International Relations and Intimate Encounters: New Work on Sexual and Reproductive Health in Latin America

In the years since the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) was held in Cairo in 1994, governments worldwide have worked to align their national policies with the meeting’s agreed-on goals regarding reproductive health. The ICPD Program of Action reflected a philosophical shift in population activities, from a focus on fertility reduction and demographic targets in the 1960s and 1970s to an emphasis on reproductive choice, sexual health, and gender equality starting in the late 1980s and early 1990s.¹ Influenced by the contributions of new actors, including feminists, human rights advocates, and environmentalists, delegates to the ICPD rejected mid-twentieth-century population control as narrowly fixated on younger women’s fertility and sought to extend reproductive health services to men, youths, and other neglected populations; to integrate reproductive health into primary health-care services; and to emphasize the importance of reproductive and sexual health in the context of respect for diverse sexual orientations and a commitment to gender equality.

The Cairo consensus on the links among population, development, and individual well-being has been reinforced by official documents and speeches from meetings such as the Beijing Conference on Women in 1995, ICPD review sessions in 1999 and 2004, and the United Nations General Assembly’s Special Session on AIDS in 2001. Importantly, at these and other meetings, additional goals have been elaborated regarding the necessity of integrating reproductive and sexual health policy.² At the 2004 meetings of the Ad Hoc Committee of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), countries in the hemisphere reviewed actions taken to implement the ICPD Program of Action, with most reaffirming their commitment to its provisions.³ Meetings at the global, national, and regional levels have also provided space for decision makers and service providers to identify concrete ways to enact programs linking work on population, development, reproductive health, and sexually transmitted infections.

The five social science analyses reviewed here take these international efforts as a point of departure for thoughtful perspectives on the opportunities and challenges of promoting sexual and reproductive health in Latin America and the Caribbean. Drawing on the methods of political science, history, medical anthropology, and discourse analysis, they use case studies as well as comparative analysis to highlight the difficulties inherent in moving from global agreements to local implementation of family planning, gender equality, and AIDS prevention and treatment. Similarly, they emphasize the importance of understanding how ideas about family, sexuality, and well-being are shaped by international forces, yet constructed locally.

Three of the books under review use case studies to analyze in depth the cultural politics of reproductive and sexual health: Claudia Dides Castillo examines the discourse of the debates surrounding the effort to give women access to emergency contraception in Chile; Mark Padilla explores popular views on homoeroticism and male sex work in the context of AIDS prevention and sex tourism in the Dominican Republic; and Matthew Gutmann examines contraception and AIDS in southern Mexico through the lens of masculinity. The remaining two books provide overviews and comparative analyses of policy making and advocacy regarding HIV/AIDS and reproductive health, respectively: Shawn Smallman provides a history of HIV in Latin America since the...