Viagra Selfhood : Pharmaceutical advertising and the visual formations of Swedish masculinity

In this chapter, we will investigate the visual confguration of what we term a Swedish Viagra imaginary, a cultural phantasy landscape that produces and repro- duces certain subject positions of great interest for feminists and other scholars invested in social change. More precisely, we interrogate a set of key images pre- sented by the Pfzer-sponsored website for potential Swedish Viagra customers with erectile dysfunction in order to explore how this particular Viagra imaginary provides reference points for shared and collective identities. We explore here the visual formation, and the naturalization, of the nationally shaped masculinity of the potential consumers of Viagra at a Swedish-language site, www.potenslinjen.se/, the same site discussed in Chapter 6. This site is produced by the pharmaceutical 2 company Pfzer for the explicit purpose of providing the Swedish public with health information on erectile problems.PPPH