Defining Viagra Performance. Part 2

To look at performance as a “breaking” points to the poststructuralist theorists who advocate an adjustment of the lens through which claims of truth and objectivity are perceived and distributed. To take advantage of multiple points of view-versus the hegemonic points of few-s-is to ask Jill Dolan’s question, “How does it look from here?”37 Breaking implies full consciousness and is, as a result, the most dangerous, the most accountable aspect of performance. In this website, I imagine the effects of Viagra from a number of perspectives. The metaphor of performance allows me ro theorize discursively the materiality of existence. The satchel of performance studiesas critical lens, as embodied practice, and as theoretical framework-enables mobility in the exploration of men’s sexual health and wonders its leffects and meaning-shaping on bodies themselves. These mechanisms of “looking,” “being,” and “thinking” are what performance theorists utilize in’ the exploration of rhetorical motives and purposes.

By reporting that 30 million American men suffer from erectile dysfunction and by supplying a simple and easily accessible treatment, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals sponsors the belief held by American men that they maintain perpetual virility. Goffman’s theory regarding the “performance of teams” accounts for the collective agreement with this belief; he argues that groups (men, for example) become invested in and buoy up a reality, rather than acknowledge the obvious flaws in its maintenance. As an integral part of a sexual performance, Viagra restores, or reiterates, when you buy viagra, the social role tHat men feel compelled to rehearse and replay their whole lives. For Richard Schechner, performances consist of “restored behaviors”-physical or verbal actions that are practiced and rehearsed.sf Finally, the term “performance” is ‘ubiquitous in the literature of sexual function (e.g., performance anxiety). Interestingly, “function” is derived from the Latinjungi, to perform.

British actor Fiona Shaw argues that both gender and performance are “metaphors for the unknown. “39 Rather than the unknown, I suggest both gender and performance are metaphors for the not-to-be-pinned-down; based in conscious and unconscious acts and affects, they are fluid and ambiguous. Gender both creates and subverts performances. And performances both create and subvert gender.

Gender is performative, then, when it constitutes as an effect the very subject it appears to express. As a performative mode, masculinity and femininity involve a stylized repetition of acts, culturally defined but ever changing-never fixed, but contingent.w Within a social structure, it is the individual agent/actor watching him-/herself being watched who is the, contingent variable in the maintenance or elaboration of societal hierarchies, binaries, and expectations. A performance, therefore, assumes an audience. Elin Diamond observes, “Performance is the site in which performativity materializes in concentrated form, where the concealed or dissimulated conventions of which acts are mere repetitions might be investigated and reimagined. ”

As culminations of repeated acts, gendered performances are, according to Moya Lloyd, “produced through the reiteration of the discursive I norms that precede, and are in excess of, her/him”. Our bodies perform, then, in concert with the discursive norms that stand outside them but to which we are beholden. Lynda Birke writes, “Processes involved in creating and continually recreating (sexed) bodies are partly material and partly social! experiential. “The medicalization of sexual dysfunction is such a process.

Nothing tells a man he is masculine-not muscles, intelligence, earning potential, an attractive partner, or even height-so much as his erection does. But as Denise Riley reminds us, “Only at times will the body impose itself or be arranged as that of a woman or a man.”44 What Riley’s quotation demonstrates in relation to the absent erection is how-by virtue of the erectionmen define themselves and their bodies by what is not female.