Propping up pharma's (natural) neoliberal phallic man: pharmaceutical representations of the ideal sexuopharmaceutical user

Sexual Pleasure and Healthcare Settings: Focusing on Pleasure to Improve Healthcare Delivery and Utilization

Sexual pleasure is best attained through facilitating access to the highest standard of health. Today global data show a persistent high burden of sexual health issues. Yet, pleasure remains a sensitive, stigmatized, and unspoken topic in healthcare services. This article examines how to incorporate a value for pleasure into healthcare services, grounded in the assumption that pleasure is a fundamental reason why people have sex and that acknowledging this can support people in creating safer, more pleasurable sexual experiences. Drawing upon examples from the literature and field experience, this article explores how to better address pleasure in healthcare settings.

Adjusting hormones and constructing desires: new materialisations of female sexuality in Brazil

This paper presents the findings from a study conducted in Brazil among doctors specialised in the treatment of sexual problems. Its focus is on medical treatments and approaches related to female sexuality. According to the accounts provided by professionals, the most common 'problem' they encountered among women was lack of sexual desire in the period around menopause. In line with current principles of sexual medicine, they concurred that this issue resulted from declining hormone production. This paper discusses how pharmaceutical treatments have facilitated the materialisation of female desire in terms of the presence or absence of testosterone, paradoxically the hormone most commonly associated with masculinity.

Feminism, psychology, and the gendering of neoliberal subjectivity: From critique to disruption

Numerous feminist scholars have argued that women, especially young women, have been constructed as ideal neoliberal subjects. Informed by Foucauldian approaches that extend neoliberalism beyond a set of free market principles to a dynamic that creates new forms of subjectivity, these scholars have demonstrated the elisions between “postfeminism” and neoliberalism in the positioning of young women as consumers, self-helpers, and “empowered” agents par excellence. The psy-disciplines have actively participated in the gendering of neoliberal subjectivity and I selectively review feminist critiques of this complicity. These critiques problematize discourses of empowerment, agency, and choice, even as they have seeped into feminist psychology itself. I then consider the theoretical resources that are available within and beyond feminist psychology to disrupt and even displace neoliberal forms of subjectivity. Building on insights from psychosocial studies, intersectional and decolonial approaches, and critical history and conjunctural thinking, I brainstorm some alternatives that feminist psychologists could offer.

Sexual dysfunction or sexual discipline? Sexuopharmaceutical use by men as prevention and proficiency

In the first decade following Viagra’s appearance, feminist and critical scholars documented the sexuopharmaceutical expansion of definitions of erectile dysfunction and its target consumer. As we approach Viagra’s 30th anniversary, while feminist scholarship on the medicalization of sexuality flourishes, the impact of erectile medication has received much less attention. This paper (re)casts a critical lens on popularized erectile medication sexual health messages in the context of current pharmaceutical marketing targeting users as neoliberal aspirational sexual subjects. Discourse analysis reveals that online advice about erectile medication use leverages the increased preoccupation with health risk assessment and prevention technologies to normalize erectile dysfunction as a risk for all men, irrespective of age and health status. Erectile dysfunction is presented as inevitable, pathological, and requiring vigilance and expert consultation; penile performance acts as a predictive health gauge. Erectile medication users are situated as model masculine subjects, (medically) augmenting sexual proficiency in romantic or sexually experimental contexts.