Set 9: Pick your Viscera

A gift is usually something given on your birthday or some other special occasion and can be small or grand. Gifts, in our culture, have come to allow individuals to monetarily quantify their feelings towards another person, of love, appreciation, or gratitude. However, a new gift has emerged from within the biomedical field: the “gift of life” via organ donation. How has the medical profession shaped this perception of organ donation and what are the implications for organ donors, recipients and the general public?

Organ transplants, a procedure that was unheard of fifty years ago, have become a normalized procedure and electing to be an organ donor is as simple as checking a box on your driver’s license application. Kaufman, Russ, and Shim’s article “Aged Bodies and Kinship Matters: The ethical field of kidney transplant” discuss this normalization of organ transplantation and really bring to light how new this procedure still is. In our society today, a kidney transplant is not an extremely common occurrence but isn’t thought of as a completely shocking medical intervention. Kaufman, Russ and Shim focus on kidney transplants for people over age 70 and posit that the construction of organ transplant for this age group is just one perpetuation of the widespread expectation “that one can grow older-and that one can strive to grow older, despite chronic disease and even terminal disease” (91) Our class has previously analyzed this expectation and shown how it has resulted in a hyper youth and longevity obsessed culture. And so how did this procedure become normalized? One process is the normalization of medical technology in general. This procedure has become more utilized for treatment and in terms of intervention forms, our mentality has evolved to a “whatever it takes” stance especially when dealing with end of life treatment. This mentality has pervaded medical decisions where now “choice is eclipsed by the routine treatment” (82) and the lengths a donor recipient will need to go through (hemodialysis, organ transplant, immuno-suppressant drugs after) have been normalized as needed in order to sustain life. Patients are expected to fight the war against death and seek extension of life at all costs.

The clip above is satirical but highlights the way our culture has come to view organ donation. Along with the great influence of medical technology, there is also the construction of organ donation as “the gift of life” often used by organ donation organizations and also medical professions. As with many relatives interviewed in the article, many of them come to symbolize the organ they donate as a physical manifestation of their love and appreciation for the recipient. Even among non-relatives, donors cited a strong family-like kinship that drove them to donate. This point is an interesting one because it seems to go in exactly the opposite direction of biomedicine historically. Biomedicine has prized itself for being objective and unbiased and medical students spend their entire medical education devoted to stripping away emotional attachment to viscera and organs in cadaver labs and patient diagnoses. But yet, donors place that emotional attachment back onto their organs. Donors explained many reasons for their donation such as “a thank you for all the years she has given me” or “donors feel obligated to allow their parent…to continue living” (85) and these loaded feelings are sometimes felt by recipients. Interviewed recipients demonstrated a lot of ambivalence towards receiving an organ and much of it was rooted as taking something from the donor, of being in debt to the donor where many “recipients…[feel] obligated to live for their families” (85). I believe that this understanding of organ donation has been constructed by donation organizations and also health care workers themselves, in skimming over Donate Life’s website, phrases such as “It’s About Living” and “the power to change someone’s life” are all conscious efforts to emotionally charge the act of donation and push people to sign up. How much free will do these organs donors really utilize in their choice to donate when looking at the loaded construction of how we view the process and act?

Nancy Scheper-Hughe’s article “The Last Commodity” focuses on individuals that have markedly less free will in terms of organ donation. Organ donors highlighted in the piece come typically from slums and ghettos and have donated organs as a means to an end. Gone are any romantic notions of a gift of life to a relative and instead the process is seen more as a business transaction of a commoditized good, our bodies. “Transplant tourism” is one notion brought up and organ donation is seen as a market consisting of “mortally sick bodies travelling in one direction…and “healthy” organs..in another (149). Although this idea may seem inherently wrong to some, the economists in the Freakonomics Radio episode "You say Repugnant..I say let's do it!" propose doing just this and treating organ matching as another business market. Treating organs as a commoditized product, at first seems repugnant, but have we not already put some emotional value on organs? What can prohibit placing monetary or trade value on them? As the article brings up “the ethical slippery slope occurs the first time one ailing human looks at another living human and realizes that inside that body is something capable of prolonging or enhancing his or her life” (161) and it is my view that we are now trying to climb back up after there has been evidence of negative repercussions around organ transplant. Like it or not, our organs have become constructed as valid entities outside of our bodies.

We have seen impoverished individuals with healthy organs exploited and preyed upon by more affluent, sick persons and this of great concern but where do we draw the line of free will over one’s body? How can we talk about the shortage of organ supply versus organ demand and then judge from our developed world the commodification of organ transplant seen in developing worlds?

Works Cited

Nancy Scheper-Hughes. 2005. "The Last Commodity: Post-Human Ethics and the Global Traffic in ‘Fresh’ Organs." Pp. 145-167.In Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Sharon R. Kaufman, Ann J. Russ, and Janet K. Shim. 2006. "Aged Bodies and Kinship Matters: The Ethical Field of Kidney Transplant." American Ethnologist 33 (1): 81-99.

"You Say Repugnant...I Say Let's Do it!". Freakonomics Radio. WNYC. Radio. December 2010

"Youtube: Anonymous Donor Donates Hospital 200 Human Kidneys". Web. March 2008

"Youtube: Man Lives Thanks To Heart Stolen From Dead Man". Web. March 2008

Site 8: Dying

My Grandfather and Grandmother in the process of a Buddhist housewarming ceremony.

My grandparents emigrated from Vietnam after the Fall of Saigon, leaving their entire lives and the cities where they grew up and raised their eight-child family. Almost all of my aunts and uncles live now in the United States and my grandparents live relatively close to my mom and our family. My mom has always enjoyed the company of my grandparents and has gone on cruises and other trips with them. In my eyes, my mom has always been the most involved with my grandparents, helping them with any errands they need to do or going along with them to help translate. In the past five or more years, my grandfather’s health had been unstable and shaky. He was diabetic and would often forget to take his insulin and fall into a coma. He was in and out of the hospital often and my grandmother and mother were the people who dealt with the majority of his health problems. This early November, my grandfather went to the hospital for another health complication and this visit, at first, felt all too familiar. Only along the timeline of his deteriorating health that my family and I were able to experience a completely different side of the how we understand and shape the idea of death and dying.

My grandfather entered the hospital with an already long medical history and it was initially treated within my family as another hospital visit. Soon he started having more complications and his prognosis began to look bleaker. In the beginning, my grandfather had to undergo hemodialysis and my grandmother and mother came to his hospital room everyday to help care for him and to translate for him. My mom, recently unemployed, carried most of the work of navigating the medical system for my grandfather. Two weeks before Christmas, my grandfather went into a coma and eventually had to be put on life support. He was put on an artificial respirator completely and was still on hemodialysis. Although my grandfather was not brain dead, I still relate to a lot of the concepts Margaret Lock brings up in “Living Cadavers and the Calculation of Death”. Not officially diagnosed as brain-dead, my grandfather, on all of this artificial support, was unable to sustain life with his own bodily processes thereby position in “betwixt and between, both alive and dead, breathing with technological assistance but…unconscious” (Lock 136). In a sense, I myself had already begun to deal with him no longer being “here” anymore. “Here” in the sense of his presence, his essence, his spirit. My mother and grandmother, the people who had been there for all his delusional outbursts and painful procedures during this time, I feel, had also begun to accept his passing. My grandfather remained on life support for one week or so until the difficult discussion of what the next step in treatment should be. Trying to gain conscious was the biggest thing but there were also his other underlying medical problems that had still yet to be dealt with. Would his life be for the better if we were to keep him alive? Or would another disease take him? The end of life debate is one that is complex with no right answer. So began a very hard process for my mother’s family.

"What Are We Going To Do About Dad?"

The NPR clip above was from an article I had previously read by Dr. Jerald Winakur titled “What Are We Going to Do About Dad” where he writes both about his experiences as an adult child caring for an father with dementia but also as a geriatric doctor. In his own personal experiences he expresses the dilemmas adult children face in navigating the parent’s medical decisions, culminating in the question his only sibling asks him every time he sees the author, “What are we going to do with dad?” Although I never heard exact conversations, my mother and her own siblings must have exchanged the same words among each other, as my grandfather’s health had been on the decline for some time. But there seemed to be no conclusion because my grandparents remained in their home, with my grandmother taking care of his day to day and my mom assisting. It was only until the question of if my grandfather should be taken off life support. My uncles and my grandfather’s brothers vetoed my grandmother and mother’s acceptance to take him off of life support. Instead they argued that he should remain on the life support, to “wait it out” maybe for a month, a year, who knows. For me, I found this incredibly frustrating because these people, who had not been there with my grandfather, had not had to go to the hospital in the middle of the night if the nurses called, wanted to keep him in the Intensive Care Unit where he was for however long. Dr. Winakur points out a huge weakness in geriatrics care of unintentional negligence, that this population takes much more attention and care than most workers are able to devote. While my grandfather was on life support and unresponsive, my grandmother and mother slept with him through the night and would sit by his bedside, offering the intense care end of life patients need. “Free from the Infirmity of (the) Age” by Eric Krakauer summarizes the sentiments I feel was happening with my uncle’s wishes to keep my grandfather alive that “Deferring death becomes more important than attending to the soul or preparation for the afterlife or the next life; it becomes more important than being with or saying farewell to loved ones, reconciling with estranged loved ones, or being home; it becomes more important even than a patient’s inability to do any of these tasks” (390). The decision to keep my grandfather on life support, in some ways seemed more rooted in the wishes of those living (my family) than the dying (my grandfather). Even if my grandfather did regain consciousness, it was highly likely he would just die from another cause (a “medical catastrophe” that one doctor in video watched in classed described) as all his organs began shutting down. Those who wished for him to stay on life support, wanted to fight to keep him alive at all costs as opposed to allowing him to pass away as peacefully as possible.

Ultimately, this hard decision was due to my grandfather’s stubborn denial to plan his end of the life decisions while he was still healthy. My mother brought it up many times and my grandfather refused to discuss the topic. In the end, his refusal to plan for the future resulted in frustration for everyone involved. My family had no clear plans or ideas of what my grandpa would have wanted in this situation. This divided my family and drew out an already painful process, both emotionally and physically. This denial of dying seems to span the American and the Vietnamese culture, that we have become unable to accept our inevitable demise. As previously discussed, medical technology and advances have had a large part to do with our staving off of aging and dying. But with these benefits are the greater costs of our extremely life centric and death fearing society.

Works Cited

Krakauer, Eric L. 2007. “To Be Freed from the Infirmity of (the) Age”: Subjectivity, Life-Sustaining Treatment, and Palliative Medicine.” In Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations. Joao Biehl, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pp 381-397.

Lock, Margaret. 2004. “Living Cadavers and the Calculation of Death.” Body and Society 10(2-3): 135-152.

"What Are We Going to Do About Dad?". Fresh Air. National Public Radio. August 18. 2005. Internet. Radio

Site 7: Anything is Possible

We humans are flawed. As much as we have evolved to be the intricate and well executed physical beings we are, there are flaws in all of us. Strength is something that varies greatly from person to person, some of it genetic and some of it malleable by lifestyle. With age and our individual lives, we will all face health problems and death is unavoidable. With the onset of medical technology and new drug patents, our culture has become health obsessed and is constantly looking for the fountain of youth, an answer to stave off old age and death. Advancements have allowed us to become much more proactive in our own bodily functions and gives power in things that used to be seen as inevitable or out of our hands. Vaccines help control diseases that used to plague our world and cancer is not a death sentence anymore but a treatable and manageable disease. In this same realm, plastic surgery has allowed people to take control over their physical appearance letting individuals shape themselves into the people they believe they should have looked like. All of this, it can be argued, is due to the reductionism of human life that is the base of science and biomedicine. Compartmentalized sections of the body are taken into consideration much the same as parts of a machine or departments of a factory. We have discussed previously how this shapes the way biomedicine “sees” patients and disease, but there is a worthy discussion at how this shapes our cultural understanding of ourselves.

In the past, science focused its gaze on the physical aspects of the human body, such as in terms of body mechanic and muscle tissue. With advancements in science, medicine has been able to direct its scope inward and look at bodily processes and chemical reactions within. With this came a focus on these reactions and posited them as identities for sufferers. Nikolas Rose’s chapter “Neurochemical Selves” delves into this reshaping of understanding with “the old regime the body of the patient had to be made legible to the physician interrogation, under the new regime the body produces its own truth” (194) where the malady is already in place and the physician’s role is merely to “uncover” this truth. This is highlighted in the discussion of mental disorders such as depression. Depression has been posited as an imbalance of neurochemicals, as almost a “molecular disorder” (Rose 198) as opposed to a mental disorder. Therefore a molecular disorder could be easily treated with molecular treatments such as Prozac that work agonistically or antagonistically on neurochemical receptors or the chemicals themselves. With this “molecular argumentation designed to emphasize simplicity of the neurochemical basis of the diagnosis and the mode of action of the drug” (Rose 199) mental disorders have become slowly stripped away of their stigma and allowed for open discussion and effective treatment. By removing the psychiatric and inherently loaded symptoms from say the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders the disease is taken for what it is, separate from personhood. A person suffering postpartum depression is not seen as a bad mother, but as someone with a under active serotonin receptor. This knowledge we have regarding our inner workings has really aided in treatment and allowed sufferers to take action against their disorders. With more answers being discovered about our weaknesses, at what point will anything be impossible or unattainable anymore? What are the implications of living in a society where “no” is not an option, and all we need is time to figure it out?

The above clip is for a movie that was just released titled “Limitless” about a down and out writer who is offered a secret drug that “unlocks” all of his potential and brain power. The trailer goes on to demonstrate his riches from this but also his inevitable downfall. If we know the chemical processes and our faults, how can we not seek to move towards “neuroenhancing”? The article “Brain Gain” chronicles this very phenomenon in the academia realm of Ivy League schools but also for working professionals. A big argument made by proponents for the use of these drugs is that it is merely focusing their own inherent intelligence and capacities. In the previous discussions of body as machinery, this argument is understandable. Just as a driver will put in better gas or oil to make their car run faster or a engineer will design a faster plane, how is someone taking a drug to simply make them work at a more productive any different? Talbot writes about a middle-aged lawyer who begins to see their mental capacity decline with old age who’s “not having any trouble at work. But she notices she’s having some problems…and want a bigger mental rev up” (Talbot 4) and this is precisely where reductionism has brought us. We are seen as completely modifiable and malleable creatures, no longer constrained by nature, due to the advancements we have been afforded. “Limitless” may be a dramatic representation of neuroenhancing but still is an accurate perspective on the practice. It allows us to become “better versions of ourselves” and what is wrong with that? We can already become prettier versions of ourselves or happier versions of ourselves. Why not aim to become smarter, more productive? How can we not blame ourselves for wanting this when we look at what science and our society says is possible?

An issue I would have hoped to see more discussed in Talbot’s article is the physical side effects and damage that comes with prescription drug abuse. Adderall abuse comes with high blood pressure and is damaging to the heart. In my opinion, prescription drugs have become so highly abused because of the mentality we have in our society regarding legal prescription drug use. So many drugs are out there and being prescribed for a number of things, making us immune to the huge presence it has in our lives. Prescription drug users often cite “It’s a prescription, so it’s okay. It isn’t cocaine or anything. A doctor prescribed it” and this is a valid argument when we look at the message biomedicine is saying: that there is a drug to cure you and to aid you. Why not a drug to enhance you? We are used to the side effects that come with legal prescription drugs, but is this enabling abusers to so easily dismiss the side effects of illegal prescription drug use? Overall I argue that our views on this neuroenhancing are deeply rooted in how science and medicine has posited our body and how it treats and cures us.

Works Cited

Margaret Talbot, "Brain Gain: The Underground World of 'Neuroenhancing' Drugs." The New Yorker, April 27, 2009.

Nikolas Rose, 2007. Neurochemical Selves, IN The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twety-First Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pp. 187-223.

"YouTube: "Limitless".YouTube.Web.Dec 21, 2010

Set #6: Disabling

The advancement of technology has brought with it ease of modern living that allows citizens to spend less time with menial tasks and focus on more important ones such as working. This has lead to a highly capitalistic society where production and a 40+ hour work week is highly regarded and praised. In our culture the “American Dream” of working hard for the big house and nice car creates workaholics and is based on consumerist values. It is safe to say that the general population regards their occupation and their time off as two very different experiences in terms of pleasure. There are those who are lucky enough to look forward to going to work everyday but for most work is a means to an end, a way to buy that new car and provide for your family. Technology and more time to focus on other things has become a trap itself for people because of how society structures what are appropriate ways to use one’s time. We seem to have become more stuck in the rat race and at what cost, physically, to us?

Dennis Wiedman’s article “Globalizing Chronicities of Modernity” deals with the topic of diabetes mellitus and the metabolic disorder Metabolic Syndrome (MetS). The arrival of MetS “shifted the theoretical paradigm that diabetes was the result of ‘sugar consumption” to…’obesity”” (Wiedman 39) and is an overarching term for a group of factors such as raised blood lipids, glucose intolerance, etc. that indicate someone who is at a higher risk for developing metabolic disorders. Wiedman goes forth to make the argument that “the persistence in time of limitations and suffering that results in disabilities” (38) termed chronicity as the common and primary causes of these disorders that afflict so much of our current population. Weidman’s article delved into many different topics about how our population’s health has declined so much but the one I want to focus on is the discussion of modernity. Although Weidman uses indigenous people to demonstrate how forced urbanization through reservations and modern tools dramatically changed the culture from one of “substinence agriculture to a cash economy” (42) he also discusses other research focusing on different populations with the same outcome. This disconnect from one’s primary cultural practices and the act of governments that “create, maintain, and impose chronicities” result in a community and its members who are lost. This is further perpetuated by “healthcare activities once associated with family, kin, and tribe become the role of professionalized healers where health care is converted into monetary activities” (Weidman 47). How I see our own society is that through modernity our culture has disconnected from the pleasure of leisure activity and been herded towards the ideology of work.

The clip above deals with how television has created a culture of aspiration but I found myself relating the ideas expressed to our culture of working. By becoming sucked into this cycle of always wanting we have become more involved in work and thereby distanced from our own cultural values and support structures. In this realm, occupation can be posited as disabling in that it pushes people into margins away from their cultural habitus. The modern lifestyle is fraught with the inability to make a personal connection (with the advent of the internet and social networking) and lack of leisure time because of the pressure felt to be working or doing related activities during this time. The unattainable “American Dream” is just one of the perpetuators of our work driven lifestyle and this mindset seems to have created a “reservation” effect in our population. Just as Native Americans began to forgo their customs and identity, turning to urbanization and falling into the black hole, so has modern man fallen into the workforce and lost the ability to leisure for pleasure. Huffington Post's article on stress relief is just one of the many examples of advice given to people regarding ways to “de-stress” their life and exemplifies how out of touch we have become with our own needs and desires. We seem to have replaced these traditional values and ideas with capitalism and science. Similar to the effect we see in biomedicine as stripping one’s autonomy to become dependent on science, work has stripped away one’s sense of identity to become dependent on career as self.

The article “Chronic Conditions, Health, and Well-Being in Global Contexts” looks into occupational therapy and how its ideology is much more focused on empowering those disabled. From the reading, the base of occupational therapy relies on “the belief that all people need to engage in occupation” and that the therapist’s role is to enable a person to participate in these activities. Medical anthropologists have worked to conceptualize “health as well being in the positive sense, not merely as the absence of disease or infirmity” (Frank 240) and I believe that occupational therapy positively aims to empower patients. There seems to be much individualized treatment and is seen as an independent living paradigm rather than simply rehabilitating the sufferer (Frank 238). Occupational therapy appears to try to begin rebuilding people’s broken autonomy and power in the world of their suffering especially among those with disabilities who have had a long history of oppression in the biomedical field. However, it is valid to point that ultimately the goal of occupational therapy is for sufferer to become a contributing, productive member of society, a worker in the factory of our society. And as has been laid out previously, occupation is another disabling paradigm.

Ultimately, from the readings our physical disorders are truly manifestations of our mental pressures and stresses. In our fast paced, modern life we have lost touch with nature due to urbanization, cuisine due to fast and processed food, and exercise due to cars. We lead lives in where we have every luxury available and constantly seek the latest thrill or gadget but at what cost to ourselves?

Works Cited

Charlie Broker- How TV Ruined Your Life.

Frank, Gelya, Baum, C., and Law, M, 2010. “Chronic Conditions, Health, and Well-Being in Global Contexts: Occupational Therapy in Conversation with Critical Medical Anthropology.” In Chronic Conditions, Fluid States: Chronicity and the Anthropology of Illness. Lenore Manderson and Carolyn Smith-Morris, eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers university Press. Pp. 230-246.

Wiedman, Dennis, 2010. “Globalizing the Chronicities of Modernity: Diabetes and the New Metabolic Syndrome.” In Chronic Conditions, Fluid States: Chronicity and the Anthropology of Illness. Lenore Manderson and Carolyn Smith-Morris, eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Pp.38-53.

Set 5: Sexing

The topic of sex is such a hotly debated issue since it taps into one of the most basal aspects of humanity. Even though the urge to procreate has been wired into our brains throughout our evolution, sexual desire and urges is still controversial and is greatly influenced on societal norms and rules. From society we learn what is considered sexually acceptable, what we are to consider appropriate objects of our desire, and even what are “normal” levels of pleasure and sexual acts. The two readings deal with the topics of homosexuality and the sexual disorders: sex addiction and inhibited sexual desire (ISD). Discussion of such taboo topics are focused on what happens when biomedicine attempts to quantify and explain something that is perceived as internally driven which leads to show how this structure of understanding has been the root of our prejudices and assumptions towards them

Homosexuality, in biomedicine, has had a rocky journey fraught with accusations of immorality and deviancy. Jenifer Terry’s chapter “Medicalizing Homosexuality” in her book American Obsession follows the historical understanding of studying homosexuality and the still current argument of whether it is inherent or acquired. This burning question led many people, scientific and non, such as Ulrichs, Freud, and others to construct different and sometimes conflicting explanations of the origin of homosexuality. Naturalists understand it to be a benign but inborn anomaly that was a condition of “sexual inversion, which caused homosexuals to be neither truly male nor truly female” (Terry 43). Freud believed that homosexuality was an individual’s inability to fully “castrate” from their Oedipus complex and their inappropriately directed sexual desire. All views of homosexuality attributed some hormonal/physical cause for homosexual but also posited it as a contamination of the body and ultimately the mind, that it was “a behavior or disposition confined to only particular types of people” (Terry 56). As Terry further goes on to explain the medicalization of homosexuality did not further its understanding but led to oppressing views that were/are culturally accepted. Homosexuality until 1973 was deemed a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) and its classification as a disease allowed for society’s Judo-Christian views to pervade into its being. It was something that doctors and those “afflicted” should seek to treat and ultimately cure. This point of view is not archaic but still prevalent in today’s society with countless camps and programs that promise to cure homosexuality. Homosexuals have been deemed abnormal and deviant from heterosexuality but where is this base of normalcy? The widely accepted notion that natural and normal is a man and a woman screams strong biblical influence. Alongside with this camp of beliefs are those that argue homosexuality is due to prenatal conditions or are currently searching for some sort of genetic marker. Is this a better understanding? My argument is that it is a different understanding but still one that is still oppressive.

In the above clip, the host draws attention to how homosexuals are stereotypically depicted in popular culture. Homosexuals are seen as outlandish, boisterous, and flamboyant. The way I see it is that instead of displaying overtly violent and negative emotions towards homosexuals, as we have done in the past, our homophobia has become subversive and this “third sex” is accepted in only culturally accepted ways. The culturally and scientifically accepted idea of “the model homosexual male” as effeminate and passive marginalizes homosexuals who do not fit this normal model of abnormality. Would a girl who enjoys makeup and “girly” activities lose her sense of identity as a lesbian just because she is not the “typical lesbian”? Homosexuality is still not seen as something normal but distinctly different within our heterosexually driven society. Again we run into the problem that we have encountered in the medicalization of many body experiences (mental disorders, diagnosing) that generality is cast over the whole. When complex and still not yet understood issues are cast in binary opposition, nuances are ultimately lost and hegemonic ideology purveys.

This structuring of sexual orientation can also be seen in how we interpret and accept sexual addiction in our culture. Janice Irvine’s article “Regulating Passions: The Invention of Inhibited Sexual Desire and Sexual Addiction” deals further with this analysis of how the medicalization of sexual disorders still find their place within cultural contexts. Irvine posits the medical belief that “sexual desire, resides in the body” (Irvine 320) and that “sexuality, although influenced by culture…[is] driven by an inner force or impulse” (Irvine 322). This correlates with the understanding of sex as primal instinct for humans and that one’s sexual drive is bodily manifested. However, the fact that outside referents are the diagnosing tools used for these disorders clearly places these disorders as formed outside of the body through societal interactions. An ISD partner’s frustration at insufficient amounts of sex is the driving force for the disorder, not the person’s own “suffering”. Those with ISD almost seem to think nothing of their disorder as one woman’s testimony regarding an interaction with her husband. The woman saw nothing extraordinarily pleasurable with sex as opposed to an ear scratch and it was the husband who deemed her as “sick” Early on in her work Irvine makes note that “More women than men are diagnosed with ISD, although many therapists report that the rate among males is rising” (Irvine 316) and I believe this points to the inadequacies of the cultural influence model used. A very plausible explanation for this may be that as sexual expectancies for males’ changes, they gain more power in voicing their lack of sexual desire. Males who have been long regarded as “sexual powerhouses” with “insatiable drives” may now feel comfortable with apathetic feelings towards sex. A recent skimming of celebrity sex addicts demonstrates a huge imbalance among those “afflicted” as they are all male. Like homosexuality, sexual deviancy such as sexual addiction is only presented and constructed on culturally accepted terms. Men are seen and accepted as being more sexually driven and in “less control” of their sexual urges. A man with a heavy sex drive is seen as virile and masculine. Therefore in this model, male sexual addiction makes medical sense, a sort of sex in overdrive explanation. A sexual addiction has become the male celebrity go to excuse for acts of infidelity or sordid stories and the public accepts and forgives these males. Women, on the other hand, are seen as promiscuous and morally loose when they commit the same acts and do not as readily use addiction as a fault. Is this because our society does not readily accept women with strong sex drives even though it constantly objectifies them? Even for a woman to engage in casual sex is seen as “having sex with a man”. The invention of these disorders has taken away power from persons that already lack most of their autonomy.

Biomedicine has sought to explain and deconstruct these sexual questions but have ultimately placed them further back into the dark closet. By allowing cultural influence into understanding, these issues have just been greater perpetuated as “abnormal” for homosexual or illnesses based on Judo-Christian ideologies. Although I see and understand the initial drivers to study these issues, researchers and biomedicine must be more mindful of what their knowledge can do for those they study.

Works Cited

Jennifer Terry. 1999. “Medicalizing Homosexuality.” IN An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pp 40-73.

Jannice M. Irvine. 1995. “Regulated Passions: The Invention of Inhibited Sexual Desire and Sexual Addiction.” In Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture.” Edited by Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla. Bloomington and Indianoplis: Indiana University Press.

Set #4: Let's Talk About Sex

Growing up as a teenager in 2011 is vastly different than when I was a teenager in 2004, less than a decade ago. I find myself becoming more and more disconnected from that age period and with that comes hindsight and self-reflection. The messages and media that target today’s youth are much stronger and sexual from the pressures and social cues I remember. With such shows as MTV’s “Teen Mom”, “16 and Pregnant” and ABC Family’s “Secret Life of an American Teenager” that prominently feature teenage sex and sexuality teenage culture as certainly changed. And is this for the better or for worse? In a world today that has terms such as “sexting” and readily available access to the Internet, what kind of implications does this have for our growing youth and in turn our future population?

Thomas Laquer’s chapter “New Science, One Flesh” goes into great detail of the historical perception of sexual anatomy and practices and how our cultural biases and ideologies are intertwined with science and our understanding of sexual physiology. Previously, female orgasm was believed to be as vital to conception as male orgasm and thereby great attention was focused on foreplay and “when pleasure is greater, the woman emits seed and suitable material for the formation of the foetus” (Laquer 101). This commonly held belief by anatomists and physicians tied orgasm with ejaculation and in time where “one in five children died before age one” (Laquer 101) reproduction and child bearing were high concerns, the female orgasm became pretty important. In the progression of years, science learned how conception actually happened and there seemed to be a shift away from the importance of female orgasm and one solely focused on the males’. With this women again got placed into the category of the “slower sex” and the more knowledge published on female anatomy seemed to perpetuate the complexity of the female orgasm and highlight the simplicity of the males’, almost creating a “Get out of Jail” card in dealing with female pleasure: you can’t orgasm? Well it’s really not my fault; your parts need a lot more attention than mine.

With the variety of feminist movements and so on, women have sought to reclaim their pleasure and sex. This can be attributed to science also in terms of the research being made public and the medicalization of an intimate topic. With anatomical terms and descriptions of orgasm devoid or any emotion, people seem to have become slightly more comfortable in talking about sex and pleasure. Just in comparing the past fifty years in terms of how our culture views and discusses sex is already a huge shift. Shows such as “Sex and The City” showcased women speaking frankly about their sexual experiences and researchers gave us messages that “more and more women are watching porn” and “70% of women need clitoral stimulation to achieve orgasm”, etc. Our society as a whole became a lot more open to talking about sexuality and previously taboo subjects. I feel that this really gave women the tools to gain power over their bodies in a way that was not present before. It also has allowed parents to engage in much more open discussions with their children regarding sex and teenagers seem much more mature about the topic than some adults. However, this power did not come without clauses and repercussions. For women, I feel that this sexualization of the feminine mystique is still very male dominated as we have seen in magazine examples in class. And even in television shows, the women are still seeking sexual satisfaction with men, not with themselves. This hegemonic sexuality is perpetuated in most of mainstream society and there are signs of its effects on youth.

New York: "They Know What Boys Like"

The social and sexual interactions of teenaged girls and boys are the topic of “They Know What Boys Like” with greater focus paid to girls. The article is especially interesting in that it addresses how technology has affected these interactions in that “sexual maturity is inextricably bound with technology” and many of the teenagers interviewed cite that everything they learned about sex they learned from the Internet. This subtle difference in how children today are now receiving and shaping their sexual knowledge is notable in that, as anyone who has perused the Internet can attest to, information on the Internet is certainly not scientifically accurate or medically neutral. The hyper sexualized information teenagers are receiving from television shows and from web pages, especially in regards to teenage boys as the article describes has lasting effect on their sexual expectations towards their partners. Although the images and metaphors that Laquer details are culturally charged medical texts, the information teenagers are currently receiving about sex are generally pornographic. As we have discussed in class, pornography has its own history of being almost entirely male-centric with very little regarding to female pleasure. This creates paradox of the teenage boy: “more aggressive sexually…less interested in…standard-issue…girls” and robs teenage females of any autonomy in their sexuality. The media echoes this point of view that teenagers are supposed to have sex on the brain and creates that as the norm. This seems to create another generation of “female as slower sex” under the guise of an openly sexual society (although it must be noted that America stands as one of the most overtly sexual yet puritanical culture).

A big question raised in class was “With all this talking we do about sex, is it for the better?” and I felt that the New York Magazine article brings at least one answer to the table. Our society is one that constantly talks about sex, in schools, in the radio, on the Internet and our younger generations who have access to all these outlets are listening and learning.

Works Cited

Morris, Alex. “They Know What Boys Want”. New York Magazine January 30, 2011.Web

Laquer, Thomas. Making Sex: Bods and Gender From The Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 1990

Images from: http://www.mtv.com/onair/16_and_pregnant/images/logo//456x330.jpg, http://teenmom.maxupdates.tv/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Teen-Mom-Season-Summary-1.jpg

Set #3

Mental disorders have had a long history in every culture and how it is interpreted and treated varies within each one. 17th and 18th century Europe sought religion and sorcery to try and explain these disorders. Schizophrenics heard “voices from God” and afflicted people were seen as taken over by a devil. Even in current day India, the explanation that one is “taken over by the Devil” is a culturally accepted explanation for mental illness. The American construction of mental illness has seen a steady change from religious forces and has planted itself firmly in the biomedical field. This can be read as our own culture’s move away from unexplainable forces to science as our answer.

Brain Disease Vs. Mental Illness

NPR. org: What's a Mental Disorder?

The above NPR clip discusses the ongoing conflict occurring in the psychiatric field regarding definitions and diagnoses of mental disorders. The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistic Manual (DSM) is the ultimate and widely accepted manual used by healthcare professionals for mental illness diagnosing. The publication of new mental disorders such as Asperger’s can create a sudden boom in diagnosis of the disorders, which some attribute to a new answer to old symptoms. This can lead to over diagnosing and also overtreatment. The second article from the Baltimore Sun by Richard Vatz addresses the issue of over diagnosing. The author expresses the issue he has with the diagnostic techniques used that consists primarily of general population surveys and not what he calls “medical diagnosing” which I will assume to be Positron Emission Topography (PET), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans and other similar tests. The fact that the author is so upset with the statistic that 55 percent of the American population was suffering from mental illness at one time seemed bothersome to me. What was it about that fact that he found so unbelievable?

Allan Young’s article “Description of How Ideology Shapes Knowledge of a Mental Disorder (Posttraumatic Stress Disorder)” is a thoughtful analysis of how the production of knowledge, in terms of PTSD, is constructed through ideology, in this case The Institute observed. The Institute creates a “highly structured social environment in which correct behavior is a precondition for continued treatment” (Young 112) and Young brings up the idea that efficacy in treatment is not in part because of the treatment program itself, but due to the rigid structure that is placed on both patients and therapists. The construction of knowledge as an actual “product” that is manufactured by all of the “workers”, positions ideology as “a medium that ensures the Institute’s knowledge producers are integrated into the detail division of labor” (Young 116) that allows patients to begin to gain a tangible grasp on their disorder. This seems to be the crucial aspect in the treatment of a disorder that is “undiagnosible without evidence of the etiological trauma…[and]… that the content of the etiological events is embedded in the disorders symptoms” (Young 109). PTSD is still largely stigmatized in our culture, especially currently with the national unrest regarding the still recent wars and even those in the past. Soldiers return to a nation that held them in contempt for what they did, pushing them into the margins without any tools to begin to deconstruct their experiences. This stigma felt towards mental disorders is how I read Vatz’s disbelief that so many Americans suffer from mental disorders. Perhaps it is because we as a culture place much more emphasis on internalizing an “internal disease” that citizens aren’t given the tools to begin working their issues like the PTSD patients. There seems to be a feedback loop from patient to therapist in terms of interpretation that is structured around The Institute’s ideology. Not only are patients held responsible for their end of the loop, therapists are also held accountable for how they reciprocate information given to them. This relationship could be applied to patient and the world they live in, both must reciprocate what the other is voicing.

In shifting from ideology, Simon Cohn’s “Picturing the Brain Inside, Revealing the Illness Outside: A Comparison of the Different Meanings Attributed to Brain Scans by Scientists and Patients” focuses on a more technologically focused way of understanding mental disorder. Cohn describes illness as having “a precarious status for many patients, not in terms of the on-going distress and suffering caused by in terms of their existence-as a thing, or entity” (Cohn 65). The article articulates the opposing views biomedicine and mental disorder sufferers interpret body and brain. The example of the two researchers joking that they could give research volunteers a generic picture of the brain and pass it of as the volunteer is a great demonstration of the impersonal view most workers have been trained to have. That the researchers “only in terms of work in the lab” (Cohn 67) is deceptively simplistic as Cohn argues that the objectification of patients in deeper and “the role of technology is crucial to mask the very human processes involved” (Cohn 67). Can the shift towards a more biomedical diagnosing of mental illnesses place diagnosing illnesses through symptoms into a more “non-medical” field? Such as what Vatz describes to be the cause of overdiagnosing, will technology rob some mental illness sufferers of their disease because an MRI shows no visible signs of illness? The patients who volunteered for the study almost all asked for a copy of their brain scan and in the article are described as having deeply personal attachments to their brain scans, going so far as to manipulate them.

Art Therapy

The act of placing their brain scans on t-shirt reminded me of art therapy, which has become popular in mental health treatment. The video above voices similar themes that I found in Cohn and Young’s articles in that it is a way for patients to begin materializing and constructing their disorder. Technology has still not seen advancement in true understanding of the brain, there is no prototypical “normal brain” that one can compare all other brains to and so sometimes it feels as if we’re ultimately repeating history and attributing the disease to an unknown being/source. This does little in helping patients, who as has been shown, greatly value and benefit from some construction of their illness. To materialize a sometimes still-unexplainable occurrence, regardless of how it is diagnosed in science, is advantageous to those who need it.

Works Cited

Cohn, Simon. 2010. “Picturing the Brain Inside, Revealing the Illness Outside: A Comparison of the Different Meaning Attributed to Brain Scans by Scientists and Patients.” Pp. 65-84. IN Technologized Images Technologized Bodies. Edited by Jeanette Edwards, Penny Harvey and Peter Wade. New York: Berghahn Books.

Vatz, Richard. "Brain Disease vs. Mental Illness”. The Baltimore Sun January 27, 2011

“What’s a Mental Disorder? Even Experts Can’t Agree”. All Things Considered. National Public Radio. December 29, 2010. Radio

Young, Allan. 1993. “A Description of How Ideology Shapes Knowledge of a Mental Disorder (Posttraumatic Stress Disorder).” Pp. 108-128. IN Knowledge, Power and Practice: The Anthropology of Medicine and Everyday Life. Edited by Shirley Lindenbaum and Margaret Lock. Berkeley: University of California Press.