The antidepressant in women’s lifeworlds: feminist materialist encounters

Abstract

This article examines how a particular class of material objects—antidepressants—circulate in women’s social, cultural and intimate lifeworlds. Following the action of antidepressants in their encounters with bodies and brains by way of the agencies they express and the specific work they perform reveals much of the social, affective and material gendering of depression, along with the everyday activities by which this gendering is resisted. Drawing on data from a qualitative research project, we examine how women conceptualise their brains as needing ‘work’ through antidepressants, and then consider the particular kinds of ‘work’ that these objects perform. In instances where they refuse an..