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Masculine enhancement as health or pathology: gender and optimisation discourses in health promotion materials on performance and image-enhancing drugs (PIEDs)

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posted on 2024-11-25, 04:27 authored by Gemma NourseGemma Nourse, Suzanne FraserSuzanne Fraser, David MooreDavid Moore
The consumption of performance and image-enhancing drugs (PIEDs) is commonly pathologised in public health discourse as stemming from an unhealthy relationship to masculinity, and is often framed as intrinsically ‘risky’ and fundamentally at odds with ‘good health’. This article examines Australian health promotion materials on PIEDs to analyse their role in shaping notions of good health, normal gender and appropriate self-improvement. To do so, it draws on the work of Butler, Law and Latour to consider how these materials co-constitute men and their health, often in problematic ways. First, we examine the ways in which PIEDs are constituted via a politics of the ‘natural’, then consider how the health promotion materials on PIEDs participate in the regulation of appropriate, healthy masculinity, and conclude by examining how adolescent masculinity is co-constituted with PIEDs. We observe a key tension between health promotion’s avowed interest in improvement and optimisation and its treatment of PIED consumers as aberrant, vulnerable and insecure subjects whose drive to enhance and optimise is characterised by pathology and addiction. We conclude by arguing that health promotion materials on PIEDs fail to acknowledge the exceedingly normative character of enhancement practices in contemporary society.

Funding

The research reported in this article was funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project (DP170100302) and by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.

History

Publication Date

2024-12-01

Journal

Health Sociology Review

Volume

33

Issue

3

Pagination

17p. (p. 289-305)

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

ISSN

1446-1242

Rights Statement

© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

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