Brasil

SEXUALITY, HEALTH AND SOCIETY: FOCUS ON WOMEN

Sergio Carrara

The first issue in the second year of Sexuality Health and Society – Latin American Journal has an emphasis on sexual and reproductive health. Four articles focus on women from different perspectives. Three of them address female identities and reproductive careers, as well as women’s experiences, emotions and perceptions regarding pregnancy and vulnerability to STD/AIDS. Based on interviews with health professionals, the fourth article looks at the violence which, grounded simultaneously on gender and class, permeates the practice of pediatricians and gynecologists.

The other three articles is this issue address topics more directly related to sexual rights: Chilean university heterosexual students towards homosexuality; the way the category “sexual violence against children” has been construed as a social and political problem in Brazil; and a reflection on the “permeable” boundaries between the Catholic Church and the Brazilian State. The latter are the opening and closing articles for this issue. Based mainly on archival and written sources, with emphasis on legislation, they bring innovative ideas to expand the understanding of such heated topics as pedophilia and the secular State.

We would also like to highlight the diversity of social contexts that the articles explore empirically. Most bring to the fore places marked by their social and symbolic distance away from large urban centers or, within them, from more affluent regions or neighborhoods. Readers of this issue will be taken more or less directly to places as varied as the Panguipulli community, in the Chilean region of Los Rios; the Madureira neighborhood, in the northern part of the city of Rio de Janeiro; the province of Orellana, in equatorial Amazon; the city of Salta, in northwestern Argentina, and to Antofagasta, in northern Chile. That diversity of social spaces is matched by an even greater variety of subjects involved, some of which, such as rural and indigenous populations, had not been contemplated in articles published in previous issues.

It is in all those senses that this fifth issue broadens the journal’s scope – in terms of perspective, topics, subjects, and contexts. Thus, it continues to pursue its main goals, expanding regional dialogs about the existing binds, and the desirable links, between sexuality, health, and society.

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In 04/12/2010

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