When love meets drugs: pharmaceuticalizing ambivalence in post-socialist China |
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Authors: | Ma Zhiying |
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Institution: | (1) Department of Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago, 5730 South Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637, USA |
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Abstract: | In this article, I examine the interaction between intimacy and psychiatry to explore the ambivalences in the use of pharmaceuticals
in psychiatric practice. Of particular interest is how pharmaceuticals come to constitute in multiple ways what pathology
is and what form of life needs to be restored, and how psychiatric medications reconfigure the ambivalence of intimacy in
post-socialist China. Following the life of Mei, a female psychiatric patient, for two years, I have made a series of discoveries
related to medicine and intimacy in China. Specifically, I show that psychopharmaceuticals indicate a diseased body that threatens
the intimate bond. They also highlight a socially suffering subject that is in lack of love from the intimate partner who
demands the latter’s redemption. I discuss how these multiple and contradicting meanings of psychopharmaceuticals and intimacy
are socio-historically situated. Thus, while previous research in medical anthropology criticizes pharmaceuticalization for
reducing the socio-political life (bios) to a biological body (zoē), I argue that these life forms co-exist in a pharmaceutical “zone of indistinction” (Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power
and Bare Life. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998), in which they constitute and contradict each other. This discussion warns researchers against falling back into the usual
orientation of either biomedicine or the social sciences. |
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