context of a collective project that includes Brazilian, Colombian and Uruguayan partners. The text by Moisés Lopes is an explicit comparative contribution, analyzing the way cross-representations regarding race, sexuality and nationality are produced among Argentineans and Brazilians. Ernesto Meccia's important notes for a sociology of "gayness" suggest a dialog yet to be initiated, on the establishment of general guidelines for the analysis of social process running simultaneously in different countries of the Region (as well as outside it). The articles by Mario Lima Carvalho on the "purification strategies" at play in the hard work of contesting politically the social exclusion of which travestis and transsexuals are object, and by Adrianna Figueiredo on the politicization of pain in their narratives gain new relevance when read against the backdrop of the categories developed by Meccia to analyze the process of social inclusion homosexualities are undergoing. If all the papers mentioned above operate upon a visible fracture between values and moralities, the analysis by María Celeste Bianciotti on techniques of female seduction among young women from Córdoba emphasizes how, regardless the risk in the infinite repetition of individual performances, the norms govern socio-erotic life are reproduced and maintained.

In sum, the papers bundled in this issue show the strength, originality and diversity of a Latin American contemporary reflection which, in close dialog with what is happening in the "North", points in the directions most fertile for an understanding of the complex and heterogeneous social context that characterizes the Region.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  23 Aug 2011
• Date of issue
  Aug 2011