The Quest for Sexual Health

The Quest for Sexual Health offers an entryway into the distinctive worlds of sexual health and provides a window onto their spillover effects. Sociologist Steven Epstein traces the development of the concept and parses the debates that swirl around it.

Since the 1970s, health professionals, researchers, governments, advocacy groups, and commercial interests have invested in the pursuit of something called "sexual health." Under this expansive banner, a wide array of programmes have been launched, organisations founded, initiatives funded, and products sold. And yet, no book before this one asks: What does it mean to be sexually healthy? When did people conceive of a form of health called sexual health? Moreover, how did it become the gateway to addressing a host of social harms and the reimagining of private desires and public dreams?

Conjoining "sexual" with "health" changes both terms: it alters how we conceive of sexuality and transforms what it means to be healthy, prompting new expectations of what medicine can provide. Yet the ideal of achieving sexual health remains elusive and open-ended, and the benefits and costs of promoting it are unevenly distributed across genders, races, and sexual identities. Rather than a thing apart, sexual health is intertwined with nearly every conceivable topical debate—from sexual dysfunction to sexual violence, from reproductive freedom to the practicalities of sexual contact in a pandemic.

In this book, Steven Epstein analyzes the rise, proliferation, uptake, and sprawling consequences of sexual health activities. He offers critical tools to assess those consequences, expand capacities for collective decision-making, and identify pathways that promote social justice.