A Rhetorician Visits the FDA

Sex and the rhetoric of drugs: Faux feminism at the FDA and how it won the day

Judy Z. SegalDepartment of English and STS Graduate ProgramThe University of British Columbia

Discourse of Health and Medicine SymposiumUniversity of Cincinnati3 September 2015Sofia Evelyn Luger DiPasquale

addyi (flibanserin)

AcronymsHSDD Hypoactive Sexual Desire DisorderFSD Female Sexual Dysfunction Cindy and Robert Whitehead

Even the Score, 2014

Enthymeme26 drugs have been approved for mens sexual problems; none has been approved for women. The FDA is biased against women. 8

Metaphor A sex drug for women is a pink ViagraGlobe and Mail, August 19, 2015

Even the Score on Facebook

ChronologyOctober 27-28, 2014 Patient-focused, information-gathering meetings at FDA HeadquartersFebruary 17, 2015 Sprout submits is application for flibanserin to the FDAJune 4, 2015 The FDA Advisory Panel recommends approval of flibanserin, with safety conditionsAugust 18, 2015 The FDA approves flibanserinChronologyOctober 27-28, 2014 Patient-focused, information-gathering meetings at FDA HeadquartersFebruary 17, 2015 Sprout submits is application for flibanserin to the FDAJune 4, 2015 The FDA Advisory Panel recommends approval of flibanserin, with safety conditionsAugust 18, 2015 The FDA approves flibanserinAugust 20, 2015 Valeant Pharmaceuticals announces its billion dollar acquisition of Sprout

Cindy Whitehead

Globe and Mail, August 21, 2015

ABC News, May 2014

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Leonore Tiefer

21Rehearsal breakfast for Even the Score, Madison Hotel, Washington, DC

Busload of women

Cindy Whitehead, CEO of Sprout Pharmaceuticals, and someone else, on the bus

Even the Score at the FDA

Us at the FDA

Inside the room at the FDA

#ThankYouFDA at Even the Score

Thank you!Thanks also to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for research funding and to Monica Brown for invaluable research assistance.

jsegal@mail.ubc.ca Discussion questionsThere has been a shift recently in medicine and medicine studies from talking about medical humanities to talking about health humanities. What is the significance of the shift and what might it mean for those of us who work on discourses of health and medicine?At professional conferences and in publications in rhetoric/composition/technical-writing/communication journals, we talk mostly to each other about the rhetoric of health and medicine. Whom else should we be talking toand how might we create the conditions in which we can talk to those people? (Who is the audience for your own work?)Where do analysis and commentary end and activism begin? Is academic writing itself a form of (symbolic) action? What, if any, responsibility do we have to make situations better when we believe that they need to beand what qualifies us to know when a situation needs to be better, and what better means in that case?

A 1979 New York Times article, Is There Sex After Marriage? describes female sexual desire in complex relational terms. Quoting expert opinion, the author reports, for example, that the leading reason that marital sex dies is underlying rage toward one's spouse.Here women are constituted, in a sense, as rhetorical subjects. They have good reasons for being or not being aroused. They are whole people, importantly unpersuaded. . . . In 2003, a New York Times article reports, again quoting experts, [Women with female sexual dysfunction] say they can have intercourse, but nothing happens, they don't get aroused . . . We don't know why. We think it has something to do with the action of vasodilation, or blood vessel dilation gone awry.

Judy Z. Segal, Female Sexual Dysfunction and a Rhetoric of Values, p. 33DSM-5, 2013

Female Sexual Dysfunction?