Sexual Subjectivity Research Articles

Preface

Preface Kathryn Moeller and Meg Sweeney “state violence is chronic,” writes Cynthia Wu in discussing institutionalized anti-Blackness and police killings.1 This issue of Feminist Studies brings together a range of essays that explore possibilities for challenging chronic forms of state-sponsored, institutionalized, sexual, intimate, and symbolic violence in a variety of transnational contexts. The first cluster of pieces in this issue responds to the current moment in US regulation of women’s reproduction, focusing on its chronic racialized, classed, and gendered aspects. Heather Latimer draws attention to how the US “slave episteme” — the system of thought that constructed enslaved women and their fetuses as competing commodities — enabled the rise of antiabortion attitudes in the nineteenth century and deeply informed the antiabortion rhetoric of early white feminists. Kenneth Carroll’s poem meditates on a twelve-year-old boy’s dawning awareness of such violence, and particularly a young woman’s unsuccessful and near-fatal abortion attempt. The second cluster of essays in this volume examines gender and sexual formation, foregrounding theoretical possibilities for reconceptualizing dominant gender and sexual subjectivities. Khanum Shaikh and Akanksha Misra both explore contexts in which children learn to comply with and to challenge gender and sexual scripts —Shaikh focuses on how intergenerational domestic spaces in Pakistan serve as sites of gender/sexual pedagogy and resistance, while Misra draws on her work as a middle-school teacher in Turkey and a child-sexual-abuse-prevention trainer in India to underscore the central role that schooling plays. Patricia de Santana Pinho elucidates how global commodity culture also shapes processes of gender and sexual [End Page 335] formation, focusing on beauty products, services, and procedures marketed as “Brazilian” in the United States. The remaining two authors in this cluster of essays —Sally Robinson and Cassius Adair— analyze processes of gender formation that foster toxic masculinity and discipline those who, in Adair’s words, “take strange and unexpected and non-linear paths in pursuit of [them]selves.” Robinson reviews five recent books that explore how specific communities of men and boys understand their masculinity, while Adair considers the affordances and limitations of conceptualizing trans subjectivity as either a chronic or acute condition, proposing that we abandon temporal frameworks. The third and final cluster of essays in this volume engages with questions of violence and gendered embodiment in zones of political conflict: Sonal Khullar analyzes the work of two contemporary women artists who live and work in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, and Ambika Satkunanathan provides a gendered analysis of the recent Sri Lankan protests that emerged in March 2022. Zainab Saleh reviews four recent books that explore state disciplining, recuperating, and/or disposing of raced and gendered bodies. The issue opens with a piece titled “Abortion Regulation as the Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery: Or, a Call to Make Abortion Natural Again,” in which Heather Latimer argues that the US “slave episteme” — defined by Alys Eve Weinbaum as the system of thought that regulated the bodies and reproductive capacities of enslaved women and constructed enslaved women and their fetuses as competing commodities — enabled the rise of antiabortion attitudes in the nineteenth-century United States and continues to racialize reproductive politics today. While abortion was largely considered a natural and ordinary part of reproductive management prior to the nineteenth century, fears about the reproductive autonomy of enslaved women contributed to a denaturalization of abortion and increasing efforts to criminalize it; as Jennifer L. Morgan argues, “to prevent a birth under the regime of hereditary racial slavery” was “to inflict damage on the regime.” Turning to the antiabortion rhetoric of early white feminists, Latimer argues that in the afterlife of slavery, the slave episteme made it possible to argue that “white women’s reproductive capacity was an economic and social resource in need of protecting.” Moreover, the slave episteme yoked women’s reproduction to the reproduction of racial categories, such that early white feminists constructed white women’s duty to reproduce as inextricably intertwined with their duty to reproduce whiteness and white supremacy. Given the central [End Page 336] role that the slave episteme continues to play in racializing and regulating abortion, Latimer suggests that we shift the terms of contemporary debate by moving...

“Call Me by My Name:” A “Strange and Incomprehensible” Passion in the Polish Kresy of the 1920s

The article demonstrates the presence of (homo)sexual subjectivity in rural Poland in the early 1920s using remarkable correspondence between two men who stood trial for committing homosexual acts in 1925. It argues that their relationship should be understood as the first documented same-sex secret marriage in Poland. By investigating relations between urban and rural spaces in the spread of sexual knowledge in the Second Republic, the article also analyzes how changing notions of male friendship and masculinity at the time could be used by men loving men to develop and pursue their own distinctive visions of love and pleasure.

Theatricality in Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater

In Sabbath's Theater (1995), Philip Roth returns to his themes of predilection, namely art, sexuality, identity, and American society, but reexamines them through the mediation of theatricality, a concept used to illuminate a wide range of cultural phenomena and communicative processes. This article investigates the cultural, sexual, and identity politics that the narrative considers while constructing a monumental character, Mickey Sabbath, a theater man par excellence, who accumulates a wide range of theatrical positions to severely critique American culture and the narrowness of the American mind.

Letter from the Editors

Letter from the Editors Lisa Barg, Vanessa Blais-Tremblay, and Kimberly White We are honored and delighted to assume the editorship of Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture. We are indebted to Emily Wilbourne for her inspiring leadership, work, and vision during her tenure as editor in chief, and we thank her for her expert guidance and consul over the past year. We also thank the selection committee, Suzanne G. Cusick, Olivia Bloechl, and Yun Emily Wang, for their encouragement and support. Our collective represents diversity in music research and language, as well as in professional and institutional affiliation, bringing together scholars working in traditional and nontraditional positions in Anglophone and Francophone academic spheres. As an editorial collective, we are committed to continuing the important critical and feminist work of the journal under the inspiring editorial leadership of Suzanne Cusick, Ellie Hisama, and Emily Wilbourne. We will prioritize inclusivity and diversity on all fronts. In addition to seeking out submissions on a wide variety of topics and across disciplinary and methodological perspectives, we strive to encourage and support early career scholars alongside established scholars. We also are excited to continue organizing special issues led by guest editors. The articles in this issue engage productively and imaginatively with themes of race, sexuality, and motherhood in a wide range of temporal and geographic fields. Francesca Inglese explores the role of women—particularly mothers—in klopse practices in post-apartheid Cape Town; Annie Kim considers how Camilla Williams used the disruptive potential of the phonograph to resound Black female subjectivity in her performance of Porgy and Bess; and Camille Rogers opens a conversation about comedy, sentimentality, and sexual violence in Così fan tutte. We are thrilled to be joined by Erin Johnson-Williams and Michelle Meinhart, who have coedited a partial special issue on sound studies and maternity. These [End Page vii] four articles delve into sound and birth during COVID-19; musical interventions in gestational labor; soundscapes of settler-colonial medicine; and stagings of maternal suffering on the operatic stage. Women & Music warmly welcomes innovative work, in both traditional and alternative formats and from diverse disciplinary perspectives, that focuses on gender and sexuality. We look forward to reading your submissions and thank you all in advance for considering Women & Music as a home for your work. [End Page viii] Copyright © 2022 Suzanne G. Cusick

The Mozambican Modern Ghost Story (1866–2006): The Genealogy of a Genre by Peter J. Maurits

Reviewed by: The Mozambican Modern Ghost Story (1866–2006): The Genealogy of a Genre by Peter J. Maurits Thomas Waller Peter J. Maurits, The Mozambican Modern Ghost Story (1866–2006): The Genealogy of a Genre (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2022). 214 pages. Print and ebook. xiv + 214 pages. There is a long and high-quality tradition of English-language scholarship on Mozambican literature. The landmark publications of Hilary Owen's Mother Africa, Father Marx and Phillip Rothwell's A Postmodern Nationalist in the early 2000s set the benchmark for subsequent work in the field by analysing the subversion and redefinition of narratives of Mozambican nationhood, and the deconstruction of discourses of gender and sexuality, in the work of authors such as Noémia de Sousa, Lília Momplé, Paulina Chiziane, and Mia Couto. More recently, monographs by Eleanor Jones, Ana Margarida Martins, and Maria Tavares have carried forward this line of research with new work engaging the theory of biopolitics, the publishing dynamics of the global literary marketplace, and the legacy of the anti-colonial nationalist movement in Mozambique. While there are points of divergence and disagreement within this scholarship, two of its characteristic features are a preoccupation with the category of national identity and a theoretical affinity with postcolonial studies, a field in which the experiences of Portuguese-speaking African societies have historically been either under-represented or ignored. Each in their own [End Page 96] way, these scholars read Mozambican literature through the framework of the postcolonial nation-state, which the texts are then seen alternately to challenge, re-examine, contest, or deconstruct. Peter J. Maurits's new book The Mozambican Modern Ghost Story approaches Mozambican literature from a different perspective. Published in Peter Lang's book series 'Reconfiguring Identities in the Portuguese-speaking World', its orientation does not come from postcolonial theory, nor is it principally concerned with the themes of gender and sexuality, and while it has much to say about the trajectory of Mozambican nationhood, its scope transcends the bounding limits of the national framework to encompass a global horizon of political economy. The structure of the book is organized in five chapters of more or less equal length. The first chapter introduces key concepts and summarizes the monograph's thesis, that there exists a 'Mozambican modern ghost story'. The second chapter then presents the category of the modern ghost story through an analysis of the work of Walter Scott, with a particular focus on his 1827 short story 'The Highland Widow'. The third chapter identifies prototypes of the Mozambican modern ghost story in the work of the nineteenth-century poet Campos de Oliveira and in Orlando Mendes's important 1966 episodic novel Portagem. The fourth chapter theorizes the consolidation of the Mozambican modern ghost story proper in the period of the late 1980s, when Mozambique was transitioning from Marxism-Leninism to free-market capitalism. Finally, the fifth chapter argues, through a close reading of Mia Couto's novel O outro pé da sereia, that the Mozambican modern ghost story re-emerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century to respond to the economic effects of neoliberal globalization. One of the virtues of Maurits's book is that it engages with two traditions that have received relatively short shrift in English-language work on Mozambican literature: Marxist social theory and world-literary studies. The first two sentences of The Mozambican Modern Ghost Story establish its argument at the outset at the intersection of these two fields: 'This book will argue that a Mozambican modern ghost story exists and that it registers primitive accumulation. It shows how literary form—a genre—can alter when it moves, temporally and spatially, through the world-literary system, and reacts with different forms and raw materials' (p. ix). A materialist commitment to the theory and critique of global capitalism is thereby paired with a sensitivity to the unevenness of the production and circulation of world-literary texts in a system stratified by power and inequality. Whereas the former preoccupation leads Maurits to theories of the aesthetic mediation of capitalist social form, and to the likes of Fredric Jameson and Pierre Macherey, the latter leads him to world...

Saúde sexual e o autocuidado entre jovens e adolescentes

The aim was to analyze in the literature the factors inherent to the process of information about sexual orientation for young people and adolescents. Integrative literature review, carried out using the Virtual Health Library and PubMed scientific databases, from 2012 to 2022, using the Boolean operator “AND”. Complete, free and original articles were included. After the findings, the final selection of six articles was made. After the analysis, three categories were divided, the first identifying the relationship between gender and the search for knowledge, the second comprising the search for knowledge and easy access to unsafe information, and the third identifying the unpreparedness of parents to their children about sex education. It found the difficulty that parents have in exposing the theme of sexuality with their children, denoting shyness and inflexibility. On the other hand, the children feel the need to pass on information, and often end up seeking it with inconsistent sources. Having seen, guidance on sex education within the family and in other aspects is necessary in order to overcome the challenges encountered in this study.

Becoming “Bad Women”: The Transnational Women’s Magazine Cosmo and the Re-Shaping of Female Sexual Subjectivity in Post-Reform China

Becoming “Bad Women”: The Transnational Women’s Magazine Cosmo and the Re-Shaping of Female Sexual Subjectivity in Post-Reform China

Homeopathic pathogenetic trial of Plumbum metallicum: the complete 2000 trial with a synthesis of the original 1828 trial

Background: in a previous paper we reported the statistical analysis and other distribution data of a homeopathic pathogenetic trial (HPT) of Plumbum metallicum 30cH carried out by our group. However, at that time we did not report the resulting pure materia medica, i.e., the totality of symptoms elicited by the tested medicine on healthy volunteers. Aim: to communicate to the homeopathic community the full record of symptoms collected in our HPT of Plb. Methods: methods to collect and select symptoms have been reported in the previous paper. In synthesis were excluded all previous common symptoms of volunteers, even with slight differences, and selected only those that were really unknown, never seen, unusual or very strange for the prover. In this paper special emphasis was given to new symptoms as well as unusual or repeated dreams, while in the previous paper special emphasis was given to repeated and crossed symptoms. Results: symptoms are reported in their chronological order of appearance in each volunteer. 37 new symptoms were found, useful to update Homeopathic Repertories. It is also included a synthesis of the original HPT of Plb carried out in 1828 in order to make available the full experimental materia medica currently existing. Conclusions: the new HPT, besides widening the pathogenetic picture of Plb (skin and mucosae symptoms), also allowed us to give new and deeper meanings to some of the symptoms reported in the original trial, such as Anxiety, Activity, Depression, Slowness, Gastro-oesophageal problems, Colitis. The dreams complete the remedy image, mainly in work, religion and sexual themes. Up to the present time there is no peer-reviewed publication devoted to HPTs. For this reason, researchers are compelled to publish HPTs as private editions. This results in poor control of the quality of publications and a lack of standards on how to present the results of HPTs.

The black female body: Representation of the erotic in contemporary visual art in Africa

Black sexual politics and its interaction with the eroticized female body in African art are still surprisingly underexplored topics in African academia (“African” not “Africanist”, to follow the distinction made by Jones in “African Scholarship, Eurocentricism and the Politics of Knowledge”). This gap is curious given the surge of contemporary African artists utilizing erotic imagery generated through 18th-century scientific racism, and its perpetuation in the imperialist epistemic structures of institutions — such as museums — in the centuries following. An icon such as Sara Baartman, the South African Khoikhoi woman exhibited at European freak shows in the early 1800s, is a poignant example of haunting images that represent the spectacular denigration of the black female body. Moreover, historically, the artistic canon has often given the perception of the black woman’s body as grotesque, animalistic, systematically subordinate, or fetishized. However, through artwork, the same body that was once unsightly has become a call to arms, suggesting that instead of continued victimization, black women wield the ‘erotic’ body as a resistance tool. African female artists are engaging with themes of eroticism and sexuality as inextricably entangled with historical violence and trauma through performance, live art, and painting. This article aims to interrogate the use of the erotic as a mechanism to navigate the complex terrain of post-colonial identities, power, and the abiding historical ‘weight’ of the colonial archive. To accomplish this, it will present several fundamental arguments that feed into black feminist interrogations of the body including a meditation on body politics and gender being rewritten into the colonial paradigm. Through the examination of the work of two prominent artists — Tracey Rose and Lady Skollie of South Africa — the author synthesizes various representations of the erotic, coupled with how it engages with issues of history and reappropriation of the black female form. Using Baartman as a guiding symbol, this article will argue that contrary to its previous confinements as an overly policed trope, the black female body is charged with an artistic power that explodes, leaks, and subverts the historical narrative, making it a constantly evolving archetype in contemporary visual art.

Female sex research with men in Kenya: Fieldwork challenges and reflections

The sexuality of women during fieldwork with men becomes constantly scrutinised, and sexualised, and the perceptions of others on our sexuality often impinge on sex research processes in patriarchal societies. This paper discusses challenges and conceptual reflections of gender interactions in sex research fieldwork by a woman with men aged 18–54 in Nairobi, Kenya. It also provides insights on practical safety strategies for women conducting sex research fieldwork. The paper draws on the researcher's field notes and reflections on experiences and interactions with gatekeepers and male participants to present brief accounts of challenges of gender interactions in sex research fieldwork. The impact of gender on the well-being of women doing gender interactions sex research during fieldwork in patriarchal societies is particularly salient. The scrutiny on women, women's sexual subjectivities and positioning of their sexuality by men occur more often than may occur with male researchers who research women. The reproduction of sex knowledge is a key aspect of ethical considerations and part of the ethical reproduction of knowledge, which needs to consider difficulties with gender interactions. Hence, this paper is a proposed resource for fieldwork and policy making in programmes that support the sexuality of men.

Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal IslamLGBTI Rights in Turkey: Sexuality and the State in the Middle East

Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal IslamLGBTI Rights in Turkey: Sexuality and the State in the Middle East

Contents of the Sexual and Reproductive Health Subject in the Undergraduate Nursing Curricula of Spanish Universities: A Cross-Sectional Study.

Background: Nursing students must receive adequate training in Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH), which could allow them to acquire sufficient knowledge to solve the future SRH needs of everyone. In this study, the contents of the SRH subject in the undergraduate nursing curricula of 77 Spanish universities were examined to determine what SRH training nursing students are receiving. Methods: The contents of the SRH subject of all the curricula that were available online were reviewed. The distribution of the contents (topics) in the two areas (reproductive health and sexual health) was analyzed, and the prevalence of each topic was established. It was also determined whether there were differences between public (n = 52) and private universities (n = 25). Results: The training of nursing students focuses mainly on the area of Reproductive Health (15 topics). Most of the topics of this area had a prevalence greater than 50%. Although the area of Sexual Health had 14 topics, most of these topics had a low prevalence (<20%), especially in private universities. Conclusions: It was found that there is considerable variation in the distribution and prevalence of SRH topics between universities. The contents of the area of Reproductive Health are usually prevalent in most of the curricula. However, the contents of the area of Sexual Health are minimal in most of the universities. An organizational effort is required to determine and standardize the contents of SRH that nursing students should receive in Spain to avoid inequalities in their training. Guaranteeing homogeneous SRH contents will avoid deficit situations that could affect people’s care.

Family Communication Pattern Regarding The Implementation Of Sex Education For Early Adolescents

This study aims to describe the communication pattern regarding sex education between parents and early adolescents. Sex education is one of the fields of study that can be applied as a way to shape the personality of adolescents. The reality shows that discussing topics of sexuality with children is considered taboo for some parents, thus creating such an obstacle for good communication pattern. This study is intended to determine the relationship between parental communication pattern in providing sex education and sex knowledge among early adolescents. The concepts applied here were Interpersonal Communication, Family Communication, Adolescent, and Sex Education. The researcher used a qualitative approach by referring to the phenomenological method. The results of the study obtained family communication pattern approaches based on informative and educative, persuasive, and instructive communication techniques.

Amusing Abusers and Humourless Survivors: Analysing the Role of Comedy in Media Representations of Sexual Violence

This article reflects on the importance of comedy when considering media engagements with sexual abuse themes. This approach is informed by how closely the study of humour is rooted in the analysis of power relations, with comic theorists, both historical and contemporary, grounding the work.The comic figures of both the child sex (CS) abuser and the sexual violence survivor are first identified, before exploring what exactly about these tropes evoke laughter, and what this means for wider conceptions of interpersonal abuse and victimology.&#x0D; In analysing examples of CS abuser themed British and American comedy, animated adult comedies such as Family Guy (1999-present) and Monkey Dust (2003-2005) are considered in the context of early 2000s anxieties towards the suburban dirty old man and online child safety. In the case of the sexual violence survivor, Saturday Night Live’s 1993 ‘Is It Date Rape?’ sketch is considered within the context of 1990s anxieties regarding feminist campus politics, and is paralleled to the mid-2010s media panic surrounding British and American university students and trigger warnings through examples including The Simpson’s 2017 ‘Caper Chase’ episode and early to mid-2010s online academic polemics on the humourless feminist, such as Mark Fisher’s ‘Exiting The Vampire Castle’ (2013) and Jack Halberstam’s ‘You are Triggering Me!’ (2014). The article concludes by considering the changing consensuses for sexual violence themed humour in the Me Too era through the 2018 episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2005-present) ‘Times Up For The Gang.’

3x3x6 – 9 Sq.m. and 6 Surveillance Cameras

The title of Shu Lea Cheang’s 3x3x6 which represented Taiwan at Venice Biennale 2019 derives from the 21st century high-security prison cell measured in 9 square meter and equipped with 6 surveillance cameras. As an immersive installation, 3x3x6 is comprised of multiple interfaces to reflect on the construction of sexual subjectivity by technologies of confinement and control, from physical incarceration to the omnipresent surveillance systems of contemporary society, from Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon conceptualized in 1791 to China’s Sharp Eyes that boasts 200 million surveillance cameras with facial recognition capacity for its 1.4 billion population. By employing strategic and technical interventions, 3x3x6 investigates 10 criminal cases in which the prisoners across time and space are incarcerated for sexual provocation and gender affirmation. The exhibition constructs collective counter-accounts of sexuality where trans punk fiction, queer, and anti-colonial imaginations hacks the operating system of the history of sexual subjection. This Image and Text piece intersperses images from the exhibition with handout texts written by curator Paul B. Preciado (against a grey background), as well as an interview between special section co-editor Paula Gardner and the artist that brings the extraordinary exhibition into further conversation with feminist technoscience scholarship. The project website is available at https://3x3x6-v2.webflow.io/.

Cherish Lives? Progress and compromise in sexuality education textbooks produced in contemporary China

ABSTRACT This article examines a set of sexuality education textbooks used in a selection of primary schools in Beijing. These textbooks, under the overall name of 珍爱生命 (Cherish Lives), embody a comprehensive sexuality education approach with content designed on the basis of the UNESCO International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education. Using feminist critical discourse analysis, we explore these books from three angles: the challenge of engaging with children as sexual subjects, given adult hegemony around sex; confusion about efforts to break the presentation of gender as a binary; and the contradiction between reproducing the myth of universal heterosexuality and attempting to present an education sensitive to LGBT issues. We show that while these textbooks demonstrate progress in sexuality education, they also manifest compromise. Despite this compromise, the books have recently been withdrawn and it is unclear whether their publication heralds a new, high quality approach to primary school sexuality education or not.

Frankenstein Redux

Frankenstein Redux

Increasing medical student confidence in gender and sexual health through a student-initiated lecture series.

Introduction: Medical students self-report insufficient training in topics of gender and sexuality in medicine, which may ultimately lead to negative health outcomes in patients for whom they will provide care. This study aims to identify whether a student-initiated lecture series on topics related to gender and sexual health leads to greater student comfort with discussing topics related to diverse sexual content.Methods: Medical students matriculated during two consecutive academic years were invited to participate in the lecture series. Investigators administered anonymous pre- and post-series surveys (n=152 and 105 respondents, respectively) using google forms. Respondents rated their comfort levels discussing relevant topics and provided narrative feedback concerning strengths and areas for improvement of the lecture series. Overlaps between the 95% confidence intervals around pre- and post-series percentage of students comfortable/very comfortable discussing each topic were examined to compare pre- vs post-series comfort ratings. Narrative comments were reviewed for thematic feedback.Results: 105 medical students completed the lecture series, with 80% identifying as female. Self-assessed comfort levels across all seminar topics were greater in post- versus pre-lecture series surveys with the following topics showing the biggest differences (percentage of students “somewhat” or “very” comfortable [95% confidence intervals]: discussing sexuality with gender (68%[59-77] vs. 29%[22-36]) and sexual minority patients (84%[77-91] vs. 49%[41-57]), HIV prevention counseling (70%[61-78] vs. 20% [20-34]), identifying female genital cutting (44% [34-53] vs. 11%[6-16]), and discussing intimate partner violence (65%[55-74] vs. 33%[25-40]). Qualitative analysis indicated respondents found the lectures to be effective and believed they should be integrated into the required medical school curriculum.Conclusion: Our student-initiated lecture series was associated with greater student comfort discussing topics related to gender and sexuality with patients. This framework represents a useful method to address gaps in medical education and has the potential to improve health outcomes in multiple populations.

SUBJECTIVE SEXUAL WELL-BEING: CONCEPTUALIZATION OF THE CONCEPT AND PSYCHOLOGICAL MODEL

The importance of interpersonal and sexual relations and realized sexuality in the concepts of subjective well-being is considered quite often, but the understanding of sexual well-being is presented rather vaguely, mainly in the context of medical issues as the absence of sexual dysfunction, as a component of sexual health, is equated with the satisfaction of sexual life. This article uses theoretical research methods - analysis, generalization, synthesis, conceptualization and modelling. Based on theories and approaches to subjective well-being, is highlights the concept of sexual well-being and presents a psychological model of subjective sexual well-being. We define sexual well-being as the harmonious realization by the subject of his sexuality on the bodily-physical, soul-emotional and spiritual-mental levels; a person's harmonious experience of belonging to the sex and an adaptive way of realizing this belonging. In a broad sense, subjective sexual well-being can be seen as a multifactorial construct that reflects the complex interrelationships of cultural (for example, continuum of norms accepted in culture), social (permissibility of certain thoughts and actions), psychological (cognitive, emotional and behavioral; for example, attractiveness, desirability, satisfaction, self-esteem), physical (physical attractiveness, sexual constitution) and spiritual factors (transcendence, axiological interpretation). Sexual well-being can be considered on at least two levels - non-deficient, from the standpoint of the absence of disorders and problems; and at the level of eudemonic, meaningful, existentially filled. According to the levels of sexual development, sexual well-being can be assessed at the bodily-physical level, soul-emotional and mental-spiritual level. Sexual well-being can be represented in the trinity of cognitive, emotional and conative (motivational, behavioral) components. The cognitive component includes: self-awareness as a representative of the sex, acceptance of one's own self-sexual, acceptance of one's own gender, orientation and attraction, one's own body, corporeality, acceptance of a partner, partnership, trust and openness, communication. The emotional component includes a positive assessment of oneself as a sexual subject, satisfaction with a partner, partnership, intimacy, satisfaction with sexual life. The conative component includes: libido, sexual interest, openness of experience, adaptive sexual scenarios, sexual security (absence of violence, coercion, blackmail, discrimination), freedom of expression, equal partnership. Factors of sexual well-being are individual (permissiveness, sexual interest, realized sexuality), dyadic (relationships as value, sexual communication, intimacy, trust, openness) and evaluation factors (satisfaction with one's own self-sexual, satisfaction with sexual relations, partnership, satisfaction with sexual life in general). We can talk about the levels of determinations of sexual well-being: 1) ) determinants of the personal level or microsystem (socio-demographic characteristics, sexual dysfunctions, personality traits, sexual self-disclosure, attitudes toward sexuality and subjective well-being); 2) determinants of the interpersonal level or mesosystem (characteristics of the relationship itself, sexual communication, intimacy, equality, openness, trust, romantic love, partnership), 3) determinants of exosystems (traditions, family values, social support, pregnancy, parenthood, victimization and victimization) in childhood); 4) determinants of macrosystems (religiosity and political ideology, public morals and values, freedom of expression). Further study of sexual well-being requires empirical verification of theoretical assumptions, clarification of empirical criteria of sexual well-being with the help of our developed psychological tools for psychodiagnostic measurement of this indicator.

Sexual body self-representations, desire, and functioning in women

Relational and Bodily Experiences Theory has contributed to female sexual desire. We aimed to add evidence to RBET by examining an integrative model of sexual body self-representations, sexual desire, and sexual functioning. The sample consisted of 278 heterosexual Spanish-speaking women. The model showed that some dimensions from body self-representations such as sexual self-efficacy, pleasure from the partner, and self-reflection were part of a Dyadic Context, while solitary desire and pleasure from the self were comprised of Solitary Context. The sexual subjectivity dimensions from the Dyadic Context, predicted satisfaction, dyadic desire for the partner, low pain, and orgasm, while Solitary Context only predicted orgasm in a negative direction. These results are relevant for both future research and clinical practice, since it is shown that the dimensions of sexual subjectivity, such as self-efficacy, pleasure from the partner, and sexual self-esteem have an impact on the sexual functioning of women.