BECOMING VIAGRA: Pharmacomasculinity as a political value.
It is not unusual to see how politicians use their masculinity/virility as a political value. The president Jair Messias Bolsonaro is an example of how it is used. Treat the worse president in all Brazilian history can be useful to clarify ways of hegemonic masculinity today. We understand it as a creation of a toxic-subjectivity/masculinity, or even, as a Viagra-subject in the pharmacopornographic era.
Paul Preciado is the mean theorist of pharmacopornographic society. When he analyzes the disciplinary society (Foucault) and the control society (Deleuze), he tries to go further and comes up with a complex notion to understand the vicissitudes of the contemporary world. Close to Preciado works we are thinking about a kind of viagrology, in other words, a way to understand the relation between the Viagra-subject and masculinity/virility.
However, Preciado writes on a pharmacopornographic way of governing life, particularly, after the Second World War. He identifies in the pharmacopornographic era or in the technocapitalism a strong relation between biotechnologies (pharmacos) and global media/semiotic-technologies (pornography). About it two points are highlighted, biotechnologies and the global media/pornography.
The first point shows us a vast laboratory for molding the body, sex and sexuality. The biotechnologies or the necropolitical technologies in the Second World War and Cold War are methods of controlling sexual subjectivities. It should be understood that every technology of war is probably going to be popularized and will become part of our daily life. Our mobiles are great examples, as we can find inside them technologies of war as the Internet or GPS (Global Positioning System). But, let us remember also that sexual surgeries or cosmetic surgeries were popularized for a middle-class consumer after the war. If in the beginning this sort of technique was to recover a body wounded by the war, today it is to change or to enhance the body to a better life in a normalizing society. Nowadays body modification is a simple process done quite regularly.
The second point shows us how pornography is dominant visual technology in pharmacopornographic era. Preciado highlights two main examples of this semiotic technology: 1) Hugh Hefner founded the first porn magazine to be sold at newspaper stands in 1957. He created Playboy which portraits Marylin Monroe on its first cover; 2) and Gerard Damiano produced the movie Deep Throat in 1975. It was widely commercialized in North America. At the same time, the pharmaceutical industry was searching for ways of triggering erection and sexual response. What Preciado indicates is a sort of toxic-pornographic subjectivity when the technoscientific industry transforms depression into Prozac, fertility/sterility into the Pill, and also, masculinity into testosterone or Sildenafil. It is about the last pharmaco — commercialized as Viagra by Pfizer laboratories since 1988 — that should be analyzed specially. The Viagra let us go straight to the notion of masculinity/virility and how it is used as a gender performance with a pharmacopolitique value.
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The gender should not be understood as natural/innate or something in an essential sense. Because gender is a social-construction and the effect of systems of power and knowledge. Butler in Gender Trouble comprehend gender as stylization and repetition of acts. We call it technological performativity. However, what we are calling technological performativity is a rigid regulatory frame. One important conclusion of it is to see the construction of a “natural” and then a “unnatural” identity. The first is the heteronormative model. The second is an error in the model. The first is related to the pharmacomasculinity and his hegemonic model the Viagra-subject. The second is every single masculinity (male or female) that were being creating in relation or outside of this matrix.
However, what queer theory points to us is the impossibility of a true gender identity (hetero, homo, trans etc.). If gender/identity is produced by technological performativity, then there is not a true gender, in other words, there is nothing which we should call “natural” or “unnatural”. The stylization of the body is produced by this technology, by those acts repeated over and over again.
Hence, when we think about Bolsonaro, we are pointing two things: 1) his gender is produced by this technological performativity; 2) and his masculinity/virility is a sort of pharmacomasculinity and it is used as a pharmacopolitical value. In both points, nothing is understood as natural or innate. Bolsonaro uses both elements as a way of doing politics. About his gender, he is aligned to the heterosexual matrix. About his masculinity, he tries to show up and show off a political masculinity as an instrument of reactionary union.
In one speech Bolsonaro used a neologism in Portuguese to address, at the same time, politics and masculinity/virility. The word employed by Bolsonaro is “Imbrochável”. This neologism in English is something close to “Unlimpable”. Bolsonaro says: “In politics I’m unlimpable! But not only in politics, I have a 9-years-old daughter, and I made her with no supplements”. Despite this, the journalist Thaís Oyama in her book, Tormenta, wrote about Bolsonaro’s uses of Tadalafil — commercialized as Cialis — that is indicated for sexual dysfunction.
Cialis works in two ways. First, it is the gender as a performance for a political argument. Second, it is also the gender as a performance for the production of an ideal of virility. Our viagrology is just to demonstrate this relation of a kind of production of masculinity/virility as a pharmacopolitical value and a pharmacopolitical ideal. In both elements we can see the invention of this Viagra-subject.
When the gap between Bolsonaro’s pharmacomasculinity and his speech come forth, it is clear that he knows, in a certain way, what is a gender performance as queer theory understand it. He is not talking about his gender/masculinity as a true experience, a putative essence of masculinity. There is no such thing as true gender or true masculinity and Bolsonaro used both (gender and masculinity) as a political construction. As much as Drag plays with gender roles, Bolsonaro plays with masculinity/virility.
Finally, what is to be unlimpable in politics? It is the affirmation of the Brazilian ideal of nuclear family as a primary unit of society. The nuclear family is constituted by a father, a mother and their children. Every person in this elementary family has his own place. The father with physical and economical power in the public space; the mother in silence in the domestic space and the children represent the future reproduction of this nuclear cell. The conjugal family is also profoundly religious, extremely racist (do not accept interracial relationship) and strongly classist (do not accept cross-class relationship).
The sociologist and anthropologist Gilberto Freyre in his work The Master and the Slaves: a Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization shows us an old saying that unify in one phrase our legacy of religiosity, racism and classism: “white woman to marriage, mulatto woman for fuck, negro woman for work”. Hence, the traditional family is the patriarchal family which Bolsonaro fights for. About this father’s family, there is a traditional relation between him and the Father of the Nation (politic) and God the Father (religion). Politicians in the right-wing spectrum usually knows quite well how to manipulate these images. Bolsonaro with his Viagra-subjectivity plays with every single ideal to make Brazil virile again. However, it is not just a fight to compose an old ideal of man. Bolsonaro fights against a possible new configuration of society, Bolsonaro fights against a more egalitarian society.
References:
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2011).
Michel Foucault, Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). Thaís Oyama, Tormenta. O Governo Bolsonaro: Crise, Intrigas e Segredos (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2020).
Paul Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (New York: Feminist press, 2013).
Gilberto Freyre, The Master and the Slaves: a Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, (California: University of California Press, 1986).
