On a summer night in 2007, the Azure Party, part of Sydney’s annual gay and lesbian Mardi Gras, is underway. Alongside the party outfits, drugs, lights, and DJs is a volunteer care team trained to deal with the drug-related emergencies that occasionally occur. But when police appear at the gates with drug-detecting dogs, mild panic ensues. Some patrons down all their drugs, heightening their risk of overdose. Others try their luck at the gates. After twenty-six attendees are arrested with small quantities of illicit substances, the party is shut down and the remaining partygoers disperse into the city streets. For Kane Race, the Azure Party drug search is emblematic of a broader technology of power that converges on embodiment, consumption, and pleasure in the name of health. In Pleasure Consuming Medicine, he illuminates the symbolic role that the illicit drug user fulfills for the neoliberal state. As he demonstrates, the state’s performance of moral sovereignty around substances designated “illicit” bears little relation to the actual dangers of drug consumption; in fact, it exacerbates those dangers. Race does not suggest that drug use is risk-free, good, or bad, but rather that the regulation of drugs has become a site where ideological lessons about the propriety of consumption are propounded. He argues that official discourses about drug use conjure a space where the neoliberal state can be seen to be policing the “excesses” of the amoral market. He explores this normative investment in drug regimes and some “counterpublic health” measures that have emerged in response. These measures, which Race finds in certain pragmatic gay men’s health and HIV prevention practices, are not cloaked in moralistic language, and they do not cast health as antithetical to pleasure.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES and LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER “Brilliant . . . riveting, scary, cogent, and cleverly argued.”—Beth Macy, author of Dopesick, as heard on Fresh Air This book is about pleasure. It’s also about pain. Most important, it’s about how to find the delicate balance between the two, and why now more than ever finding balance is essential. We’re living in a time of unprecedented access to high-reward, high-dopamine stimuli: drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting . . . The increased numbers, variety, and potency is staggering. The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. As such we’ve all become vulnerable to compulsive overconsumption. In Dopamine Nation, Dr. Anna Lembke, psychiatrist and author, explores the exciting new scientific discoveries that explain why the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain . . . and what to do about it. Condensing complex neuroscience into easy-to-understand metaphors, Lembke illustrates how finding contentment and connectedness means keeping dopamine in check. The lived experiences of her patients are the gripping fabric of her narrative. Their riveting stories of suffering and redemption give us all hope for managing our consumption and transforming our lives. In essence, Dopamine Nation shows that the secret to finding balance is combining the science of desire with the wisdom of recovery.

Since the onset of the HIV epidemic, the behaviour of men who have sex with men has been subject to intense scrutiny on the part of the behavioural and sociomedical sciences. What happens when we consider the work of these sciences to be not merely descriptive, but also constitutive of the realities it describes? The Gay Science pays attention to lived experiences of sex, drugs and the scientific practices that make these experiences intelligible. Through a series of empirically and historically detailed case studies, the book examines how new technologies and scientific artifacts – such as antiretroviral therapy, digital hookup apps and research methods – mediate sexual encounters and shape the worlds and self-practices of men who have sex with men. Rather than debunking scientific practices or minimizing their significance, The Gay Science approaches these practices as ways in which we ‘learn to be affected’ by HIV. It explores what knowledge practices best engage us, move us and increase our powers and capacities for action. The book includes an historical analysis of drug use as a significant element in the formation of urban gay cultures; constructivist accounts of the emergence of barebacking and chemsex; a performative response to Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis and its uptake; and, a speculative analysis of ways of thinking and doing sexual community in the digital context. Combining insights from queer theory, process philosophy and science and technology studies to develop an original approach to the analysis of sexuality, drug use, public health and digital practices, this book demonstrates the ontological consequences of different modes of attending to risk and pleasure. It is suitable for those interested in cultural studies, sociology, gender and sexuality studies, digital culture, public health and drug and alcohol studies.

The Drug Effect: Health, Crime and Society offers new perspectives on critical debates in the field of alcohol and other drug use. Drawing together work by respected scholars in Australia, the US, the UK and Canada, it explores social and cultural meanings of drug use and analyses law enforcement and public health frameworks and objectives related to drug policy and service provision. In doing so, it addresses key questions of drug use and addiction through interdisciplinary, predominantly sociological and criminological, perspectives, mapping and building on recent conceptual and empirical advances in the field. These include questions of materiality and agency, the social constitution of disease and neo-liberal subjectivity and responsibility. This book provides a fresh scholarly perspective on drug use and addiction by collecting top quality original work, written by a mix of international leaders in the field and emerging scholars working at the cutting edge of research.

A tidal wave of panic surrounded homosexuality and AIDS in the 1980s and early 1990s, the period commonly called 'The AIDS Crisis'. With the advent of antiretroviral drugs in the mid '90s, however, the meaning of an HIV diagnosis radically changed. These game-changing drugs now enable many people living with HIV to lead a healthy, regular life, but how has this dramatic shift impacted the representation of gay men and HIV in popular culture? Positive Images is the first detailed examination of how the relationship between gay men and HIV has transformed in the past two decades. From Queer as Folk to Chemsex, The Line of Beauty to The Normal Heart, Dion Kagan examines literature, film, TV, documentaries and news coverage from across the English-speaking world to unearth the socio-cultural foundations underpinning this 'post-crisis' period. His analyses provide acute insights into the fraught legacies of the AIDS Crisis and its continued presence in the modern queer consciousness.

This pioneering book explores the notion of 'radical decadence' as concept, aesthetic and lived experience, and as an analytical framework for the study of contemporary feminist textile art. Gendered discourses of decadence that perpetuate anxieties about women's power, consumption and pleasure are deconstructed through images of drug use, female sexuality and 'excessive' living, in artworks by several contemporary textile artists including Orly Cogan, Tracey Emin, Allyson Mitchell, and Rozanne Hawksley. Perceptions of decadence are invariably bound to the negative connotations of decay and degradation, particularly with regard to the transgression of social norms related to femininity and the female body. Excessive consumption by women has historically been represented as grotesque, and until now, women's pleasure in relation to drug and alcohol use has largely gone unexamined in feminist art history and craft studies. Here, representations of female consumption, from cupcakes to alcohol and cocaine, are opened up for critical discussion. Drawing on feminist and queer theories, Julia Skelly considers portrayals of 'bad girls' in artworks that explore female sexuality - performative pieces designed to subvert and exceed feminine roles. In this provocative book, decadence is understood not as a destructive force but as a liberating aesthetic.

This book offers a genealogy of the medicalisation of sexual appetite in Europe and the United States from the nineteenth to twenty-first century. Histories of sexuality have predominantly focused on the emergence of sexual identities and categories of desire. They have marginalised questions of excess and lack, the appearance of a libido that dwindles or intensifies, which became a pathological object in Europe by the nineteenth century. Through a genealogical approach that draws on the writings of Michel Foucault, A Genealogy of Appetite in the Sexual Sciences examines key ‘moments’ in the pathologisation of sexuality and demonstrates how medical techniques assumed critical roles in shaping modern understandings of the problem of appetite. It examines how techniques of the patient case history, elixirs and devices, measurement, diagnostic manuals and pharmaceuticals were central to the medicalisation of sexual appetite. Jacinthe Flore argues that these techniques are significant for understanding how a concern with ‘how much?’ has transformed medical knowledge of sexuality since the nineteenth century. The questions of ‘how much?’, ‘how often?’ and ‘how intense?’ thus require a genealogical investigation that pays attention to the emergence of medical techniques, the transformation of forms of knowledge and their effects on the problematisations of sexual appetite.

Whether drinking Red Bull, relieving chronic pain with oxycodone, or experimenting with Ecstasy, Americans participate in a culture of self-medication, using psychoactive substances to enhance or manage our moods. A “drug-free America” seems to be a fantasyland that most people don’t want to inhabit. High: Drugs, Desire, and a Nation of Users asks fundamental questions about US drug policies and social norms. Why do we endorse the use of some drugs and criminalize others? Why do we accept the necessity of a doctor-prescribed opiate but not the same thing bought off the street? This divided approach shapes public policy, the justice system, research, social services, and health care. And despite the decades-old war on drugs, drug use remains relatively unchanged. Ingrid Walker speaks to the silencing effects of both criminalization and medicalization, incorporating first-person narratives to show a wide variety of user experiences with drugs. By challenging current thinking about drugs and users, Walker calls for a next wave of drug policy reform in the United States, beginning with recognizing the full spectrum of drug use practices.

In older cultures, the use of intoxicant drugs was integrated into the rhythms of social existence and bounded by rituals and taboos that ensured their dangerous forces were contained and channelled. In modern western societies, by contrast, the state and the institutions of society have washed their hands of any responsibility for assimilating the desire for intoxication into social existence, and by doing so have sponsored a free-for-all that has often had disastrous consequences for individuals and communities alike. Why We Take Drugs provides a timely intervention in the growing debate about the wisdom of the ongoing ‘war on drugs’. Rather than adopting the assumption that drug and alcohol use is a problem that poses a threat to society, this book makes a case for the idea that society is a problem for intoxicant drug use and that it is society that poses a threat, by denying those who seek intoxication a legitimate and socially sanctioned space in which to experience these altered states. Scholarly yet approachable, it provides a new understanding of the meaning and role of intoxicant drug use in contemporary society, setting an in-depth phenomenological analysis of intoxication as an embodied experience within a wide sociological, anthropological and historical context. These ideas are brought to life by intimate and revealing accounts of ordinary drug users’ experiences with a wide range of substances. This book will appeal to a wide range of students and scholars throughout the social sciences, particularly in the areas of drug and alcohol studies, body studies, cultural studies, anthropology and philosophy.

This open access book explores the increasing role of psychoactive substances in contemporary everyday life, focussing on women's use. Drawing on an ethnographic study in Sweden, it uses cultural studies and queer phenomenology to analyse the women’s narratives of drug use relating to themes that encompass social, legal, cultural, embodied and gendered perspectives on drugs in the contemporary Western world. It examines topics such as stigma, happiness, children, the body, gifts, the drug market, medication, sickness and health and also the orientation of themselves towards others, to social and cultural norms, to drug laws and to the substances. It discusses how drug related spaces and directions be analysed in terms of gender and class, and how, in turn, the directions of contemporary society and culture can be affected by drug use. It speaks to academics in Sociology, Criminology, Ethnology, Gender studies, Law and History.