media essay 5-6 pages due 12 hours
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Lecture102283F_17.pptxAgenda 11.14.17
News and announcements
Media Essay
Gender, Sexuality, and Medicalization
Media Essay
Media essay (30% of final grade): five-six page critique of a film, television show, or any other type of visual media that focuses on one of the themes and topics that have been discussed in class. You must discuss at least TWO readings from the course in your paper. Your paper must have a thesis.
Media Essay
Due date: 12.5.17
Instructions
Essay Format
Five to six pages
Essays must be double-spaced.
12 pt. Times New Roman font.
No extraneous spaces between paragraphs.
Media Essay
Instructions cont.
In text citation: (Author Year: Page)
Reference format: MLA, Chicago, APA
Be consist with the citation format chosen.
Wikipedia, blog entries, or information gathered from a website are not appropriate sources. Information gathered from news sites is permissible, e.g., Salon, Slate, Bust, and Ms., among others like these sites.
Media essay
Turn essays in at the beginning of class
Submit paper online under “Assignments” tab
If you do not submit paper online, you will receive a “0” on the paper until you do.
Late papers:
2% deduction every 24 hours
Extensions:
Accommodation documentation
Extraordinary circumstances
Media Essay
Summarize the film
Critical analysis
Thesis
Make an argument
Make an interesting and unexpected argument
Support the argument
Draw upon issues, concepts, notions, and themes from the semester
Media Essay
Papers will be evaluated according to the following 5 criteria:
The extent to which the student follows instructions of the assignment, in particular having a well-developed and thoughtful thesis (/10)
Intellectual creativity and rigor (/10)
Ability to integrate concepts and themes from across readings (readings are in conversation with each other) (/10)
Depth of analysis (/10)
Clarity and organization of writing; grammatical and editing issues (/10)
How to write the media essay
Watch
How is women’s desire and pleasure being represented?
What message is the media sending?
Who is the targeted audience? How do you know?
How is gender and gender roles depicted?
Who is being represented: class, race, religion, sexual partners?
How to write the media essay
Contemplate:
What did you find interesting?
What did you find troubling?
How does this media relate to class themes?
Women’s desire and pleasure in relation to freedom, choice, heteronormativity, class, race, social and cultural norms
Representations of women as sexual objects
Medicalization of women’s sexuality and desire
How can you analyze these themes?
Psychoanalytical approaches to women and desire
Second and third wave feminist theories
Feminist film theory
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How to write the film essay
Develop
Make a claim
Think persuasively (meaning, make an argument that can not be easily argued, e.g., “the sun is hot,” “racism and sexism are bad,” and “it’s great that women enjoy sex.”
Gather evidence: examples from film, class readings, and class discussion that bolster your claim
Write!
Summarize film
Focus on main argument
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Ehrenreich and English reading
Femininity as a disease (late 19th and early 20th centuries)
Female functions are inherently pathological
Women prone to illness
Pregnancy as a form of illness
Pathological nature of childbirth
Menopause: “death of the woman in the woman”
Ehrenreich and English reading
Dictatorship of the Ovaries/Psychology of the Ovary
“Ovarification” of women’s bodies and health
Relationship between biology, gender, and reproduction
Reproductive organs were the source of disease and thus the target of treatment
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Ehrenreich and English reading
Dictatorship of the Ovaries/Psychology of the Ovary/
Women as “reproducers” and “sexual beings” not one in the same
Sexuality and sensuality perceived as detrimental to reproduction
Female sexuality paradox:
Women perceived as having no “predilection” for sex
Women also perceived as having an “insatiable lust”
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Medicalization of Gender
Class, feminine biology and health in the late 19th century
Marriage as “sexual-economic relation”
Upper class women’s role as breeders
Linked with female invalidism
Poverty, SES, race, gender, and health
Ehrenreich and English reading
Wave of invalidism among middle- and upper-class women in mid- to late 19th century
Hysteria
Relationship to “gentle invalidism”
“real disease” vs. malingering
Transformed conversation about the nature of “women’s conditions”
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/original-sin-sex/videos/birth-of-the-vibrator/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKgdLjDZ6ig
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Ehrenreich and English reading
Role of Freud, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and psychology
Transformed conversation about the nature of “women’s conditions”
Focus on female psyche, not female body
“The experts of the twentieth century would accept women’s intelligence and energy: the question would no longer be what a woman could do, but, rather, what a woman ought to do” (283).
Medicalization of Gender
Legacies of Hysteria, invalidism, and Freud
Contradictory female sexuality
Necessary to “desexualize” reproduction
Need to suppress women’s innately unruly sexuality so women’s innately restrained sexuality can be unleashed
Women are innately sick and reproductive
FSD
Female sexual dysfunction (FSD)
“‘ . . . a disturbance in the process that characterize the sexual response cycle or by pain associated with sexual intercourse’” (70)
Hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD)
Female sexual arousal disorder (FSAD)
Female orgasmic disorder (FOD)
Dyspareunia
FSD and sexual response cycle
Desire, excitement, orgasm, and resolution
Dysfunction n.功能失调；出现机能障碍
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“Female Viagra” (flibanserin/Addyi)
History of flibanserin
Owned by Sprout Pharmaceuticals
Failed as anti-depression medication
Side effect: improved women’s sexual outcomes
Failed twice in seeking Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval in U.S.
Approved on third try by an 18-6 vote with the agency's strongest warning label.
Relationship with feminism
Fibanserin 药物名为弗利班思林（flibanserin），据报告，每天服用100毫克该药物的女性比服用安慰剂的女性有更多满意的性生活
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Addyi
Flibanserin
Drug performance vs. placebo
Side effects: nausea, dizziness, fainting, and severely low blood pressure
Side effects may increase in frequency and severity in combination with alcohol.
Women are advised not to drink at all if taking the drug
Addyi
Leonore Tiefer, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at NYU School of Medicine.
http://newviewcampaign.org/video.asp#20152
“I am very opposed to the drug and have been since it first went to the FDA in 2010 and it was rejected. Then it was rejected a second time. The drug hasn’t changed, the data hasn’t changed, and my opinion hasn’t changed. I think it’s a disaster. It’s unsafe and it doesn’t work. That is all a drug is supposed to do. Work and be safe. The third strike is the illegitimate means by which the company [Sprout Pharmaceuticals] tried to distract the FDA by honing in on this completely erroneous accusation of sexism. The campaign is totally inappropriate.” (Time article, August 17, 2015)
Addyi
Dr. Irwin Goldstein, director of San Diego Sexual Medicine and consultant for Sprout Pharmaceuticals
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77iFta9nKhY
"Serving as a consultant to pharmaceutical companies helps me ensure that the research they're performing or results they're interpreting match what we in the field understand about women's sexual function," he says. "I'm seeking the best possible treatment options that might be available to my patients….I just cannot understand—it just makes me a tiny bit crazy—how something that actually helps women's lives would be so criticized," Goldstein says. "They have another agenda.” (Mother Jones article, September 2, 2015)
Addyi
Should the FDA have approved Addyi?
What seem to be the benefits and risks of putting Addyi on the market?
How does the marketing of Addyi relate to different kinds of feminism?
Addyi
http://fortune.com/2017/11/06/valeant-pharmaceuticals-sprout/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKEayZ6oqmg
“Female Viagra” (flibanserin/Addyi)
“Flibanserin sounds like a drug that will only be right for a small proportion of women for whom there is a biological, rather than purely psychological and social, cause of their sexual dysfunction. But shouldn’t these women have the right to make an informed choice? Rather than ban the drug altogether, isn’t the answer to address over-medicalisation in western healthcare by tackling attitudes in the pharma industry and teaching the medical profession to better distinguish between the biological and the psychosocial causes of conditions such as depression and sexual dysfunction?” (Sodha)
“Female Viagra” (flibanserin/Addyi)
“We all experience distress in the terms available for us to experience it in, and sexual distress is no different. We are surrounded by professional and public discourses — rhetorics — about health and illness. These rhetorics are imbued with values, including values about sex. We absorb these values and draw on them in interpreting our own experience of health and illness.” (Segal)
FSD
Medicalization of sexuality and the market
Pharmaceutical companies involved at every stage.
Belief in origin of FSD related too focus of research and market endeavors
Relationship with health care practice
Relationship with popular culture
Depoliticizes women’s sexual problems
Lack of focus on “non-medical” issues
Female sexual satisfaction
“Measuring and operationalizing female sexual satisfaction has proved to be challenging…. Sexual satisfaction is even more complex than the physiological underpinnings of sexual functioning because it includes physical, emotional, psychological, and relational variables.” (Pronier et. al. 70-71)
Measurements typically focused on orgasm
FSD
Factors influencing female sexual satisfaction
Race, class, age, educational background, religion, etc.
Lifestyle choices
Time
Personal well-being
Sexual history
Depoliticizes women’s sexual problems
FSD
Female sexual satisfaction research from feminist and qualitative perspective
“While physiological components were determined in the analysis to be important in a woman’s overall sexual satisfaction, other factors such as stress, intimacy, sexual agency, and emotional closeness were significant in understanding variation in reported sexual satisfaction…These results suggest that women would benefit from reducing their stress, increasing their experiences of quality intimacy, asserting their needs and desires, and increasing their feeling of emotional closeness in their relationships. None of these actions involve a prescription for a pill.” (Pronier et. al. 77)
Feminism?
“Whether it’s a drug to fix the chemical imbalances that are associated with low libido, companies paying for female employees to freeze their eggs or giving girls the right to wear the hijab to school, the truth is that what is liberating for one woman can be exploitative for another.” (Sodha)
Next Week
Alia Imtoual and Shakira Hussein (2009). “Challenging the Myth of the Happy Celibate: Muslim Women Negotiating Contemporary Relationships.” Contemporary Islam 3(1): 25-39.
Lauren Winner (2005). Excerpts from Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press.
