Abstract
Using material from the Pfizer sponsored website providing health information on erectile dysfunction to potential Swedish Viagra customers (www.potenslinjen.se), this article explores the public image of masculinity in relation to sexual health and the cultural techniques for creating pharmaceutical appeal. We zoom in on the targeted ideal users of Viagra, and the nationalized, racialized and sexualized identities they are assigned. As part of Pfizer’s marketing strategy of adjustments to fit the local consumer base, the ways in which Viagra is promoted for the Swedish setting is telling of what concepts of masculinity are so stable and unassailable that they can withstand the association with a drug that is, in essence, an acknowledgement of ‘failed’ masculinity and ‘dysfunctional’ sexuality. With comparative national examples, this study presents an interdisciplinary take on the ‘glocalized’ cultural imaginary of Viagra, and the masculine subject positions it engenders.
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Notes
This article is based on a paper presented at the Vårdnäs symposia 7–9 May 2008, Self, Identities and Bioethics. We wish to thank participants and organizers for their generous feedback, and we would also like to acknowledge the constructive comments of our anonymous reviewers.
Accessed on October 28th, 2007 and in February and April of 2008.
This is in contrast to another Pfizer sponsored website, www.viagra.se, which is framed as an informational site for medical professionals. The differences in readership is constructed to avoid direct to consumer advertising of Viagra.
See the special issue of sexualities, Sexualities vol 9(3), 2006.
We are aware of, and regret that, many references to key texts and authors of these fields and areas of study unfortunately have not been mentioned here. The specificities of the field feminist visual studies of technoscience have been elaborated on in other publications [3].
As something of a buzzword in recent gender studies, intersectionality accounts for how identities are never just sexed and gendered, but also conditioned by nationhood, ethnicity and racialization, class etc. An analytical insistence on intersectionality emerged from within the social sciences and anti-racist feminist theory [7, 13, 23]. In that vein, we argue that the educational advertising of Viagra in Swedish in fact does more than merely provide information, that it generates cultural negotiations over gender and sexuality as these are intersected by issues of, for instance, age and ability, nationhood and ethnicity.
Related to, but different from, Althusser’s notion of interpellation, psychoanalytic theories of the power of the unconscious and our shared cultural imaginary, subject positioning is a term used within cultural studies that assumes that there is neither anything natural about becoming a subject nor that becoming-subject is a conscious choice. Subject positioning as an ongoing process can be studied through a range of culturally embedded narratives, visual icons and modes of communicating, that provide sign posts for such recognition and identity formation.
We lean here on a wide range of scholars, such as Londa Schiebinger, Ludmila Jordanova, Donna Haraway, Adéle E. Clarke, Maureen McNeil, Sarah Franklin, Annemarie Mol, and others, in order to define how these concepts have been discussed within feminist science studies.
Of note is that on the Swedish site there is a page explaining what sex therapy can offer men suffering from impotence, in addition to pharmaceutical solutions to ED, and listing the telephone number to a sexual medicine center at a large hospital in Stockholm that receives undirected funds from Pfizer. We assume that this page is included on the informational website about ED because Pfizer is not legally allowed to advertise Viagra in Sweden and must therefore include some information about alternative treatments on the webpage.
Characterized by Anderson as a set of recognizable symbols and cultural attachments, the imagined community of, say, Sweden supports a national phantasy of horizontal camaraderie in spite of historically shifting geographical borders, power differentials, language-use and that not all Swedes ever will know each other [1].
http://www.potenslinjen.se (accessed 28 October 2007).
http://www.potenslinjen.se (accessed 28 October 2007).
“Blå, blå vindar och vatten” The chorus of this well-known song underlines an atmosphere of Swedish summer nights as connected to feelings of desire. (Here translated) “Blue, blue winds and water. Blue, blue skies and sea. Blue, blue feelings at night. ’Cause it’s a feast with Stillness as guest” (lyrics and song by artist Thomas Ledin.).
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Research article submitted to Health Care Analysis, special issue on “Self, Identities & Medicine”.
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Åsberg, C., Johnson, E. Viagra Selfhood: Pharmaceutical Advertising and the Visual Formation of Swedish Masculinity. Health Care Anal 17, 144–157 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10728-009-0112-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10728-009-0112-5