Contenu du sommaire : La production de la santé sexuelle

In Soviet Russia, following De-Stalinization, abortion was legally accessible at the simple request of the woman involved, and public policies did little to encourage the use of “modern” contraception. The women of the “last Soviet generation”, who entered their adult lives in the 1980s, would often use “traditional” methods, and had on average three or four abortions over the course of their lives: on rare occasions they aborted in order to delay their first child, and most frequently they aborted in order to space out and limit the following ones. This article analyses the situated rationality of their procreative choices, and shows that the non-planning of pregnancies takes on different meanings depending in particular on the children that had already been born and the parents' conjugal context.

This article analyses the way in which representations of gendered, social and cultural alterity shape normative discourses in the field of sexual and reproductive health. In Guatemala, such discourses legitimate a form of authoritarian control by the medical sector over the reproductive lives of indigenous women. This article argues that the targeted violence of family planning programs is articulated with and continues the violence of the recent armed conflict, through the physical and symbolic appropriation of the bodies of Indigenous women.

This article investigates the genealogy of the criminalization of the sexual transmission of HIV in France, which starts with the parliamentary debates on the possible introduction of the offence of transmitting epidemic diseases in 1991 to the boom in court cases on unwanted HIV transmission in the mid-2000s. Based on an analysis of parliamentary, legal sources as well as NGOs archives, this article aims to reconstruct the changes in the political justification of the criminalization of HIV. In so doing, this article aims to show how discourses on the criminalization of HIV transmission oscillate between the desire to protect the nation and the desire to protect women.

In France, following the removal of a breast due to cancer, the majority of female patients does not undergo any surgical reconstruction, and continue to live with only one breast, or none at all. This article compares the strategies of resistance and re-appropriation of two NGOs, and those of patients who are not involved in any organization. One NGO promotes the social acceptance of bodily asymmetry while the other underlines the importance of personal acceptance of one's new physical condition (known as reconstruction of identity). The patients, however, display a management of asymmetry that includes acts of resistance against bodily norms, as well as acts of accommodation with bodily norms. The article concludes that the processes of resistance to normative bodily representations are thus only partial ones.

By analysing the practices and representations of those who prescribe contraceptive methods, this article examines the contrast between France and England when it comes to prescribing masculine contraception methods. This research is based on an institutional and historical comparative study and semi-structured interviews carried out with practitioners in both countries. While all the medical staff in charge of prescribing contraceptive methods share gendered representations of contraceptive responsibilities, these gendered representations have a different impact on the professional practices of contraceptive prescription in each country, depending on the institutional framework of the medical profession. Indeed, while English prescribers are more inclined to recommend masculine methods due to a strict protocol framing their practices, such methods are only offered rarely and somewhat randomly by French prescribers.

This article aims to explore the relationship between health and gender through the history of diseases, and in particular of a set of diseases which, over the course of the 18th century, were referred to as “milk diseases”. Although they are little-known today, these diseases were widespread during a very long period: milk fever, lait répandu or lait épanché (“scattering or diffusion of the milk”) were diseases that afflicted women during pregnancy and following childbirth. Based on the history of these diseases, I highlight the importance of adopting a gendered perspective for the analysis: I first examine the origins of milk diseases and the construction of a specific nosology; I then examine the construction of new temporalities around female physiology, as well as the reasons why these diseases disappeared at a later stage, though not without leaving enduring traces in the epistemology of certain diseases.

This article examines the way in which gender norms influence not only interventions on intersexual bodies, but also the evaluation of the health and sexuality of these individuals once they have reached adult age I analyse various scientific studies on the life course and adulthood of individuals who were operated on in childhood to explore issues of fertility and sexuality of intersexual persons. This analysis focuses on the various biases that plague these studies, on the norms they use to define the desired “quality of life”, and on the politics of ignorance that characterize these studies. Finally, I investigate how intersexuality can serve as an avenue to open up debates about theories of the biological determinism of gender identity and sexuality.