Sexual Medicine, Sexual Bodies and the ‘Pharmaceutical Imagination’

This paper analyzes contemporary clinical research on sexual dysfunctions to explore the biomedical construction of sexual bodies. The clinical and commercial success of Viagra as a treatment for erectile dysfunction intensified the search for biomedical explanations and solutions for an expanded range of sexual disorders in both women and men. I review significant shifts in scientific and cultural narratives of sexual problems, focusing on the extent to which a variety of increasingly discrete sexual dysfunctions with presumed organic bases have been constructed as therapeutic targets. It is argued that a ‘pharmaceutical imagination’ which assumes linear progress from psychological to physiological etiologies and anticipates pharmaceutical solutions, frames these narratives. Drawing on critical and feminist science studies, I demonstrate how drugs (such as PDE-5 inhibitors, hormones, and SSRI antidepressants) become enrolled as actants in the construction of ‘functional’ sexual bodies.