Book ID: CBB940171398

A Cultural Biography of the Prostate (2021)

unapi

Johnson, Ericka (Author)


MIT Press


Publication Date: 2021
Physical Details: 272
Language: English

We are all suffering an acute case of prostate angst. Men worry about their own prostates and those of others close to them; women worry about the prostates of the men they love. The prostate—a gland located directly under the bladder—lurks on the periphery of many men's health issues, but as an object of anxiety it goes beyond the medical, affecting how we understand masculinity, aging, and sexuality. In A Cultural Biography of the Prostate, Ericka Johnson investigates what we think the prostate is and what we use the prostate to think about, examining it in historical, cultural, social, and medical contexts. Johnson shows that our ways of talking about, writing about, imagining, and imaging the prostate are a mess of entangled relationships. She describes current biomedical approaches, reports on the “discovery” of the prostate in the sixteenth century and its later appearance as both medical object and discursive trope, and explores present-day diagnostic practices for benign prostate hyperplasia—which transform a process (urination) into a thing (the prostate). Turning to the most anxiety-provoking prostate worry, prostate cancer, Johnson discusses PSA screening and the vulnerabilities it awakens (or sometimes silences) and then considers the presence of the absent prostate—how the prostate continues to affect lives after it has been removed in the name of health.

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Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB940171398/

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Authors & Contributors
Christophe Capuano
Persson, Alma
Hartmut Beyer
Piper, Alana J.
Nagy, Victoria M.
Yallop, Helen
Concepts
Sexuality
Aging
Human body
Medicine and society
Medicine
Masculinity
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
20th century
Early modern
21st century
18th century
Places
France
United States
England
Peru
Spain
Germany
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