Ericka Johnson: A Cultural Biography of the Prostate

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Ericka Johnson A Cultural Biography of the Prostate  We are all suffering an acute case of prostrate 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 this talk, 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 

Ericka Johnson, Professor of gender and society, Linköping University, Sweden and member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. She has an interdisciplinary background in sociology, gender studies, and science & technology studies. She is the author of several monographs and anthologies, including A Cultural Biography of the Prostate (MIT Press 2021). 

 Her forthcoming book A Cultural Biography of the Prostate is available to pre order:

Blackwells - https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/A-Cultural-Biography-of-the-Prostate-by-Ericka-Johnson-author/9780262543040

or 

Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cultural-Biography-Prostate-Ericka-Johnson/dp/0262543044/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=9780262543040&qid=1623153725&sr=8-1 

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