A new article by DruGS team members Gemma Nourse, David Moore and Suzanne Fraser examines discourses on performance and image-enhancing drugs (PIEDs) in Australia. The article has been developed from Gemma’s PhD thesis, supervised by Suzanne and David, which examined what it means to be a man who consumes PIEDs, a practice commonly pathologised in public discourse. The thesis demonstrates how the conventions and logics (Latour, 2013) of news media, public health, welfare and health services, and consumer lived experience both shape (Butler, 1999; Law, 2004)—and delimit—the identities and possibilities available to male PIED consumers. In examining these concerns, the thesis considers how the constitution of PIED consumption as problematic also constitutes problematic masculinities and narrow, regulatory definitions of health.

The article examines 18 Australian health promotion materials that address PIEDs. It is premised on the observation that contemporary health discourses promote a health-enhancing disposition towards the self that is constituted as morally good, and that those who are unwilling or unable to comply—those who ‘choose’ to neglect their health and wellbeing—are often stigmatised. The article identifies a distinct paradox in the Australian health promotion materials on PIEDs: namely, that the health promotion injunction to become health-conscious, self-managing and self-optimising evident in them is consistent with the experience of ‘vibrant physicality’ (Monaghan, 2001), and increased sense of health and wellbeing (Fomiatti et al., 2019, 2020), reported by PIED consumers. In these materials, the properly healthy masculine subject is painstakingly invited to rationally optimise a very specific conception of health, which is heavily inflected with discourses of ‘the natural’, while avoiding being perceived as too concerned with his physicality and too interested in other illicit forms of optimisation. The article argues that conceptions of health are enrolled in these relations in a range of complex ways that expose a distinctly gendered anxiety: that through PIED consumption and emerging understandings of health, masculinity may be in the process of embracing traditionally ‘feminine’, and therefore denigrated, practices of bodily enhancement. As lead author Dr Gemma Nourse says:

I’m very excited that my research is contributing new understandings of men’s use of performance and image-enhancing drugs, a topic that is overwhelmingly discussed in negative terms. This article aims to more closely examine the mechanisms through which male PIED consumers are so commonly constituted as pathological masculine subjects, and to suggest the need for more expansive possibilities for these men, their bodies and their health.

References

Butler, J. (1999). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity (2^nd edition). Routledge.

Fomiatti, R., Latham, J. R., Fraser, S., Moore, D., Seear, K., & Aitken, C. (2019). A ‘messenger of sex’? Making testosterone matter in motivations for anabolic-androgenic steroid injecting. Health Sociology Review, 28(3), 323–338.

Fomiatti, R., Lenton, E., Latham, J. R., Fraser, S., Moore, D., Seear, K., & Aitken, C. (2020). Maintaining the healthy body: Blood management and hepatitis C prevention among men who inject performance and image-enhancing drugs. International Journal of Drug Policy, 75, 1–9.

Latour, B. (2013). An inquiry into modes of existence: An anthropology of the moderns. Harvard University Press.

Law, J. (2004). After method: Mess in social science research. Routledge.

Monaghan, L. (2001). Looking good, feeling good: The embodied pleasures of vibrant physicality. Sociology of Health & Illness, 23(3), 330–356.