The principal objective of this Science and Technology Studies Dissertation Improvement Grant is to support field work that will result in an ethnographic study of the role of pharmaceutical marketing in women's health care. This project will combine intensive archival work and the collection of oral histories with popular culture analysis and participant observation at a large pharmaceutical marketing firm. It will focus on the ways in which advertising and popular theories of gender and mental illness interact with the experimental production of medical and scientific knowledge. The thesis is that pharmaceutical marketing, specifically the development of the brand, is actively helping to redefine the ways in which women can be ill, and is affecting how women individually and collectively situate themselves in medical systems, how they strategize to share medical information and personal experiences, and how they negotiate narratives about female sickness and health. The major product will be a dissertation manuscript that will contribute to understanding the implications of prescription drug marketing in our changing notions of gender, illness and medical systems. Its analysis will draw off the Multidisciplinary methods of science studies, medical and cultural anthropology, and cultural studies. This study of pharmaceutical marketing will contribute substantively to the fields within STS. First, it will document medical knowledge production at the intersection of popular understandings and scientific discourse; second, it will provide an interdisciplinary case study of how the nature of medical objects is changing within shifting relationships between academic and corporate medicine and patient movements; third, it will borrow from anthropological categories of personhood (self, normality, rationality) to propose how people's identities are depending more and more on the personal relationships they develop with their illnesses, which are changing along with the social meanings that marketing attaches to their prescription drug treatments. The broader impacts of this project will include the establishment of new lines of communication between underrepresented patient groups, clinical researchers and pharmaceutical marketers, with a special focus on women's mental health care and new analyses of the changes in women's health care policy.
