Achieve Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics Of Drugs Designed By Kane Race Categorized In Pamphlet

especially enjoyed the chapters documenting counterpublic health measures and the parts questioning moral citizenship/the "normal" and "good" uses of the body.
On a summer night in, the Azure Party, part of Sydneys annual gay and lesbian Mardi Gras, is underway.
Alongside the party outfits, drugs, lights, and DJs is a volunteer care team trained to deal with the drugrelated emergencies that occasionally occur.
But when police appear at the gates with drugdetecting dogs, mild panic ensues, Some patrons down all their drugs, heightening their risk of overdose, Others try their luck at the gates, After twentysix attendees are arrested with small quantities of illicit substances, the party is shut down and the remaining partygoers disperse into the city streets.
For Kane Race, the Azure Party drug search is emblematic of a broader technology of power that converges on embodiment, consumption, and pleasure in the name of health.
In Pleasure Consuming Medicine, he illuminates the symbolic role that the illicit drug user fulfills for the neoliberal state.
As he demonstrates, the states performance of moral sovereignty around substances designated “illicit” bears little relation to the actual dangers of drug consumption in fact, it exacerbates those dangers.
Race does not suggest that drug use is riskfree, good, or bad, but rather that the regulation of drugs has become a site where ideological lessons about the propriety of consumption are propounded.
He argues that official discourses about drug use conjure a space where the neoliberal state can be seen to be policing the “excesses” of the amoral market.
He explores this normative investment in drug regimes and some “counterpublic health” measures that have emerged in response, These measures, which Race finds in certain pragmatic gay mens health and HIV prevention practices, are not cloaked in moralistic language, and they do not cast health as antithetical to pleasure.
Ok, briefly, and hopefully someday I will revisit this in full this is a few great ideas presented in such a muddied, poor and meandering manner that it seems engineered to undermine the strength of these ideas.

the idea that we should look at the pharmacology of selffashioning esp antiretroviral regimes for managing HIV and how side effects, adherence, and the understanding of the individual works and
juxtapose this with the self fashioning of drug use, especially the "crystal meth craze" running circa
whilelashing this to neoliberal understandings of self management and citizenship

but instead the thesis gets bogged down in a bunch of half finished ideas or extensive literature reviews that detract from actually moving through the motions of fleshing out a thesis which is sort of a problem that i think is normal to have with books Yesterday I finished reading Pleasure Consuming Medicine.
I am inspired by a number of parts of the book, I love the way Race exposes the paradox between 'acceptable' drugs medicine and 'unacceptable' drugs illicit drugs, The idea that HIV/AIDS actually fuelled the development of rave/dance party cultures is intriguing: that in the AIDS era, people sought pleasures in communal dancing with MDMA a kind of 'safe sex' through gaining similar pleasures without the same dangers of contracting HIV.
Race's concept of counterpublic health is very relevant to my work and he cites some of the articles I cite around 'folk pharmacologies' using embodied ethics to generate appropriate interventions by and for the peer community as compared to the moralising interventions imposed upon communities by governments.
Then I was blown away at the start of Chapterwhere Race recounts his memory of interacting with an intoxicated 'hot guy' in a gay venue, discusses his

own use of drugs, and expertly shows how it would be much easier for him to blame drugs for his HIV, renounce them as evil and live by a moral code which would be unsustainable, therefore it would be punctuated with "little moments of exception as opportunities to do all those wonderful, naughty things that my moral self so rigorously suppresses".
He actually writes honestly about the dilemmas of drug use and drug user identity in his own world while theoretically examining this world.
I recommend this book, especially to drug researchers grappling with how to represent their own worlds within their research writings.
Pleasure Consuming Medicine is the deliciously and ambiguously titled new work by the Senior Lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, Kane Race.
His difficult but rewarding text joins a number of new works about the pleasures not just punishments of drug use.
New works by Sarah Maclean, Joao Biehl, Philippe Bourgois, Lee Hoffer, Merrill Singer, and others have begun to flesh out in ethnographic richness the theoretical provocations of the French social theoretician Michel Foucault.
Race theorizes the limits to community and political mobilization efforts insofar as they are tied to drug use and to sexual identity and networking.
Insights from ethnography, queer theory and drug and gender studies address the illegality of drug use and the perceived deviance of drug users.
Nevertheless, he pitches his argument not at the level of degradation and addiction, but rather, at the possible unity and the undoubted pleasures of members of communities who identify and who can be mobilized politically through consumptions of drugs and pursuit and experience of sexual pleasure.


The book is comprised of seven densely written but rewarding chapters, each being titled by means of double entendres, for example, “Recreational States,” “Exceptional Sex,” and “Consuming Compliance.
” It will appeal to academic researchers and to gay and lesbian, feminist and queer activists, but will not perhaps be appreciated by many policymakers, public health officials or casual readers.
Pleasure Consuming Medicine is not an easy read, but those who are well versed in critical theory, social history, and queer studies and who proceed slowly and contemplate his complex argument, will be greatly rewarded.
It would be appropriate to use in graduatelevel courses in several fields,

Races account of the centrality of the Azure Party, the piece de resistance of Sydney, Australias annual lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender fest, is just as humane as it is intellectual.
Such events are typically analyzed as instances of mass escape and debauchery by members of sexual minorities, By contrast, he argues that it was also “a crucial apparatus within which the notion of community was given popular resonance” in terms, for example, of dealing with the threat and reality of HIV and AIDS.
Race explores the ethics of drug use both in public and more privately, but resists the usual tendency to frame drug use and gay male sexuality in terms of marginalized, deviant men in search of sexual ecstasy and pharmaceutical Ecstasy.
Pharmaceutical companies make the drugs that their reps shill to the doctors who prescribe that they be obtained from pharmacists, each of whom, then, does his or her part to proscribe their use and denigrate their users.
Much irony ensues.

If there be a scene or event around which this text revolves, its the swooping down of disciplinary forces inupon denizens of Sydneys Mardi Gras, the Azure Party.
As gay, lesbian, straight, and genderbending partiers engaged in the technocultures of music, dance, and licit and illicit drugs, supervised by and being cared for by members of volunteer medical teams, a tremendous panic swept over the crowd when policemen and canine drugsniffers busted into the crowd.
Some revelers swallowed their drugs to avoid detection and thus overdosed, Others breached the gates and were arrested thusly, Others reacted with mild violence to police presence and thus damaged their reputation further,

His argument is often subtle, for example, asking us to think of “the dance party” not as “the transparent radiation of community,” but rather, “as a mediated event through which a sense of community was hallucinated.
” The rewards are there for the reader who takes the time to appreciate the complexities of dance party culture and social theories about it.


by Lawrence James Hammar, Ph, D. Kane Race is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, .