The Sexual Pharmacy

Abstract

This chapter examines the pharmaceutical tablet as a technique for the management of sexual appetite in the twenty-first century. It explores the emergence of Addyi (flibanserin) as a case study of how this technique produces a particular subject of pharmaceutical knowledge. The chapter considers the significance of the act of pharmaceutical ingestion on the embodied subjectivity of the consumer and the chemical constitution of the human body. The use of Addyi to manage sexual imbalance in combination with the tools of the diagnostic manual, discussed in Chap. 5, converges in the emergence of a socio-technical and knowledge-gathering subject. This subject is armed with techniques to monitor the self and gather knowledge of her sexual imbalance, a process that affirms intimacy. Indeed, the subject who swallows the pill is a fundamentally social one, that is to say, one who desires intimate contact with others.