in the absence of a public space in which we can engage with one another in an attempt to discover and secure the common good, we fall back on private strategies to shore up both our material conditions and our sense of self. We try to tailor our personalities to become more competitive. We mange … Continue reading »
Filed under Late Capitalism and Sexual Culture …
Female Sexual Dysfunction, Marketing, and Disease-Mongering
Sexual anxiety in late capitalism
Although I agree that as long as there have been human beings there have been questions about sex, I believe that the current deluge reflects less eternal inquisitiveness than a modern epidemic of insecurity and worry generated by a new social construction: the idea that sexual functioning is a central, if not the central, aspect of a … Continue reading »
The fallacy of sexual naturalism
My mother is a professional musician, and the metaphor of music has helped me explain sexuality to numerous audiences. Open a textbook on human sexuality, and nine times out of ten it will begin with a chapter on anatomy and physiology. This opening sets the stage for the assumption that “the biological bedrock,” as it … Continue reading »
A few quick thoughts on the next sexual revolution
In the 1960s a range of political, social, economic and cultural factors intersected to generate a dramatic increase in the range and scope of everyday discourse about sex and sexuality. People begin to think and talk about sex/sexuality with a degree of explicitness and visibility which had heretofore been lacking. This generates interpenetrating feedback loops … Continue reading »
The government of an ‘economy’ and the emergence of a ‘bioeconomy’
As Peter Miller and I have argued elsewhere, the government of an “economy” becomes possible only through discursive mechanisms that represent the domain to be governed as an intelligible field with its limits, characteristics whose component parts are linked together in some more or less systematic manner (Miller and Rose 1990). For the bioeconomy to … Continue reading »
The tension at the heart of the DSM
DSM IV cautions that individuals within any diagnostic group are heterogeneous: its categories are only intended as aids to clinical judgement. But it promotes an idea of specificity in diagnosis that is linked to a conception of specificity in underlying pathology. The broad categories of the start of the twentieth century – depression, schizophrenia, neurosis … Continue reading »
The transition from psy discourse to neurochemical discourse
The psy discourses that took shape across the twentieth century brought into existence a whole new way of relating to ourselves – in terms of neuroses, trauma, unconscious desires, repression, and, of course, the theme of the centrality of sexuality to our psychic life. To say we have become “neurochemical selves” is not to say that this … Continue reading »
The creation of the ‘mind’
In psychoanalysis, and in the whole array of psychotherapies that accompanied it, the eye gave way to the ear: it was the voice of the patient that was the royal road to the unconscious. Madness, as mental illness, neurosis, and psychosis, came to be located in a psychological space – the repository of biography and … Continue reading »
Late capitalism and a/sexual culture
My aim is descriptive and diagnostic – to begin to map the new territory of biological citizenship and to develop some conceptual tools for its analysis Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, Pg 137, Princeton University Press In short: my plan is to do the same thing with sexual experience in late capitalism….
