Masculine enhancement as health or pathology: gender and optimisation discourses in health promotion materials on performance and image-enhancing drugs (PIEDs)

Abstract

ABSTRACT The consumption of performance and image-enhancing drugs (PIEDs) is commonly pathologised in public health discourse as stemming from an unhealthy relationship to masculinity, and is often framed as intrinsically ‘risky’ and fundamentally at odds with ‘good health’. This article examines Australian health promotion materials on PIEDs to analyse their role in shaping notions of good health, normal gender and appropriate self-improvement. To do so, it draws on the work of Butler, Law and Latour to consider how these materials co-constitute men and their health, often in problematic ways. First, we examine the ways in which PIEDs are constituted via a politics of the ‘natural’, then consider how the health promotion materials on PIEDs participate in the regulation of appropriate, healthy masculinity, and conclude by examining how adolescent masculinity is co-constituted with PIEDs. We observe a key tension between health promotion’s avowed interest in improvement and optimisation and its treatment of PIED consumers as aberrant, vulnerable and insecure subjects whose drive to enhance and optimise is characterised by pathology and addiction. We conclude by arguing that health promotion materials on PIEDs fail to acknowledge the exceedingly normative character of enhancement practices in contemporary society.