Sexuality, Health & Society

A LATIN AMERICAN JOURNAL

ISSN 1984-6487 / n.1 - 2009 - pp.08-10/ www.sexualidadsaludysociedad.org


From the editors

Sérgio Carrara, Ivonne Szasz, Silvina Ramos & Carlos Cáceres



It is with great satisfaction that we deliver the first issue of Sexuality, Health and Society – A Latin American Journal. As conceived by its editors, mentors and collaborators, the journal’s main goal is to become an academic forum dedicated to theoretical production, debate, and the dissemination of innovative research. This free-access online publication is offered as a meeting point for everyone interested in reflecting upon the territorially vast, socially heterogeneous, and culturally complex space we call Latin America, interpelated by sexuality. What we mean to address – let this be highlighted – is not the contingent relation between two terms: “sexuality” and “Latin America”; since the symbolic boundaries of a Latin America – whatever that might be – are established in special reference to sexuality. As in other colonial and postcolonial contexts, the slow (geo)political configuration of our strange West has been accompanied by a broad symbolic operation which intended to project it as the location of a paradoxical sexuality: on the one hand, the place of machismo, of rigid, outdated, gender hierarchies, and of traditionalist catholic sexual morality; on the other hand, the place of a raw sensuality, of overwhelming sensuousness, of exotic pleasures, where all the barriers of race, class and sex are overcome. Thus, if Latin America is a strategic space to analyze the intricate social processes cross-cutting sexuality nowadays, the opposite is no less true: sexuality is a central perspective to understand Latin American Modernity.

The launching of the Journal relates to the combination of a number of processes, some of which we would like to recall in this brief introduction. To begin with, sexuality, or sexualities, have become increasingly important as an object of reflection for the social sciences and the humanities in the region. This is partly due to the contribution, over the past few years, of a Human Rights perspective in the area of Sexual and Reproductive Health, which contributed to the displacement of the biomedical parameters which had traditionally guided investigations in the area. In that sense, taking a lead from issues introduced by Latin American Feminism in the 1980s, studies which articulate sexuality and reproductive health to justice and sexual rights have multiplied. We believe that this intellectual field is mature enough to have a publication of its own, as an expression of, and a contribution to, its consolidation. Further, we verify that, although mature and vibrant, the Latin American scholarly work on sexuality is still relatively dispersed, and its producers are still either isolated, or connected to networks around specific topics – contraception, abortion, AIDS, gender violence, sex work, sexual diversity – with little cross-communication. This is due not only to linguistic barriers, but mostly to the reality of a publishing market which has great difficulties to overcome national boundaries, and of relatively isolated local academic communities. In this sense, Sexuality, Health and Society seeks to contribute to the development of “horizontal” relations, uniting the different Latin American academic communities and disseminating the best intellectual production from and on those different national contexts.

By academic standards, contributions are subjected to double blind peer review. In addition, the Journal has a particular interest in disseminating knowledge that is socially meaningful, that is, in making a direct or indirect contribution to facing the countless challenges coming from the enormous, persistent situations of social inequality which are still part of Latin America’s singularity. We believe that, in its connection to the reproduction of class, gender, generational, and racial/ethnic differences, sexuality is a fundamental dimension of social inequality. Therefore, the Journal has activists and policymakers as privileged interlocutors, striving to offer them elements to support their actions and interventions.

Regarding other aspects of this new space of interlocution, this first issue of Sexuality, Health and Society brings an exemplary body of articles, including discussions on trans-sexuality, AIDS, adoption, contraception, masculinity, violence, and sex work. This combination mirrors a thematic multiplicity which will be one of the Journal’s distinctive features. Such multiplicity extends to the national context of each contribution, in this issue represented by Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Spain, where Latin American women migrate to become sex workers. Besides the diversity of topics and contexts, the Journal equally valorizes a multiplicity of approaches, bringing in perspectives from Collective HHealth, Social Anthropology, Sociology, Political Science, History, Social Psychology, and Law. Either more empirical or more theoretical, contributions may come from experienced researchers or from those at the beginning of their academic careers. This is precisely the Journal’s goal: making sexuality a vantage point, investing on diversity and multiplicity – theoretical, thematic, methodological and disciplinary – as a way to approach the values, practices, moralities, knowledge, and politics produced and performed in different Latin America countries.

At having accepted to take part of the Editorial Board, having submitted articles for review, or having accepted to act as reviewers, many colleagues are sharing this investment. While we celebrate the release of this first issue, we would like to thank the enormous generosity of all those colleagues who have lent their competence to this project. We hope that the Journal fulfils their expectations, and that it may actually contribute to facilitate and intensify an ongoing dialog, which is the very reason of any vigorous academic or scientific endeavor.