Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century

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Winner of the 2021 Cultural Studies Association First Book Prize In Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century, Alyson K. Spurgas examines the “new science of female sexuality” from a critical, sociological perspective, considering how today’s feminist-identified sex researchers study and manage women with low desire. Diagnosing Desire investigates experimental sex research that measures the disconnect between subjective and genital female arousal, contemporary psychiatric diagnoses for low female desire, new models for understanding women’s sexual response, and cutting-edge treatments for low desire in women—including from the realms of mindfulness and alternative healing.   Spurgas makes the case that, together, all of these technologies create a “feminized responsive desire framework” for understanding women’s sexuality, and that this, in fact, produces women’s sexuality as a complex problem to be solved. The biggest problem, Spurgas argues, is that gendered and sexualized trauma—including as it is produced within technoscientific medicine itself—is too often ignored in contemporary renderings. Through incisive textual analysis and in-depth qualitative research based on interviews with women with low desire, Spurgas argues for a more radical and communal form of care for feminized—and traumatized—populations, in opposition to biopolitical mandates to individualize and neoliberalize forms of self-care. Ultimately, this is a book not just about a specific diagnosis or dysfunction but about the material-discursive regimes that produce and regulate femininity.   DIAGNOSING DESIRE: Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century, by Alyson K. Spurgas Half title page Series title page Title page Copyright page Contents Acknowledgments INTRODUCTION · Diagnosing Gender through Desire: How You Know You’re in Bed with a Woman Race, Femininity, and the Whiteness of Sexual Difference Diagnosably Low Female Sexual Desire: A Brief Clinical History Theoretical and Methodological Framework Chapter Overview CHAPTER 1 · Sexual Difference and Femininity in Sex Therapy and Sex Research: Examples from the Nineteenth, Twentieth, and Twenty-First Centuries Freud and Deficient Womanhood: “The Little Creature without a Penis” Masters and Johnson: The Human Sexual Response Cycle and the Focus on Behavior Helen Singer Kaplan: Behavioristic Sex Therapy and the (Re)Introduction of Desire (Sexually Dimorphic) Desire in Evolutionary Sexology CHAPTER 2 · Interest, Arousal, and Motivation in Contemporary Sexology: The Feminization of Responsive Desire Seeking Rewards and Intimacy: The New “Female-Friendly” Sexual Response Models Measuring the Gap: Plethysmography and Mind/Body Disconnects Frigid or Burning Up? Gendering Low-Desire Diagnoses and Sexual Dysfunctions in the DSM-5 Bringing Bodies and Minds into Line: Brain Drugs and Mindfulness-Based Sex Therapy Implications of Shifting Diagnoses: Behaviorism and Sexual (Self-)Management CHAPTER 3 · Women-with-Low-Desire: Navigating and Negotiating Sexual Difference Socialization Research on Women’s Sexual Psychology in the Aftermath of Cultural Feminism Desire? Interest? Arousal? Linkages and Lacunae in Embodied/Psychic Sexual States Opening Up “Receptivity” Spontaneous Desire and “Me Time” Nurture Is for Women, Nature Is for Men: Learning Sexual Difference via Science and Medicine Penetrative Sex as the Only “Real” Sex How Women Learn about Their “Complex” “Emotions” Visibility, “Obviousness,” and Phenomenological Experiences of the Gendered Body Femininity and the “Pathologizing-Healing Dialectic”: How Sex Is Produced as a Realm for Men How Women Are Socialized to Be “Certain Kinds of Sexual Beings” Embodied Feedback Loops among the Biological, Psychological, and Social CHAPTER 4 · Embodied Invisible Labor, Sexual Carework: The Cultural Logic and Affective Valorization of Responsive Female Desire Social Reproduction, Receptivity, and Feminized Labor Feminine Socialization and Sexual Carework Early Experiences with Embodied Invisible Labor: “Giving Daddy Five Kisses a Day” “Men Only Want One Thing” “Doing It Anyway” “Faking It” and Affective Performances of Pleasure Feminized Sexual Carework beyond the Bedroom Carework as Coercion The Biopolitics of Sexual Carework: Medicine, Science, Therapy, Capital Capacitating Femininity CHAPTER 5 · Reclaiming Receptivity: Parasexual Pleasure in the Face of Compulsory and Feminized Trauma Popular Depictions of Feminine Sexuality: Receptivity, Submission, Masochism Feminism and BDSM: Social Debates about Sexual Power Relations Taboo, Trauma, and Trust Submission without Coercion: Low-Desiring Women on Enhancing Sexual Enjoyment Time, Labor, Presence Performing Femininity, Camp, and Switching Queerness, Enthusiastic Consent, and Rejecting Heteronormative Scripts for Sexual Pleasure Reclaiming Receptivity, Subverting Submission CONCLUSION · The Freedom to Fall Apart: Feminine Fracturing and the Affective Production of Gendered Populations Appendix References Index Series page