Ericka Johnson

DIVFeatures six Russian women who are either in search of or have already found foreign husbands via listings on the internet, highlighting their understandings of gender roles, the mail-order bride industry, and the experience of entering a new culture./div

Russian-American Internet Romance

Dreaming of a Mail-Order Husband

What contemporary prostate angst tells us about how we understand masculinity, aging, and sexuality. We are all suffering an acute case of prostate angst. Men worry about their own prostates and those of others close to them; women worry about the prostates of the men they love. The prostate--a gland located directly under the bladder--lurks on the periphery of many men's health issues, but as an object of anxiety it goes beyond the medical, affecting how we understand masculinity, aging, and sexuality. In A Cultural Biography of the Prostate, Ericka Johnson investigates what we think the prostate is and what we use the prostate to think about, examining it in historical, cultural, social, and medical contexts. Johnson shows that our ways of talking about, writing about, imagining, and imaging the prostate are a mess of entangled relationships. She describes current biomedical approaches, reports on the "discovery" of the prostate in the sixteenth century and its later appearance as both medical object and discursive trope, and explores present-day diagnostic practices for benign prostate hyperplasia--which transform a process (urination) into a thing (the prostate). Turning to the most anxiety-provoking prostate worry, prostate cancer, Johnson discusses PSA screening and the vulnerabilities it awakens (or sometimes silences) and then considers the presence of the absent prostate--how the prostate continues to affect lives after it has been removed in the name of health.

A Cultural Biography of the Prostate

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.

Feminist Studies of Pharmaceuticals

Gendering Drugs

Cecilia Åsberg

Ebba Sjögren

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. An exploration of how global pharmaceutical products are localized - of what happens when they become ‘glocal’ - this book examines the tensions that exist between a global pharmaceutical market and the locally bounded discourses and regulations encountered as markets are created for new drugs in particular contexts. Employing the case study of the emergence, representation and regulation of Viagra in the Swedish market, Glocal Pharma offers analyses of commercial material, medical discourses and legal documents to show how a Swedish, Viagra-consuming subject has been constructed in relation to the drug and how Viagra is imagined in relation to the Swedish man. Engaging with debates about pharmaceuticalization, the authors consider the ways in which new identities are created around drugs, the redefinition of health problems as sites of pharmaceutical treatment and changes in practices of governance to reflect the entrance of pharmaceuticals to the market. With attention to ‘local’ contexts, it reveals elements in the nexus of pharmaceutcalization that are receptive to cultural elements as new products become embedded in local markets. An empirically informed study of the the ways in which the presence of a drug can alter the concept of a disease and its treatment, understandings of who suffers from it and how to cure it - both locally and internationally - this book will appeal to scholars of sociology and science and technology studies with interests in globalization, pharmaceuticals, gender and the sociology of medicine.

Ericka Johnson

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