Jamie Schafroth

When Louisiana became the first state in the US to legalize surgical castration as a form of punishment for certain sex crimes, it renewed debates on the longstanding practice of “chemical castration.” Chemical castration remains the common descriptor for androgen deprivation therapies (ADT) that, in punitive contexts, suppress testosterone production to diminish sexual capacity. Yet, “castration” becomes a misnomer when physicians use ADT therapeutically to confer sexual health and wellbeing while promoting public safety. ADT has catalyzed debates. Is it a cruel and unusual punishment? Did it constitute a grave bodily invasion? What is at stake when “the sex offender” is the recipient of therapeutic sexual medicine? Using ethnographic methods at specialized clinics deploying therapeutic ADT for problematic sexual behavior, this project examines these contradictions ethnographically to investigate what kinds of “healthy” sexual subjects are produced by hormonal suppression – and how this happens – as ADT mediates the boundaries between care and punishment. Situating sexual medicine within broader biopolitical projects, this project will illuminate how “healthy” sexuality and citizenship are made malleable and contestable within contemporary (and contradictory) regimes of care and control.