ABSTRACT
In Chapter 2, Swedish discourses are refracted through Viagra to make visible the various author assemblages of the discourses and their institutional concerns, concerns which stemmed from existing, historically and culturally contingent social structures. I use this example of the introduction of a new pharmaceutical to a bordered, cultural context defined by a nation-state to refract a spectrum of values (descriptive and prescriptive) being employed by official actors and social institutions in the discourses they produce and entangle with the materiality of the drug. I will elaborate on details of the values and their generative impact on Swedish-Viagra and Swedish-Viagra men. This close reading explores what underlying values and actors, with their unique worries and assumptions, are relevant to this very contingent and specific entanglement. Such an understanding becomes important if one wants to understand Viagra and its place in Swedish medical practice.
