As disfunções sexuais femininas no periódico Archives of Sexual Behavior.

Abstract

After the sale success of Viagra, a medicament indicated for the treatment of erectile dysfunction, which was launched in 1998, there was a fast proliferation of articles, books and meetings on female sexual dysfunctions. Since 2000, an intense debate about the involvement of the pharmaceutical industry in the biomedical production related to female sexual dysfunctions and the simultaneous search for a medicament similar to Viagra aimed to women has been involving professional from different areas. The goal of this dissertation was to investigate scientific discourses on female sexual dysfunctions through the analysis of articles published in the periodical Archives of Sexual Behavior, since its foundation in 1971 until 2007. The periodical was chosen due to its legitimacy in this field of knowledge, for covering a vast period (36 years) and for its multidisciplinary nature. The intention was to locate when, how and by which professional groups female sexual dysfunctions were described and dealt with in the periodical. In the case of the so-called sexual dysfunctions, scientific descriptions, which have been significantly increasing in recent years, originate therapeutic prescriptions, medicaments, chirurgical interventions, sexual education programs and public policies. That is, subjacent to this discourse, which poses as empirical and impartial processes were found that reach quite beyond the limits of a lab or the activities of a researcher. Therefore, the aim was to think of the scientific production as a product of articulations and negotiations unfolded in diversified domains and involving cultural, social and economical processes, as well as cognitive and scientific ones, in contrast to the conceptions that characterize science as a project that only brings about the truth. For this, the context in which a science of sexuality emerged throughout the 19th Century was presented, followed by the context in which the discourses on female sexual dysfunctions appeared: what has facilitated their emergence in that given moment, how and by whom were they defined, how were they articulated to social, economical and cultural processes and which transformations they suffered throughout the years.