A new article by DruGS team members Gemma Nourse, David Moore and Suzanne Fraser examines health professional understandings of 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.

The article examines data from in-depth interviews with 20 Australian health professionals who encounter men who consume PIEDs in their work and explores how they performatively constitute the relationships between PIEDs, health, and masculinity. Reflecting the conceptual orientation of the broader study, this analysis mobilises the work of Judith Butler, John Law and Bruno Latour to argue that interviews with health professionals stabilise PIEDs, somewhat paradoxically, as inherently dangerous substances that distort and damage ‘natural’ bodies, and as important medical technologies that can reverse this damage when administered ‘legitimately.’ Examining the implications of this paradoxical framing, the analysis points to several mechanisms through which PIED consumers are excluded from health services, and are sometimes enacted as difficult and deceitful. Rather than taking these as reflecting pre-existing truths about PIED consumers, the analysis demonstrates how, when framed within the assumed authority of medical expertise, discourses of ‘the natural,’ health and masculinity produce these realities. Through these entanglements, masculinity is performed as natural to the body, and self-guided, experimental and illicit consumption of drugs constitutes the consumer, his body and his masculinity as unnatural, deceptive, and inauthentic. Building on recent sociological research on PIEDs led by DruGS team members and collaborators such as Suzanne Fraser, Renae Fomiatti and Kate Seear, this analysis concludes by arguing that treating men who consume PIEDs as potential co-experts, acknowledging the many uses of PIEDs, and having open discussions could improve health outcomes for this group. Importantly, such a move also holds the potential to intervene in the iterative practices that work to regulate so-called ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ masculinities in ways that create more expansive possibilities for men. As lead author Dr Gemma Nourse says:

I’m excited that this research is now published and can contribute to new understandings of men’s use of PIEDs, a topic that is overwhelmingly discussed in negative terms. My research in this space 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 men, their bodies and their health.

References

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

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.