The articles assembled for this new issue of Sexuality, Health and Society explore, from multiple perspectives and using different methods, the field delineated by the complex implications of the concepts of biopolitics and thanatopolitics. In other words, they focus on the unsettling centrality of death (or of letting die) within the framework of a device designed to increase life (or, at least, certain lives). This analytical movement (re)places the discussion of sexuality in broader landscape, related to the management of other life processes (birth, illness, death).
The political and social effects, in Latin America, of the debates about euthanasia, abortion, “teenage pregnancy,” “humanized childbirth,” the recognition of different gender identities, and the sexuality of people with disabilities are unfathomable. However, the texts included in this issue show the potential for alliances between political and religious actors regarded as each other’s antithesis. Likewise, they show approaches to human rights that represent different understandings from the ones dominant until recently. While they recognize new subjects, practices, and subjectivities, the versions they generate may––perhaps inevitably–produce new subjections.
