Sexuality and health: contributions from sociological insights.(Editorial)

Sigmund Freud turned 150 on May 6th this year. Yet despite the advancing of years, his life's work continues to have profound significance--not least for the social sciences. While much of the world remembers Freud as the 'Father of Psychoanalysis', the significance of his work for the social sciences is deep and broad.

Freud developed his research methodology--qualitative interviewing--to a high level of sophistication and opened the way for some highly original interpretations of people and our relationships with society. His writings reveal an inescapable and growing consciousness of the role that society plays (largely in his view through repression) in the construction of human sexuality, sexual identity and sexual praxis, both in health and in illness (Freud 1977).

Meanwhile, Michel Foucault has a key birthday this year too: he would have turned 80 in October. Foucault too contributed enormously to the social sciences and while there are great differences between them, Foucault also added tremendously to the literature on the social construction of sexuality as well as to social sciences methodology Foucault 1990).

It is therefore fitting that this year Health Sociology Review hosts a special issue on sexuality and health: a theme which lies at the nexus of three great domains of social construction and social control: sexuality, gender and health. But increasing awareness of the constructed nature of sexuality, gender and health does not seem to have tamed our tendency for personal sexual neuroses and collective moral panics. Moreover, research into sexuality and gender and their relationships with health continues to focus particularly on transgressive boundaries. This raises a key question for all of us: as researchers who play an important role in documenting, inventing and regulating the discourses of sexuality, gender and health, to what extent do we police sexuality, gender and health?

Another paradox, which has become increasingly apparent thanks to historical analyses, is that deep social themes--most notably the taboos--continue to be profoundly influential despite the extraordinary technical advances since the birth of Freud and Foucault. Perhaps the most significant difference in the past 500 years has been the substitution of the acronym HIV for the central character of Frascotoro's poem: the shepherd named Syphilis (for example, see Davenport-Hines 1991, Hester 1992).

Not surprisingly, the papers in the present edition also illustrate our contemporary preoccupations. While not overtly about social boundaries, it is significant that in one edition we have a smorgasbord of social neuroses and transgressions: castration anxiety, drugs, underage sex, incest, sexual assault, sexual violence and the perennial problem of how to classify homoerotic praxis.

Questions arising from the papers