EDITORIAL

The group of articles and book reviews in this year's last issue of Sexuality, Health, and Society - Latin American Journal explore different dimensions of sexuality in remarkably diverse social contexts—thus mirroring the social diversity that characterizes the region. We have important contributions for a reflection on the main devices that institute and regulate identities, desires and sexual practices, either in the realm of public health policy, of medical theories, or in communication media. The texts published in this issue shed light on them, addressing their historical singularity and exploring their local articulation.

The devices regulating sexuality project a vast array of representations about particular subjects, such as the "burning charapa" in the Peruvian Amazon, or the Chilean medicalized homosexual. The more ethnographic articles show how those representations are related to everyday life and are, in that sense, co-produced by the subjects themselves. Following a lesbian journalist's column in a Brazilian magazine, joining women in the Peruvian jungle, or youths in the Rio das Pedras favela in Rio, means not only to perceive how certain identities are 'purified' by science, by the market, by the press, or by politics, but also how they gain density and complexity, when they intersect with other "differences", such as class, ethnicity, gender, regional belonging, etc.

The contributions to this issue also bring an instigating reflection on the ways capital values of Modernity, such as equity, freedom and the dignity of the human person define and organize political and legal processes specifically related to health, involving the demand for the universalization of the protective role of the state, as well for the expansion of individual autonomy regarding vital decisions. This reflection is echoed in particular ways in the two book reviews included in this issue, about the issues of abortion, and of same-sex conjugality, where such vital decisions stress the limit of hegemonic morality.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  16 Dec 2011
• Date of issue
  Dec 2011