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.
Keywords
- Subject Position
- Healthy Subjectivity
- Medical Guideline
- Intergenerational Relationship
- Injured Body
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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- 1.
See Chap. 1 for a discussion of terminology around sex, gender, trans and so on.
- 2.
- 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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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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