Medicalized virilism under scrutiny: Expert knowledge on male sexual health in Italy

Treatments for male sexual dysfunctions work at transmitting cultural scripts which reinforce normatively gendered expressions of sex focused on a phallocentric coital imperative and on a naturalized notion of male sexual desire, assumed as always present and unproblematic. Drawing on the analysis of documentary material and in-depth interviews with medical experts involved in awareness campaigns on male sexual health this chapter shows how medical discourses, setting male sexual health as a new public issue, construct both the masculinity to be fixed and the new forms of medical expertise legitimized to treat it. By focussing on the plurality of accounts experts give for their clinical experience, the chapter discusses to what extent there is some room for negotiating or challenging over-medicalized frames from within the medical field.