The Sexualization of the Medical

Abstract

The medicalization of sex is part of an already-in-place discursive problem that can be illuminated by looking at efforts to sexualize the medical. “Erectile dysfunction,” “female sexual dysfunction,” and their real and imagined pharmacopia, do not constitute the medicalization of sex; they are effects of sex already having been—to borrow a term from Peter Conrad (1992)—healthicized. The equation of sex and health, as cultural common sense, has made health seem like the natural discourse for thinking about sex in the first place. Reversing the terms of this special issue, and using the methodology of rhetorical analysis, this article looks at the person with cancer as a sexualized subject—someone whose health is represented as intimately tied to his or her sex life. It suggests that, in public discourse—and notably in movies and on television—sex is the comic ending of the illness narrative. In light of this narrative move, the ability to have good sex joins the ability to be positive and cheerful as a (Western) cultural imperative of illness experience, in general, and cancer experience, in particular. Public representations of illness virtues often fail, then, to answer realistically the compelling question, “How shall I be ill?”