EDITORIAL

The number of articles and topics on this issue of Sexuality, Health and Society represent a sort of enhancement with regard to the journal's stated purpose, as a space for the confluence of debates which, through diverse approaches, explore cultural and political dimensions of sexuality in Latin American countries––in this issue represented by Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico and Uruguay.

The Dossier Medicalization, Sexuality and Gender: Subjects and agency, organized by Regina Facchini and Carolina Branco de Castro Ferreira, follows up debates introduced in previous issues of the journal, about scientific investments and the production of knowledge, bio-medical in particular, on the subject of sexuality, and their role in the development of subjectivities, public policy, and the creation of new political subjects, such as travesti and transgender individuals. Under the rubric of medicalization, the Dossier explores less researched issues such as "erectile dysfunction," intersexuality, transsexuality, circumcision, sex-addiction, asexuality, and exchanges between communities organized around sadomasochistic practices and medical professionals and scientists. We invite our readers to a more detailed introduction to the Dossier's contents in its editors' Presentation.

In the issue's general section, the articles by Isadora Lins França and Laura López explore the potentials offered by the concept of intersectionality to analyze the complexity of itineraries and transits of individuals and collectives at the crossroads of class, race, gender and geographical origin. In interviews with gay men living between São Paulo and Recife, França describes how different social markers of difference, especially those related to class, mediate desires and organize classifications of male homosexuality. By following the mobilization of black women in Uruguay, López works on the intersection of race and gender to observe their political trajectories, as they reflect on how their bodies have become a locus for the exercise of colonial power.

The articles by Mariana Cerviño and Santiago Peidro establish an interesting dialogue on performing arts, politics and sexuality in Argentina. Cerviño shows the cultural rupture introduced by Gumier Maier and Marcelo Pombo, whose artistic and intellectual production had intense links to homosexual experience and activism, in the Buenos Aires of the re-democratization period. Peidro brings an instigating analysis of two contemporary cinema pieces about the intersexual experience, showing how the arts help to conceive living corporealities which destabilize gender and sexual conventions, departing from the prescriptions and tutelage of the biomedical apparatus.

This issue also brings new contributions to the debate on sex work, in the articles by Eduardo Perez Archundia, and by Juliana G. Jayme, Alessandra S. Chacham and Mariana R. de Moraes. Exploring health prevention practices (preservative use), and social and labor organizing, both articles address issues that have become the subject of intense debates with regard to sanitary and police interventions. In closing, we draw attention to the quality of Lynn M. Morgan's review of the book God´s laboratory: Assisted Reproduction in the Andes, by the anthropologist Elizabeth F. S. Roberts. Its study of practices and representations of assisted human reproduction in Ecuador opens interesting comparative opportunities in relation to other Latin-American countries.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  20 Sept 2013
• Date of issue
  Aug 2013