Cacchioni moves beyond the search for a sexual pharmaceutical drug for women to ask a broader question: how does the medicalization of female sexuality already affect women's lives?
Tracks the medical emergence and treatment of vulvar pain conditions in order to understand why so many US women are misinformed about their sexual bodies. How does a woman describe a part of her body that much of society teaches her to never discuss? It Hurts Down There analyzes the largest known set of qualitative research data about vulvar pain conditions. It tells the story of one hundred women who struggled with this dilemma as they sought treatment for chronic and unexplained vulvar pain. Christine Labuski argues that the medical condition of vulvar pain cannot be adequately understood without exposing and interrogating cultural attitudes about female genitalia. The authors dual positioning as cultural anthropologist and former nurse practitioner strengthens her argument that discourses about healthy vulvas naturalize and reproduce heteronormative associations between genitalia, sex, and gender. This is an empirically engaged, ethnographically rich interpretation of genital pain in a cross section of womenbut it is also so much more. Christine Labuski has a deep understanding of both the anatomical biomedical construction of female genitalia and manifestations of physical pain and suffering, which she combines with a marvelous cultural analysis of how entangled these biological facts are with the contemporary culture of female loathing and self-loathing. Lisa Jean Moore, coauthor of The Body: Social and Cultural Dissections
What is the history of ‘everyday health’ in the postwar world, and where might we find it? This volume moves away from top-down histories of health and medicine that focus on states, medical professionals, and other experts. Instead, it centres the day-to-day lives of people in diverse contexts from 1950 to the present. Chapters explore how gender, class, ‘race’, sexuality, disability, and age mediated experiences of health and wellbeing in historical context. The volume foregrounds methodologies for writing bottom-up histories of health, subjectivity, and embodiment, offering insights applicable to scholars of times and places beyond those represented in the case studies presented here. Drawing together cutting-edge scholarship, the volume establishes and critically interrogates ‘everyday health’ as a crucial concept that will shape future histories of health and medicine.
Women are in a bind. In the name of consent and empowerment, they must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently. Yet sex researchers suggest that women’s desire is often slow to emerge. And men are keen to insist that they know what women—and their bodies—want. Meanwhile, sexual violence abounds. How can women, in this environment, possibly know what they want? And why do we expect them to? In this elegant, searching book—spanning science and popular culture; pornography and literature; debates on Me-Too, consent and feminism—Katherine Angel challenges our assumptions about women’s desire. Why, she asks, should they be expected to know their desires? And how do we take sexual violence seriously, when not knowing what we want is key to both eroticism and personhood? In today’s crucial moment of renewed attention to violence and power, Angel urges that we remake our thinking about sex, pleasure, and autonomy without any illusions about perfect self-knowledge. Only then will we fulfil Michel Foucault’s teasing promise, in 1976, that ‘tomorrow sex will be good again’
This book explores the ‘material-discursive entanglement’ of how we both make the world with our words and how the materiality of the world forces us to put words on it. Beginning with the conundrum of how the things that make up our world are both shaped by and shape the ways in which we talk about, engage with and think about them, the author accepts the entanglement and then works backwards, using the metaphor of refraction to help articulate the structures, values and norms that discursively shape our world and our selves in it. Through a series of empirical examples taken from work on medical technologies and the body, Refracting through Technologies shows how researchers and designers can use material things – technologies – to refract discourses and articulate the concerns and voices producing them. Refraction as a metaphor is thus revealed to be an important concept, enabling scholars to apply analytical work to political concerns about the technological world. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, science and technology studies, philosophy and design with interests in technoscience, feminist thought and social theory.
This cutting-edge and comprehensive fourth edition of Women’s Lives: A Psychological Perspective integrates the most current research and social issues to explore the psychological diversity of girls and women varying in age, ethnicity, social class, nationality, sexual orientation, and ableness. Written in an engaging and accessible manner, its use of vignettes, quotes, and numerous pedagogical tools effectively fosters students’ engagement, active learning, critical thinking, and social activism. New information covered includes: neoliberal feminism, standpoint theory, mujerista psychology (Chapter 1) LGBT individuals and individuals with disabilities in media (Chapter 2) testosterone testing of female athletes, precarious manhood (Chapter 3) raising a gender non-conforming child, impact of social media on body image (Chapter 4) gender differences in narcissism and Big Five personality traits, women video-game designers (Chapter 5) asexuality, transgender individuals, sexual agency, "Viagra for women" controversy (Chapter 6) adoption of frozen embryos controversy (Chapter 7) intensive mothering, integrated motherhood, "living apart together", same-sex marriage (Chapter 8) single-sex schooling controversy (Chapter 9) combat roles opened to U.S. women, managerial derailment (Chapter 10) work-hours dilemmas of low-wage workers (Chapter 11) feminist health care model, health care for transgender individuals, Affordable Care Act (Chapter 12) feminist critique of CDC guidelines on women and drinking (Chapter 13) cyberharassment, gendertrolling, campus sexual assault (Chapter 14) transnational feminism, men and feminism (Chapter 15) Women’s Lives stands apart from other texts on the psychology of women because it embeds within each topical chapter a lifespan approach and robust coverage of the impact of social, cultural, and economic factors in shaping women’s lives around the world. It provides extensive information on women with disabilities, middle-aged and older women, and women in transnational contexts. Its up-to-date coverage reflects current scientific and social developments, including over 2,200 new references. This edition also adds several new boxed features for student engagement. In The News boxes present current, often controversial, news items to get students thinking critically about real-life applications of course topics. Get Involved boxes encourage students to actively participate in the research process. What You Can Do boxes give students applied activities to promote a more egalitarian society. Learn About the Research boxes expose students to a variety of research methods and highlight the importance of diversity in research samples by including studies of underrepresented groups.
Covering a wide variety of subjects and points of inquiry on women's sexuality, from genital anxieties about pubic hair to constructions of the body in the therapy room, this book offers a ground-breaking examination of women, sex, and madness, drawing from psychology, gender and sexuality studies, and cultural studies. Breanne Fahs argues that women’s sexuality embodies a permanent state of tension between cultural impulses of destruction and selfishness contrasted with the fundamental possibilities of subversiveness and joy. Emphasizing cultural, social, and personal narratives about sexuality, Fahs asks readers to imagine sex, bodies, and madness as intertwined, and to see these narratives as fluid, contested, and changing. With topics as diverse as anarchist visions of sexual freedom, sexualized emotion work, lesbian haunted houses, and the insidious workings of capitalism, Fahs conceptualizes sexuality as a force of regressive moral panics and profound inequalities—deployed in both blatant and more subtle ways onto the body—while also finding hope and resistance in the possibilities of sexuality. By integrating clinical case studies, cultural studies, qualitative interviews, and original essays, Fahs offers a provocative new vision for sexuality that fuses together social anxieties and cultural madness through a critical feminist psychological approach. Fahs provides an original and accessible volume for students and academics in psychology, gender and sexuality studies, and cultural studies.
This book, by bringing together critical pharmaceutical studies and feminist technoscience studies, explores the way drugs produce sexed and/or gendered identities for those who take – or resist – them, and how feminist technoscience studies can contribute a theoretical lens with which to observe sex and gender in the pharmaceuticalization processes. Topics explored in this diverse collection include the use of hormones to delay puberty onset for trans children; HPV vaccination against cervical cancer in Sweden, the UK, Austria and Colombia; Alzheimer’s discourses; and the medication of prostate issues. Ericka Johnson has brought together an innovative and timely collection that demonstrates gender as relevant in studies of pharmaceuticals, and provides multiple examples of methodological and theoretical tools to consider gender while studying drugs.
This book offers a genealogy of the medicalisation of sexual appetite in Europe and the United States from the nineteenth to twenty-first century. Histories of sexuality have predominantly focused on the emergence of sexual identities and categories of desire. They have marginalised questions of excess and lack, the appearance of a libido that dwindles or intensifies, which became a pathological object in Europe by the nineteenth century. Through a genealogical approach that draws on the writings of Michel Foucault, A Genealogy of Appetite in the Sexual Sciences examines key ‘moments’ in the pathologisation of sexuality and demonstrates how medical techniques assumed critical roles in shaping modern understandings of the problem of appetite. It examines how techniques of the patient case history, elixirs and devices, measurement, diagnostic manuals and pharmaceuticals were central to the medicalisation of sexual appetite. Jacinthe Flore argues that these techniques are significant for understanding how a concern with ‘how much?’ has transformed medical knowledge of sexuality since the nineteenth century. The questions of ‘how much?’, ‘how often?’ and ‘how intense?’ thus require a genealogical investigation that pays attention to the emergence of medical techniques, the transformation of forms of knowledge and their effects on the problematisations of sexual appetite.