Citation

Flore J, Kokanovic R, Duff C, Callard F. BioSocieties 2021; 16(2): 177-195.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group -- Palgrave-Macmillan)

DOI

10.1057/s41292-020-00189-2

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This article examines how a particular class of material objects--antidepressants--circulate in women's social, cultural and intimate lifeworlds. Following the action of antidepressants in their encounters with bodies and brains by way of the agencies they express and the specific work they perform reveals much of the social, affective and material gendering of depression, along with the everyday activities by which this gendering is resisted. Drawing on data from a qualitative research project, we examine how women conceptualise their brains as needing 'work' through antidepressants, and then consider the particular kinds of 'work' that these objects perform. In instances where they refuse antidepressant medication, women co-constitute antidepressants as objects to be resisted and objects that resist, reframing in the process relationships between corporeality, diagnosis and pharmaceutical matter. The 'female' brain emerges in our study as a potent site for the gendering of depression as antidepressants become entangled in the social, material and affective dynamics of women's everyday lives.

Language: en