ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the visual configuration term a Swedish Viagra imaginary, a cultural phantasy landscape that produces and reproduces certain subject positions of great interest for feminists and other scholars invested in social change. Interrogating the many cultural dimensions of the natural as a rhetorical device at work in the Viagra imaginary, one consult the work that a range of feminist scholars working on science, medicine and technology have produced since the late 1970s on the powerful, ideological processes of naturalization. Viagra discourse invites interrogations of volatile masculinity and male ageing, pharmaceutical incorporation and prosthetic virility, and of commerce in liaison with medical science. United States advertising has seen a conceptual shift from impotence to erectile dysfunction (ED), and later to erectile quality (EQ) as a much more inclusive category of erectile insecurity. National differences, understood in line with Benedict Anderson's anthropological notion of nationhood as non-essential imagined communities, are comparative indicators of the glocal dimensions of the Viagra imaginary.
