Sexuality, health and human rights: The invention of sexual rights

Abstract

Summary Objectives The recent publication (March 2014) of the new declaration of sexual rights of the World Association for Sexual Health (WAS) provided a good opportunity to review the genealogy of sexual rights in order to understand the circumstances of the emergence of such rights, to identify the organisations which opened the discourse on sexual rights and the various different perspectives from which this theoretical and intellectual elaboration was engaged. Methods A database was compiled comprising of all the main texts and declarations of sexual rights. The analyses revealed the following phases: in the first phase, we saw how the issue of family planning and the fight against the violence and discriminations against women emerged in the discourse on human rights; in the second phase, it was the human rights issues that were included in the field of sexual health, giving rise to “sexual rights”. These first two phases principally concerned the sexual health of heterosexual women and men. We are now witnessing the development of a new perspective aimed at the promotion of human rights and the fight against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identities. Conclusion The combination of a “health” approach and a “human rights” approach provides the bases of the main contemporary regimes of truth (Foucault) for sexuality.