Alyson K. Spurgas, PhD
Since the turn of the twenty-first century and the monumental success of Viagra, “female sexual dysfunction” has occupied the clinical, media, and activist spotlight. Most feminist anti-medicalization critics argue that pharmacological and hormonal treatments capitalize on women’s sexual problems, and suggest that pharmaceutical companies have thus engaged in “disease-mongering.” But much less critical attention has been paid to the burgeoning world of alternative self-help treatments and how these rely on and perpetuate antiquated notions about receptive or responsive white, straight, cisgender femininity.
In this lecture, Dr. Alyson K. Spurgas will provide a corrective to the myopic focus on pharmaceutical treatments for female sexual dysfunction, and instead shift attention to the logic of receptivity that undergirds the “feminized responsive desire framework” within the new science of female sexuality—a framework that is often posited as feminist but which rarely attends to the diversity of people’s backgrounds and experiences.
The lecture will draw from Dr. Spurgas’s recent book, Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century, which brings together intersectional feminist critique of sexology, sex therapy, and diagnosis alongside interviews with women who identify as low in sexual desire. In addition to tracing the history of the ways that women’s sexuality has been framed as receptive and responsive within sexological paradigms from psychoanalysis to evolutionary psychology, Spurgas examines some of today’s most cutting-edge treatments for low desire in women—including from the realms of mindfulness and complementary and alternative medicine. Spurgas ultimately argues for a more radical and communal form of care, challenging individualized, neoliberal, and cisheteronormative approaches to treatment.
The NSS lecture series is made possible by generous contributions from Con Edison.