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Italians (should) do it better? Medicalisation and the disempowering of intimacy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2016

Raffaella Ferrero Camoletto  and
Chiara Bertone
Raffaella Ferrero Camoletto*
Affiliation:
Department of Cultures, Politics and Society, University of Turin, Turin, Italy
Chiara Bertone
Affiliation:
University of East Piedmont, Italy
*
∗Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Recent years have witnessed new processes of visibilisation of adult heterosexual men's sexuality in the public arena in Italy, culminating in discussions on sexual scandals. The authors explore here one of these processes: the current mediatisation of a medicalised male sexuality, which appears as a more socially legitimate and scientifically grounded new discourse on masculinity. By analysing recent social campaigns on male sexual health, it will be shown how, far from opening spaces for a de-naturalisation of male sexuality and masculinity, this form of visibility through medicalisation actually works by re-naturalising male sexuality, and thereby restoring virility, through reference to highly gendered respectability and predatory sexual scripts and the disempowering of intimacy as a new sexual script promoting a situational and more symmetric understanding of gender.

Keywords

medicalisationsexual healthheterosexualitymasculinitysexual scriptsvirilism
Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Italy , Volume 17 , Issue 4: Special Issue: The politics of sexuality in contemporary Italy , November 2012 , pp. 433 - 448
Copyright
Copyright © Association for the study of Modern Italy 

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