Re-gendering Depression: Risk, Web Health Campaigns, and the Feminized Pharmaco-Subject

Abstract

This article analyzes the textual and visual discourse of recent depression campaigns and advertisements generated by state-policy, advocacy, and pharmaceutical organizations, drawing on the work of Anne Balsamo, Nikolas Rose, and Paul Rabinow, among others. A variety of recent Web campaigns are critiqued, addressing the new pharmaceutical strategy of identifying a broad spectrum of depression. These campaigns re-gender subjects by targeting common social and biological factors in the lives of women and girls as risks, while framing male depression as patriarchal opportunity. This analysis of the discourse of gender, risk, and depression in the context of neo-liberalism indicates how health subjects are imagined as consumers and how this situation creates new constrained forms of “responsibilized,” gendered subjectivity.