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Sexing Drugs, Refracting Discourses

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Gendering Drugs

Abstract

This book has discussed the way pharmaceuticals can produce sex/gender and be sexed/gendered in many different contexts. It presents empirical cases, covering pharmaceuticals on both ends of the adult subject and sex/gender in many different contexts. As such, it is an attempt to show the productive benefits of applying feminist technoscience studies’ theoretical tools about material-discursive entanglements and subjectivity to pharmaceutical studies and the political traction this can produce.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Chap. 1 for a discussion of terminology around sex, gender, trans and so on.

  2. 2.

    This has been explored elsewhere at length with the obvious example of Viagra, a drug that is often discursively positioned as a necessary component for sexual and sometimes emotional relations between people; see Mamo and Fishman (2001); Marshall (2006); Tiefer (2006); Johnson et al. (2016).

  3. 3.

    Please note that I am using the term “refraction,” not “diffraction,” even though I am proposing “refraction” within the same theoretical framing of material-discursive approaches to materiality that has generated the concept of diffractive reading. Refraction is different than diffractive reading, which was suggested by Haraway (1997) and developed by Barad (2003) as a way to step away from reflection. I understand diffractive reading as a method to combine ideas from diverse theories, theorists and fields, to find ways to see new things. As Barad poetically puts it, “Like the diffraction patterns illuminating the indefinite nature of boundaries—displaying shadows in ‘light’ regions and bright spots in ‘dark’ regions” (Barad 2003: 803). The usefulness of this approach when theorizing about technology is demonstrated by work from Hoel and van der Tuin, who use diffractive reading as a “new methodology for working with philosophical texts” that allows them to bring together previously disparate theories as resources for contemporary work on technology (Hoel and van der Tuin 2013: 190). The approach is equally useful for questions of gender and sex, as when Jagger applies it in her analysis of new materialism and sexual difference (Jagger 2015), and as a way of rethinking ethnography (Schneider 2002). But it is different than the refractive untangling of material-discursive entanglements I’m proposing here.

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  1. Department of Thematic Studies, Technology and Social Change, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden

    Ericka Johnson

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  1. Technology and Social Change, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden

    Ericka Johnson

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Johnson, E. (2017). Sexing Drugs, Refracting Discourses. In: Johnson, E. (eds) Gendering Drugs. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51487-1_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51487-1_10

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-51486-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-51487-1

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