Governmentality, the iconography of sexual disease and 'duties' of the STI clinic

Abstract

Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) have come to occupy a different social space over the last hundred years, where the iconography of disease has moved from purity to consumption of desire, and where the regulation of disease has moved from moral proscription to governmentality. These processes are represented through health promotion campaigns where the medico-moral discourses appropriated both the iconography of pathology and the construction of the family as the site of moral surveillance and governmentality. This paper will consider how the 'duties' of STD clinics have been defined and mark a paradigmatic statement of the panoptic role of medicine in the mapping of the social and psychological spaces between individuals. Sexual health medicine, together with health promotion ideologies, has claimed privileged status through the deployment of expert, clinical knowledge and rationalities, to penetrate the sexual praxis of populations. In so doing, it also underscored the individual's roles and responsibilities in the ideological work of the changing constructions of sexual citizenship, from moral purity to ars erotica, as well as the increasing intervention of the state in reproduction and control of sexualities.