Pharmopornographic Politics and Bio-capitalist Systems

Capitalism’s intersection with gender and sexuality is a lucrative one, institutionalizing each genders relationship with medications that we begin to identify with as validating our place in the gender hierarchy, perpetuating a profitable pharmaceutical environment based on our gendered relationship to the marketability of medications. Everything we buy and see is sexual, transformative, identifying and materialized. Corporate benefit by virtue of ‘women’s’ mental health and reproductive rights depicts the tip of the iceberg so to speak of industrialized medicine. “Breast cancer has become the poster child of corporate cause-related marketing campaigns, which marketing experts have labeled a "dream cause, becoming obfuscated by a shiny, pink story of success” (The National Film board of Canada, 2011) which describes “the shop for the cure” and the industry of Breast Cancer, its unmatched profitability, the biopolitics of disease culture and activism in the twenty first century. Medicine and corporality converge within the study of the cancer industry and question its “end game” so to speak. If a car dealership, dependent on gas for their vehicles, asks you to donate a dollar towards “the cause” is also the company that manufactures plastic ‘pink products’, and owns the chemicals for chemotherapy and radiation, is their goal a cure? Perhaps to not only create your cancer, but cure you as well. In linking plastic surgery to the topic of breast cancer, biomedical politics surrounding mastectomy is encountered. The “need to promote awareness for this issue because if women lose their breasts, we wont want them anymore”, deconstructs a woman’s identity as being a solely physical, body-based entity and rank in society. If this is the weight ‘subjective’ medicine (industry) puts on the preservation of genitalia as epitomizing ‘female’ identity, what prevents us from encouraging a trans woman’s desire for the procedure to obtain this identifying body ‘part’. If breasts equal woman, woman means breasts. The queer context surrounding plastic surgery exposes the perception of surgical integrity and medicine as being either ‘for your health’ or ‘for your appearance’, and is nuanced in a way that implies electiveness (optionality) and enhancement for cisgendered individuals. As bodies are either marked “man or woman”, there are appropriate levels of ‘mutilation’ and medication for each. For example, women are linked to the pill and plastic surgery, not as simply a skeleton within a meat suit. The body is a fabrication, being an individual is not sufficient, as capitalism requires categories. A body requires a sex, which then requires a gender, sexuality and the ‘necessity’ for drugs related to those markings. To essentialize phamactegorization, it can be understood as a perpetuation of that individuals’ gender performativity. Biopower is defined as the disciplinarity of the body, health and identity, “overflowing legal and punitive spheres, which constitutes the body of a modern individual” (Preciado, 2008(2013), p.109). Biopower also speaks to the “centrality of sex and of sexuality in the modern art of governing life” (Preciado, 2008(2013), p.109). This topic redefines notions of public and private based on westernized frameworks of ideals and norms, such as the exposure of children to sexuality, associating moral superiority with perpetuating sexuality as taboo and private. This results in adults who lack understanding about their bodies, orientation variance and sexuality altogether. Corporations capitalize upon this knowledge deficiency/bodily insecurity through power relations and subjectivity, resulting in medicines and necessitating manufactured corporality and materiality (the pill, Viagra, Prozac, etc.). By further deducing pharmapornographic power as being biopower with a capitalist twist, stating that we understand ourselves based on how we relate to medication (or not) and that neither organism/machine nor nature/culture is a technobody. “We no longer inhabit power technologies, but instead they inhabit us” (Preciado, p.110), expressing constructions of the “body as a political prosthesis that describes ‘possible gender’ as a revolution under the control of molecular technologies in straightjackets” (Preciado, p.112).

“At the beginning of the twenty first century, rhinoplasty is considered plastic surgery whereas vaginoplasty and phalloplasty are considered sex change operations” (Preciado, p116), illustrating an oppressive, controversial and ultimately detrimental narrative associated with which organ the operation occurs upon. Plastic surgery for a queer individual would be considered automatically drastic and identifying, versus any surgery a cisgendered person underwent. Individuals who undergo sex change operations are legally binded to the documentation of this process as part of their identity, whereas again, a cisgenedered person would not be bound to the documentation of their transformational surgeries as part of their ‘record’ even if they underwent a complete surgical overhaul touching everything except for their genitals. If plastic surgery outside of the queer sphere is deemed to be simply about aesthetic and functionality enhancement, where does one draw the line in terms of procedures that are deemed suitable? Prosthetic legs are faster and more efficient, therefore at what point do we start amputating healthy legs to replace them with these prosthetics? Is this notion obscenely different from normalized procedures such as rhinoplasty and breast enhancements? “The nose is regulated by pharmapornographic power in which the organ is considered to be private property, whereas the genitals are still imprisoned in a premodern, sovereign and nearly theocratic power regime that considers them to be property of the state and unchanging transcendental law” (Preciado, p.116). We cannot put onus on the individual for wanting to change their looks, as its impossible to differentiate the reasoning for this aesthetic revision as being either a ‘personal preference’ or due to the internalization of a norm. –For an individual who identifies with a binary ‘cohesive’ gender and sexuality, this change is rationalized and contextualized within various (capitalist) systems to be a matter of ‘quality of life’ and a simple a visual enhancement.

In conclusion, its critical to recognize that functions of capitalism require categories, and that liberation can often be found through failure to conform. Western society requires one to look the part, act the part, speak the part and have the parts in order to enforce heteronormative gender, sex and sexuality within the ‘ideal cohesive and binary’. “Gender is an operational program capable of triggering a proliferation of sensory perceptions under the form of affects, desires, actions, beliefs, and identities, as well as the production of knowledge about ones self, and a sense of sexual self that appears to be an emotional reality that is evident and conscious - The certainty of being a man or woman produced by a collection of body technologies” (Preciado). “Those who survive the mutation that is happening will see their bodies moving into a new semiotechnical system and will witness the proliferation of new organs, they’ll cease to be the body (and thus the individual) that they were before” (Preciado, p.116) describes binary thinking’s intersection with science and the male/female divide as being inherent, absolute and unchanging. We relate to biopolitical labels such as “I am a man, woman, heterosexual, transsexual” as units of specific knowledge about ones self that program gender through neoliberal subjectivity that potentiates fixed senses of individuality, allowing pharmaceutical corporations the opportunity to create customers through these categories, not cures. The necessitation of materiality depicts understanding of sex and gender as corporations benefit from the structural state of society and not of the individual. For example, when a new drug is released, why are the masses suddenly on it? “Bodies cannot be understood outside of production and technoscience” (p.110). Pharmapornographic politics and bio capitalist systems are an educational space of immeasurable learning potential, spanning from various lenses and intersectional branches such as the scientific, social and industrialized implications of gender, sexuality and manufactured corporality.