SEXUAL HEALTH POLITICS [LIVE]

MEDICALIZATION OF DESIRE

DESCRIPTION

Sexual Health in its current form only dates back to 1970s. How did our understanding of Sexuality change when Sexuality was clubbed with Health? Once Sexual Health became an Industry, how did it influence how knowledge is produced and societies are governed? How did it influence Education, Research, Policy making and Healthcare options? How did it reframe what is a fulfilling life? What political battles did we end up fighting? Who benefits from the investments made in Sexual Health? Who is left out of the conversation?

Conjoining “sexual” with “health” did not simply expand the scope of medicine. It restructured the terms on which sexuality could be spoken about, researched, and regulated. The WHO’s 1975 definition of sexual health introduced a framework that was simultaneously liberatory and normalizing: it opened space for pleasure, rights, and wellbeing while also creating new standards against which bodies, desires, and behaviors could be measured and found deficient. What followed was the rapid institutionalization of sexual health as a field, with its own professional bodies, diagnostic categories, research methodologies, and commercial markets. The concept proved extraordinarily flexible, capable of being adopted by feminist health advocates and pharmaceutical corporations alike, by human rights organizations and conservative governments, often in direct contradiction to one another.

This flexibility is precisely what makes sexual health politically consequential. The course examines how the medicalization of sexuality produced new forms of expertise and new claims to authority over one’s personal life. It traces how diagnostic reform, population surveys, and clinical standardization translated sexuality into measurable, governable data. It asks what gets classified as dysfunction, who conducts the research, and whose experiences are centered in the evidence base. For practitioners in sexuality education, therapy, and counseling, these are not abstract questions. The frameworks inherited from the sexual health industry shape assessment tools, treatment protocols, curriculum standards, and the very language used with clients. This course builds the critical literacy to examine those frameworks rather than simply reproduce them.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. At the end of the session, attendees will be able to critique the historical and institutional processes through which sexual health was constructed as a field of knowledge, research and practice. [CKA: A, B, C, N, P, Q] [ SET: B, C ] [STT: A, F] [SCT: A, E]
2. At the end of the session, attendees will be able to evaluate how the medicalization of sexuality has influenced diagnostic classification, clinical assessment, and the operationalization of sexual norms across education, healthcare, and policy. [CKA: A, B, D, H, I, P, Q] [SET: B, C, D] [STT: A, B, F] [SCT: A, B, E]
3. At the end of the session, attendees will be able to investigate the political economy of sexual health, research topics, healthcare access, and the distribution of sexual health resources across populations. [CKA: A, C, D, J, P] [SET: C, D] [STT: E, F] [SCT: E, F]
4. At the end of the session, attendees will be able to analyze one’s own biases in their sexology practice. [CKT: A, N, O, Q] [SET: A, B, C, D] [STT: A, E, F] [SCT: A, B, E, F]

EDUCATOR BIO