Wasted: Performing Addiction in America

Description

Departing from the scholarly treatment of addiction as a form of rhetoric or discursive formation, Wasted: Performing Addiction in America focuses on the material, lived experience of addiction and the ways in which it is shaped by a ’metaphor of waste’, from the manner in which people describe the addict, the experience of inebriation or his or her systematic exclusion from various aspects of American culture. With analyses of scientific and popular cultural texts such as novels and films, scholarly or medical models of addiction, reality television, TV drama, public health and anti-addiction campaigns, and the lives of celebrities who struggled with addiction, this book recovers the sense of materiality in which the experience of substance abuse is anchored, revealing addiction to be a set of socio-cultural practices, historically-contingent events and behaviours. Exploring the ways in which addiction as an identity construct, as a social problem, and as a lived experience is always and already circumscribed by the metaphor of waste, Wasted: Performing Addiction in America advances the idea that addiction constitutes a site of social control beyond the individual, through which American citizenship is regulated and the ’nation’ itself is imagined, demarcated, and contained. As such, it will appeal to scholars of popular culture, cultural and media studies, performance studies, sociology and American culture. Cover......Page 1 Contents......Page 6 Acknowledgments......Page 8 Preface: On Being Wasted in America......Page 10 Part I Representing Wasted Metaphors......Page 26 1 Writing Belushi/Performing America: Addiction, National Identity, and the Cultural Mythos of “Waste” in Wired......Page 28 Part II Staging Wasted Histories......Page 52 2 Welcome (Again) to the Circus: Resurrecting the Freak Show and the Inebriate Asylum in A&E’s Intervention......Page 54 3 Re-Visiting Literary Realism: Adaptation, Ideology, and the Metaphor of Waste in Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City and Bret Easton Ellis’Less Than Zero......Page 84 4 “My name is Jim, and I’m analcoholic”: Peddling the Wasteful Propaganda of 12-Step Treatment in Peter Cohn’s Drunks......Page 108 Part III Performing Wasted Lives......Page 132 5 “Real People With Real Stories”: Anti-Drug PSAs, the Propagation of Stereotypes, and the Boomerang Effect......Page 134 6 “Didn’t [She] Almost Have It All?”: Being Whitney Houston/Performing Addiction/Imagining America......Page 158 Conclusion On Being Wasted in America —Redux......Page 180 Bibliography......Page 200 Index......Page 214