-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Ericka Johnson, Big Pharma, Women and the Labour of Love, Science and Public Policy, Volume 44, Issue 3, June 2017, Pages 431–432, https://doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scw061
- Share Icon Share
Extract
Sexuality has become medicalized and pharmaceuticalized, and one of the more vocal sources of critique against this comes from work at the intersection of feminist science studies and medical sociology. Much of this work has a distinctive activist stream. Big Pharma, Women and the Labour of Love by Thea Cacchioni is both another brick in the wall of resistance to pharma’s definition of normal, ‘healthy’ sex and an interesting study in the way heterosexual norms, the coital imperative and penetrative sex prevail through the health care system to the individual. Cacchioni’s study gives the reader clear, strong and empirically grounded examples of how this is discursively done by and to individuals as they learn to enact (or occasionally resist) the labour of love.
Thea Cacchioni is an assistant professor in the Department of Women’s Studies at the University of Victoria, Canada. In addition to academic research on heterosexuality, sexual pain, and the medicalizaion of sexuality, she has also testified against ‘pink Viagra’ before the US Food and Drug Administration and worked closely with academic and activist Leona Tiefer in the New View Campaign. The research in this book is another challenge to contemporary trends in sexual medicalization, built around qualitative data, with careful analysis of in-depth interviews, and framed in a critique of health care’s pharmaceuticalization practices.