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Cosmopolitan, which places an emphasis on ‘finding yourself through sex’,
achieving satisfaction through communication by telling your partner what
you want (Winship, 1987; McMahon, 1990). Steamy casual sexual encounters
continue to provide titillation on prime-time television or in the cinema:
for example, Madonna’s book of soft-porn photographs featuring her own
body was a best-seller in 1992. Yet the same popular media routinely report
on the dangers of sexuality, providing the latest statistics on HIV/AIDS,
publish features on the ‘new’ joys of monogamous marriage and techniques
on making love with the same person for the rest of one’s life, or
depict people who engage in casual sex as being punished by unhappiness
or even death for their actions (for example, the high-grossing films Basic
Instinct and Indecent Proposal). Thus, at the beginning of the twenty-first century,
the sexual body must struggle with a tension between the discourses
privileging self-expression and satisfaction through sexual encounters and
those emphasizing the fearful and potentially fatal consequences of the
mingling of body fluids during sexual abandonment.
Public health and the disciplined body
The Body in Medicine 33
In public health discourse the body is regarded as dangerous, problematic,
ever threatening to run out of control, to attract disease, to pose
imminent danger to the rest of society (Lupton, 1995; Petersen and
Lupton, 1997). For centuries and up to the present day, concerns about the
spread of infectious diseases such as cholera, smallpox, yellow fever and
the plague have resulted in measures being taken by the state to confine
bodies and control their movements. This control over bodies in the name
of public health has often been coercive and discriminatory. For example,
from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries, whole households of
people were confined to their houses if public health officials designated
one member as infectious, or people were removed to quarantine stations
or lazarettos, sometimes by the police (Tesh, 1988: 12).
Those of foreign nationality, the poor and the working class have
historically been singled out for attention by public health authorities as
agents of disease, requiring forcible ‘hygiene’ programmes sometimes
involving the destruction of their homes and isolation from the rest of
society (Lupton, 1995). In the early twentieth century, for example, immigrants
to Canada were especially targeted by quarantine regulations and
subjected to medical examinations upon arrival, thus marking them as the
dangerous, potentially contaminating Other (Sears, 1992: 70). Even in contemporary
western societies, public health acts devised decades ago are
used to constrain the movement of bodies in the name of health. One
instance of this occurred in 1989 in Australia, when a section of the New
South Wales Public Health Act of 1902 was instituted to detain for a time
a sex worker who had publicly admitted to being HIV positive but not
willing to enforce condom use among her clients.