Diagnosing Desire

<b>Winner 2021 Cultural Studies Association First Book Prize</b><br> <br> In <i>Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century</i><i></i> Alyson K. Spurgas examines the new science of female sexuality from a critical sociological perspective considering how today's feminist-identified sex researchers study and manage women with low desire. <i>Diagnosing Desire</i> investigates experimental sex research that measures the disconnect between subjective and genital female arousal contemporary psychiatric diagnoses for low female desire new models for understanding women's sexual response and cutting-edge treatments for low desire in women-including from the realms of mindfulness and alternative healing.<br>  <br> Spurgas makes the case that together all of these technologies create a feminized responsive desire framework for understanding women's sexuality and that this in fact <i>produces</i> women's sexuality as a complex problem to be solved. The biggest problem Spurgas argues is that gendered and sexualized trauma-including as it is produced within technoscientific medicine itself-is too often ignored in contemporary renderings. Through incisive textual analysis and in-depth qualitative research based on interviews with women with low desire Spurgas argues for a more radical and communal form of care for feminized-and traumatized-populations in opposition to biopolitical mandates to individualize and neoliberalize forms of self-care. Ultimately this is a book not just about a specific diagnosis or dysfunction but about the material-discursive regimes that produce and regulate femininity.<br> <br>