Cecilia Åsberg

Viagra Selfhood: Pharmaceutical Advertising and the Visual Formation of Swedish Masculinity

Using material from the Pfizer sponsored website providing health information on erectile dysfunction to potential Swedish Viagra customers (www.potenslinjen.se), this article explores the public image of masculinity in relation to sexual health and the cultural techniques for creating pharmaceutical appeal. We zoom in on the targeted ideal users of Viagra, and the nationalized, racialized and sexualized identities they are assigned. As part of Pfizer’s marketing strategy of adjustments to fit the local consumer base, the ways in which Viagra is promoted for the Swedish setting is telling of what concepts of masculinity are so stable and unassailable that they can withstand the association with a drug that is, in essence, an acknowledgement of ‘failed’ masculinity and ‘dysfunctional’ sexuality. With comparative national examples, this study presents an interdisciplinary take on the ‘glocalized’ cultural imaginary of Viagra, and the masculine subject positions it engenders.

Biology is a feminist issue: Interview with Lynda Birke:

This is an interview with Professor Lynda Birke (University of Chester, UK), one of the key figures of feminist science studies. She is a pioneer of feminist biology and of materialist feminist thought, as well as of the new and emerging field of hum-animal studies (HAS). This interview was conducted over email in two time periods, in the spring of 2008 and 2010. The format allowed for comments on previous writings and an engagement in an open-ended dialogue. Professor Birke talks about her key arguments and outlooks on a changing field of research. The work of this English biologist is typical of a long and continuous feminist engagement with biology and ontological matters that reaches well beyond the more recently articulated ‘material turn’ of feminist theory. It touches upon feminist issues beyond the usual comfort zones of gender constructionism and human-centred research. Perhaps less recognized than for instance the names of Donna Haraway or Karen Barad, Lynda Birke’s oeuvre is part of the same long-standing and twofold critique from feminist scholars qua trained natural scientists. On the one hand, theirs is a powerful critique of biological determinism; on the other, an acutely observed contemporary critique of how merely cultural or socially reductionist approaches to the effervescently lively and biological might leave the corporeal, environmental or non-human animal critically undertheorized within feminist scholarship. In highlighting the work and arguments of Lynda Birke, it is hoped here to provide an accessible introduction to the critical questions and challenges that circumvent contemporary discussions within feminist technoscience as theory and political practice.

Feminist technoscience studies

Feminist technoscience studies is a relentlessly transdisciplinary field of research which emerged out of decades of feminist critiques. These critiques have revealed the ways in which gender, in its intersections with other sociocultural power differentials and identity markers, is entangled in natural, medical and technical sciences as well as in the sociotechnical networks and practices of a globalized world. As the sociocultural embeddedness of all scientific and technological theories and practices is a basic assumption among researchers within this field, the positivist distinction between scientific theories and their technological/practical applications is taken to be unsustainable. The term ‘technoscience’ is meant to challenge critically this distinction and the ensuing separation of ‘basic’ and ‘applied’ science. For researchers within the overlapping fields of science and technology studies (STS) and feminist technoscience studies, there is no such thing as a pure and politically innocent ‘basic’ science that can be transformed into technological applications to be ‘applied’ in ‘good’ or ‘bad’ ways at a comfortable distance from the ‘clean’ hands of the researcher engaged in the former. It is a shared assumption of researchers within the fields of STS and feminist technoscience studies that ‘pure’, ‘basic’ science is as entangled in societal interests, and can be held as politically and ethically accountable, as the technological practices and interventions to which it may give rise. The compound word ‘technoscience’ was coined to emphasize this unavoidable link. Following the tradition of, among others, feminist technoscience scholar Donna Haraway (1997a), we have chosen to emphasize this link as crucial to feminist critiques of science and technology by using the umbrella term feminist technoscience studies for this special issue of the European Journal of Women’s Studies (EJWS). However, to avoid terminological confusion we should underline that the field is sometimes (including in some of the articles in this special issue) referred to by other names, such as feminist science studies, feminist cultural studies of science, feminist studies of science and technology, gender and science, etc. Genealogically, feminist technoscience studies is inspired by social constructionist approaches to gender, sex, intersectionalities, society, science and technology. However, it is important to underline that these studies, together with other kinds of material or postconstructionist feminisms (Lykke, 2008, 2010a), has also transgressed social constructionism, forcefully drawing attention to the ways in which the discursive and material aspects of sociotechnical relations and processes of materialization are inextricably intertwined. This is reflected in the articles on the following pages. They are all, in Editorial

The Timely Ethics of Posthumanist Gender Studies

Since the inception of interdisciplinary feminist studies (under whatever heading), the field of feminist materialist thinking, from Christine Delphy to Karen Barad, has both exploded and imploded on itself. Recently under the auspice of a range of speculative and queer feminist materialisms, previous insights – especially from feminist science studies – are re-evaluated and re-read through animal studies, in-house science feminisms and green critique, critical disability studies and crip theory, new materialisms, and older ones, such as queer phenomenology or dialectic materialism (Alaimo 2011). In this think piece, I would like to query the posthuman, or material, or ontological turn, and ask more poign antly: was this turn (whatever we want to call it) an ethical turn? Nowadays, materialities hail us from all sides, in all forms, from around and from within: Waste accumulates in landfills, and in the oceans, scattered garbage congeal into plastic continents. The weather heats our planet, and hurricanes, wood fires and climate refugees keep uneven steps. Erupting volcanoes halt European air traffic and solar f lares wreck technological havoc. The drugs we ingest are f lushed out of our bodies and into lakes, seas and other bodies of water, perhaps to alter the sexual morphology of fish and prove the critical salience of materialist enviro-feminist Stacey Alaimo’s concept »transcorporeality«. Clearly we are embedded in reciprocal relations of both human and non-human making. With a material-semiotics of its own, widely celebrated recent science phenomena, like neuroplasticity and epigenetics, re-conceptualize the multiple materialities of bodies. With riffs from poststructuralist theory, embodiment in present bioscience is a case of contingent co-configuration within context. Newly mapped microbiomes also belie humanist assumptions of self-contained individuality: the number of microbes, e.g. bacteria, that inhabit our bodies exceeds the number of our »own« bodily cells by up to a hundredfold. Like all of us »companion species« (Haraway), neurons and genomes are produced in reciprocity with environments, thus finally putting the tired nature or nurture debate to rest. We are naturecultures. Basta! But how are these converging strands of materialisms changing the horizon of feminist studies? I believe the timely ethics of posthumanist gender studies is long overdue. Entanglements of self and other, cultures within worldly nature, pasts, presents and futures emerge here as a kind of starting point, but the entanglements does not come from an interconnectedness of separate entities to start with but are instead »specific material relations of the ongoing differentiation of the world« (Barad 2010, 265). And these entanglements, these onto-epistemological

PharmAD-ventures: A Feminist Analysis of the Pharmacological Imaginary of Alzheimer’s Disease

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) may be situated within a cultural landscape produced, in part, by demographics and the marketing strategies of an aggressive biopharmaceutical industry. The simultaneously corporeal and visual domain of advertisements for anti-AD drugs generates dynamic images of gender and embodiment, and it also lends itself to feminist interventions engaging with the images and ideas circulating around aging, medicine and the body. In this article, we investigate advertisements targeting medical practitioners treating patients with AD. Working within a methodological framework we identify as ‘feminist visual studies of technoscience’, we want to propel the discussion in the direction of a broader corpus of medical media. Through this limited exercise, we hope to make a scholarly contribution to the feminist community by critiquing some of the images emerging within popular/scientific media with regard to Alzheimer’s, a disease collectively imagined within an aging Western population.

Editorial : Post-humanities is a Feminist Issue

It is a great pleasure to introduce this special issue of NORA, entitled Posthumanities—which we construe as the conceptual re-tooling and reinvigoration of feminist research within the humanities and social sciences. Such re-tooling is here regarded as necessary so as to meet up with the accelerating changes within contemporary life engendered by technoscience (new technologies for baby-making is but one intimate example), our natural world (the climate for instance), and the discrepancies that mount up when we keep Man as the given focal point of sociocultural analysis. As has often been commented upon in recent discussions about this predicament, the deterioration of the humanities is often linked to the growing cultural and financial importance of technoscience. With this issue, in which we engage in various forms of post-humanist gender studies, we would like to make a strong case for an updated alliance between feminist theory, humanities research, and technoscience studies—an alliance that could re-calibrate the analytical tools for understanding the everyday practices of the sciences and how they affect our sense of self, while enhancing the relevance of the humanities as well as making the applicability of feminist theory more visible. As something of a transdisciplinary area of its own, feminist technoscience studies has emerged out of more than four decades of feminist materialist critiques of biological determinism and androcentric medical expertise. It is a heterogeneous field of research that takes its cues from the larger field of science and technology studies (as the study of the history and social construction of knowledge, technology, and medical practice), from actor-network theory, but also from cultural studies and post-colonial and feminist theory. Feminist technoscience studies zooms in on the ways in which gender, as it intersects with other power differentials, gives shape to and challenges technology, the medical and natural sciences, and our very understanding of nature, culture, and humanness. As humans, more obviously today than ever, are entangled in co-constitutive relations with technology and science, with other animals, and with the environment, it has become difficult to uphold notions of the human along the lines of androcentrism and anthropocentrism. This is the raison d’être for research in the registers of both post-humanities and feminist technoscience studies. In fact, feminist technoscience studies—such as the oeuvre of Donna Haraway—pioneered much of the work that today may be called post-humanities (to emphasize the transitional dimensions of the disciplines connected to the human, cultural, and natural sciences) as well as that peculiar philosophical trend of returning to (process) ontological issues as these link up with epistemological and ethical ones. Sometimes such trends are termed the material turn, or the post-human

Picturizing the scattered ontologies of Alzheimer’s disease: Towards a materialist feminist approach to visual technoscience studies:

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is emerging into public view in unprecedented ways. Foremost among these is the embodied form of elderly men and women appearing in commercial imagery for patient advocacy groups or pharmaceutical advertisements, but scientific imagery also seeps into the visual media cultures that surround us. The recent reconfiguration of Alzheimer’s disease is due to expanding ageing populations, an aggressive biopharmaceutical industry becoming a fast-growing material-semiotic realm that is providing powerful images of both gendered and racialized embodiment. Such a visual, and yet highly material, realm is in need of feminist interventions, engaging with the images and ideas that circulate around ageing, medicine, human and non-human embodiment. From a non-representationalist (figural realist) and posthumanist perspective identified as feminist visual studies of technoscience, the authors seek to further the discussion in the direction of understanding the ‘scattered ontologies’ of Alzheimer’s — in laboratory practice, the realm of medical media and in commercial appeals to coherent individuality and human cognition — as gendered domains of figural reality and performative matter.

Enrolling Men, their Doctors, and Partners: Individual and Collective Responses to Erectile Dysfunction

This section of this book explores local examples of a pharmaceutical’s ability to influence the treatment of established medical conditions and redefine health problems as issues with a pharmaceut ...Using the Pfizer funded Swedish informational site about erectile dysfunction (ED), www.potenslinjen.se, we examine how potential users, their partners, and medical doctors are enrolled in the process of creating the Swedish Viagra user. Contextualized against other critical work on Viagra, our analysis shows how the commercial discourse embeds the ED patient into a network of actors. Three separate actors are co-constituted and enrolled by this erectile dysfunction information discourse, comprising Viagra marketing material in a country which forbids direct to consumer advertising of prescription medication. Doctors are enrolled to produce the cultural authority of expert medical knowledge, whereas partners are given responsibility for the emotional aspects of a man’s sexuality and encouraged to direct the man toward the relationship-saving Viagra. Throughout, though, the man is the patient responsible for taking Viagra to fix his dysfunctioning penis. We problematize this individualised solution by contrasting it with the social aspects of the discourse and examining other qualitative and historical studies of impotence. We then ask if the enrolment presented by the Swedish Viagra website could be (mis)used to expand the circle of actors involved in ED, redefi ning the ‘problem’ and opening for a wider variety of treatments.In April 2001, the Swedish government decided to immediately remove Viagra from the public pharmaceutical reimbursement system (Swedish Book of Statutes 2001, 140). All patients who still wanted th ...An exploration of how global pharmaceutical products are localized - of what happens when they become ’glocal’ - this book examines the tensions that exist between a global pharmaceutical market and the locally bounded discourses and regulations encountered as markets are created for new drugs in particular contexts. Employing the case study of the emergence, representation and regulation of Viagra in the Swedish market, Glocal Pharma offers analyses of commercial material, medical discourses and legal documents to show how a Swedish, Viagra-consuming subject has been constructed in relation to the drug and how Viagra is imagined in relation to the Swedish man.Engaging with debates about pharmaceuticalization, the authors consider the ways in which new identities are created around drugs, the redefinition of health problems as sits of pharmaceutical treatment and changes in practices of governance to reflect the entrance of pharmaceuticals to the market. With attention to ’local’ contexts, it reveals elements in the nexus of pharmaceutcalization that are receptive to cultural elements as new products become embedded in local markets.An empirically informed study of the ways in which the presence of a drug can alter the concept of a disease and its treatment, understandings of who suffers from it and how to cure it - both locally and internationally - this book will appeal to scholars of sociology and science and technology studies with interests in globalization, pharmaceuticals, gender and the sociology of medicine.The Swedish medical discourse : Impotence, erectile dysfunction and Viagra in Lakartidningen

Fathoming chemical weapons in the Gotland Deep

At the end of World War II, tens of thousands of tons of chemical warfare agents – mostly mustard gas – were dumped in the Gotland Deep – a deep basin in the middle of the otherwise shallow Baltic Sea. Decades later, these weapons are being reactivated – both literally (perhaps on the faces of dead seals, and in fishermen’s nets) and also in our imaginations. In this story that recounts the beginning of our research into this situation, militarization meets with environmental concern: the past floats into the present, where humans and non-humans are equally implicated, where the sea itself conditions the kinds of questions we can ask, and answers we might get, and where terms like ‘threat’ and ‘risk’ remain undecided. After spending time on Gotland Island – the closest terrestrial site to these weapons dumps – we ask what kinds of research methods might be adequate to these tangled, underwater tales that we find so difficult to fathom.

Glocal Pharma : International brands and the imagination of local masculinity

This section of this book explores local examples of a pharmaceutical’s ability to influence the treatment of established medical conditions and redefine health problems as issues with a pharmaceut ...Using the Pfizer funded Swedish informational site about erectile dysfunction (ED), www.potenslinjen.se, we examine how potential users, their partners, and medical doctors are enrolled in the process of creating the Swedish Viagra user. Contextualized against other critical work on Viagra, our analysis shows how the commercial discourse embeds the ED patient into a network of actors. Three separate actors are co-constituted and enrolled by this erectile dysfunction information discourse, comprising Viagra marketing material in a country which forbids direct to consumer advertising of prescription medication. Doctors are enrolled to produce the cultural authority of expert medical knowledge, whereas partners are given responsibility for the emotional aspects of a man’s sexuality and encouraged to direct the man toward the relationship-saving Viagra. Throughout, though, the man is the patient responsible for taking Viagra to fix his dysfunctioning penis. We problematize this individualised solution by contrasting it with the social aspects of the discourse and examining other qualitative and historical studies of impotence. We then ask if the enrolment presented by the Swedish Viagra website could be (mis)used to expand the circle of actors involved in ED, redefi ning the ‘problem’ and opening for a wider variety of treatments.In April 2001, the Swedish government decided to immediately remove Viagra from the public pharmaceutical reimbursement system (Swedish Book of Statutes 2001, 140). All patients who still wanted th ...An exploration of how global pharmaceutical products are localized - of what happens when they become ’glocal’ - this book examines the tensions that exist between a global pharmaceutical market and the locally bounded discourses and regulations encountered as markets are created for new drugs in particular contexts. Employing the case study of the emergence, representation and regulation of Viagra in the Swedish market, Glocal Pharma offers analyses of commercial material, medical discourses and legal documents to show how a Swedish, Viagra-consuming subject has been constructed in relation to the drug and how Viagra is imagined in relation to the Swedish man.Engaging with debates about pharmaceuticalization, the authors consider the ways in which new identities are created around drugs, the redefinition of health problems as sits of pharmaceutical treatment and changes in practices of governance to reflect the entrance of pharmaceuticals to the market. With attention to ’local’ contexts, it reveals elements in the nexus of pharmaceutcalization that are receptive to cultural elements as new products become embedded in local markets.An empirically informed study of the ways in which the presence of a drug can alter the concept of a disease and its treatment, understandings of who suffers from it and how to cure it - both locally and internationally - this book will appeal to scholars of sociology and science and technology studies with interests in globalization, pharmaceuticals, gender and the sociology of medicine.The Swedish medical discourse : Impotence, erectile dysfunction and Viagra in Lakartidningen