Date of Award
May 2019
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
Communication and Rhetorical Studies
Advisor(s)
Dana Cloud
Keywords
asexuality, flibanserin, HSDD, medical rhetoric, sexuality
Subject Categories
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Abstract
Using a Foucauldian-influenced approach to discourse and power, this thesis analyzes the production of nonsexualities, such as the lack of sexual desire, in the contemporary United States. In psychiatric discourse, the distressed nonsexual subject is produced as the patient with Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD). This discursive formation was put to use in the debate surrounding pharmaceutical drug flibanserin (Addyi) in order to secure its approval by the FDA in 2015. I posit that, by emphasizing the distress of the HSDD patient experience, the rhetoric of pro-flibanserin advocacy succeeded in producing an ethical exigency, arguing that it would be cruel for the FDA to reject the drug. Centrally, its support for this claim relies upon the construction of an ideal (hetero)sexual marriage and problematizing nonsexuality as a threat to love. Flibanserin’s rhetorical support depended, then, upon casting nonsexuality in the role of a destructive enemy force. As a counter-discourse, the discourse of the asexual community—which produces “asexuality” as a sexual orientation—codifies a point of resistance to these claims.
Access
Open Access
Recommended Citation
Thompson, Hannah Helene, "Sexually “Broken”: The Rhetorical Production of The Distressed Nonsexual in The Flibanserin Debate & Beyond" (2019). Theses - ALL. 302.
https://surface.syr.edu/thesis/302
