Capitalizing on Affect: Viagra (in)Action

Extract

Recent cultural criticisms of Viagra’s advertisements and promotional materials have argued that rhetorical constructions of Viagra users reestablish a hegemonic masculinity premised on heterosexual standards of traditional gender norms (Baglia, 2005; Bordo, 2000; Loe, 2004). Cultural critics have also noted that Viagra’s promotional materials allow “for alternative readings by potential users who do not fall into the category of the ‘traditional/ideal’ Viagra user” including women and homosexual men (Mamo & Fishman, 2001, p. 14). What most criticisms fail to take into account is that Viagra, like other lifestyle drugs, does not only reestablish cultural constructs of the contemporary gendered body and its subversions, but that Viagra’s advertisements also provide a rhetorical site in which to investigate the cultural body’s relationship to contemporary capitalism.

In an economy based on the circulation of intimate and personal relationships, the manner in which our affect is appropriated and circulated is important to the study of contemporary forms of subjectivity.¹ The importance of interpersonal relationships in the contemporary workplace relies on “communicative labor” (Greene, 2004), the work of building and sustaining personal relationships for the sake of business. As Martin (1995) explained, the contemporary worker must be “innovative, flexible, whole in mind and body, nimbly managing a multitude of relationships and circumstances to maintain a vigorous state of health” (p. 225).² The contemporary worker needs to manage not only his or her physical body to meet the desired standards of health, but with the advent of lifestyle drugs, he or she must also manage the affects of the body in order to induce the proper communicative responses necessary for the management of “a multitude of relationships and circumstances.” Therefore, contemporary workers must not only be flexible and competent but also likeable and confident. Prescription drugs, along with their attendant advertisements, have altered our cultural understanding of “illness” and the definition of a medicinal “cure” by suggesting that ailments such as depression, anxiety, and even impotence are aberrations within the physical body and not effects caused by social factors outside the body. With the use of lifestyle drugs, we are told, any person may now attain likeability and confidence.