Tag-Archive for » biopolitics «

Almost 40% of American women are sexually sick. Please help us.

According to the Washington Post story, research at Harvard Med School funded by a pharma company that makes drugs for female “sexual dysfunction” finds that “Forty percent of patients have sexual concerns, and 12 percent have enough of a concern that it’s a significant dysfunction in life. This needs to be addressed.” And it needs to be addressed with drugs and by medicalizing sexuality. Fuckin’ brilliant.

The survey included “problems” like “diminished sexual desire.” Um, why is not wanting to have sex as often as cosmo seems to indicate you should or maybe even your partner thinks you should your problem that you should fix by pathologizing your body?

This topic of medicalized sexuality has probably been touched on a lot in queer history, at least, but I feel like some sort of historical and anthropological intervention to place sexuality, sickness, sexual citizenship, medicine, and capital in their proper relations.

Tactical Biopolitics

Sarah Freeman at Feminist Review has blogged about Kavita Philip and Beatriz da Costa’s newly released volume Tactical Biopolitics. She focuses in particular on subRosa’s art:

Biopower, for Foucault, moves beyond the local disciplinary and containment of an individual and instead takes entire groups or populations as its central focus. So what subRosa has successfully depicted in their artwork are the various methods by which the capitalized and medicalized state apparatus has attempted to control women’s bodies and sexualities.

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