Political agents or vulnerable victims? Framing sexual rights as sexual health in Argentina

PECHENY MARIO

Handbook on Sexuality, Health and Rights

Routledge

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2012; p. 359 - 369

In this chapter, I want to examine if and how the short-term politicization of sexuality through health exists in tension with a broader and longer-term process of the de-politicization of sexuality and gender relations. According to my hypothesis, if HIV and reproductive health have contributed to the greater recognition of reproductive and sexual rights, they have done so in ways that need to be critically analyzed: through allied processes of victimization (or victimism), medicalization, and judicialization. In sexual and reproductive health, as well as in the first wave of sexual rights, subjects were framed as victims: victims of unwanted pregnancies, violence, HIV, or social and gender inequalities. Little room was left for political agency, collective projects, and historical and structural thinking. We witness now a a gradual movement from sexual health to sexual rights. This process opens the door to re-politicize sexuality. However, the original framing has installed the idea that powerful, publicly speaking up and acting subjects ? that is political subjects -- are suspect.