This article answers ongoing calls within critical sexuality scholarship to explore how constructions of women’s bodies influence and are influenced by broader sociocultural contexts. Specifically, this article offers a conceptual analysis of female sexual desire, highlighting the deeply political nature of its pathologization. We briefly explore dominant definitions and models of sexual desire to highlight the erasure of embodied desire as an important part of healthy female sexuality. The DSM-5 diagnosis of Female Sexual Interest/Arousal Disorder is critically analyzed to highlight how desire differences are framed as gendered, individual problems which sidelines relational, contextual, and sociopolitical factors contributing to individual distress. When the language of desire is displaced by the language of interest (particularly when framed as receptivity), the capacity to theorize wanting and entitlement is undermined. We argue that the pathologization of diverse desires obscures possibilities for embodied wanting and neglects the consideration that all types of desire (absent, frequent, physical, emotional) may represent normal sexual variations.

这篇文章回答了性批判性学术研究中正在进行的呼吁，以探讨女性身体的构造如何影响更广泛的社会文化背景并受到其影响。特别是，本文提供了对女性性欲的概念分析，强调了其病态化的深层政治性质。我们简要地探讨了性欲的主要定义和模型，以强调消除作为健康女性性欲的重要组成部分的内在欲望的消除。对DSM-5对女性性兴趣/性骚扰的诊断进行了严格的分析，以强调性欲差异如何被归类为性别，个体问题，而这些问题则排除了导致个人困扰的关系，情境和社会政治因素。当欲望的语言被感兴趣的语言所取代时（特别是当被构想为接受性时），理论上对匮乏和应享权利的能力就会受到损害。我们认为，对各种欲望的病态化掩盖了实现性欲望的可能性，而忽略了所有类型的欲望（缺席，频繁，身体，情感）可能代表正常的性变异的考虑。