Promotional Information

An exploration of the symbolic role that the illicit drug user fulfils for the neoliberal state and of "counterpublic" health measures that do not cast health as antithetical to pleasure

Table of Contents

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xvii
1. Pleasure Consuming Medicine: An Introduction 1
2. Prescribing the Self 32
3. Recreational States 59
4. Drugs and Domesticity: Fencing the Nation 80
5. Consuming Compliance: Remembering Bodies Inhabit Pharmaceutical Narratives 106
6. Embodiments of Safety 137
7. Exceptional Sex: How Drugs Have Come to Mediate Sex in Gay Discourse 164
Notes 191
Selected Bibliography 229
Index 245

About the Author

Kane Race is a Senior Lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney.

Reviews

"Pleasure Consuming Medicine is one of the best examples of critical cultural studies I have read. The scholarship is truly stunning. Kane Race presents a highly original argument which extends thinking about several interconnected issues: HIV, drugs, drug culture, embodiment, medical governance, sexuality, and identities."--Elspeth Probyn, University of South Australia "Kane Race's Pleasure Consuming Medicine supplies what we have missed for so long: a radical but responsible exploration of both the ethics and the politics of pleasure. Exhilarating in its daring and its intelligence, startling in its originality yet completely sensible in its interpretations, the book unerringly describes the paradoxical world where we now live out the cruelties and ecstasies of human embodiment."--David M. Halperin, author of Saint Foucault and What Do Gay Men Want?