The Reshaping of Public Health

Abstract

The previous chapter explored the idea that public health governance can exploit technosexual visibility. In Chapter 5, I explored how public health governance tries to exert itself through various imperatives and how these articulate with bio-technologies. These chapters have therefore addressed public health governance and how it impinges on, or works through, technosexuality. In this chapter, I want to consider how technosexuality may help to (re)shape public health governance. Superficially, it would be possible to argue that the ways in which some forms of public health governance seek to exploit technosexuality is a simple process of medicalisation, or in other terms, the incorporation of technosexual citizens into a form of total society public health governance, extended to bio- and communication technologies and their hybrids. But it may be a simplification to conclude that public health only extends its authority through technosexual practices. Drawing on the example of the Viagra cyborg and the productively disruptive effects it is said to have in relation to medical authority and sexual embodiment, this chapter considers how technosexuality may be altering the social relations of public health governance. As we will see, the decentring implied in these changes raises the prospect of a paradoxical extension and loosening of public health authority over technosexuality.