The medicalization of the culture wars

ABSTRACT

Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies was a product of the 9/11 era. In this article, I consider the ways the COVID-19 pandemic displaced 9/11 as the defining event of our time and, in the process, fundamentally altered the intellectual landscape for producing scholarship. The so-called culture wars provide a compelling case study for assessing this contextual transformation. Building on the writings of Paul Preciado, I engage the new-found emphasis on pharmaceutics and their role in the culture wars. I focus on three topoi cultivated from works published in CC/CS to explore these changes: those related to biopower, bureaucracy, and coalitional politics.

KEYWORDS:

• Medicalization
• pharmaceuticals
• culture wars
• biopower
• bureaucracy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Ben Rhodes, “The 9/11 Era is Over,” The Atlantic, April 6, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/its-not-september-12-anymore/609502/.

2 John L. Lucaites and James P. McDaniel, “Telescopic Mourning/Warring in the Global Village: Decomposing (Japanese) Authority Figures,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1, no. 1 (2004): 1–28.

3 Paul Preciado, “Pharmaco-Pornographic Regime: Sex, Gender, and Subjectivity in the Age of Punk Capitalism,” in The Transgender Studies Reader Remix, eds. Susan Stryker and Dylan McCarthy Blackston (New York: Routledge, 2022), 404.

4 Preciado, 404.

5 Ibid., 407.

6 Ibid., 409.

7 Ibid., 407.

8 Ibid.

9 Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, “(In)Conceivable: Risky Reproduction and the Rhetorical Labors of ‘Octomom,’” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 11, no. 3 (2014): 232.

10 Eric King Watts, “Postracial Fantasies, Blackness, and Zombies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 14, no. 4 (2017): 321.

11 Watts, 322.

12 Megan Foley, “Voicing Terri Schiavo: Prosopopeic Citizenship in the Democratic Aporia between Sovereignty and Biopower,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7, no. 4 (2010): 382.

13 Foley, 383.

14 Ahmad Muhammad Auwal, Tamar Haruna Dambo, and Metin Ersoy, “Chastising the Child of Necessity: Peace Journalism and Almajiri Repatriation During COVID-19,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 19, no. 4 (2022): 365.

15 E. Johanna Hartelius, “Undocumented and Unafraid’? Challenging the Bureaucratic Paradigm,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 13, no. 2 (2016): 138.

16 Hartelius, 138.

17 Lisa Daily, “‘We Bleed for Female Empowerment’: Mediated Ethics, Commodity Feminism, and the Contradictions of Feminist Politics,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 16, no. 2 (2019): 140.

18 Phaedra Pezzullo, “Contextualizing Boycotts and Buycotts: The Impure Politics of Consumer-based Advocacy in an Age of Global Ecological Crises,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 8, no. 2 (2011): 132.

19 Isaac West, “PISSAR’s Critically Queer and Disabled Politics,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (2010): 156.

20 Cristina Mislán and Sara Shaban, “‘To Ferguson, Love Palestine’: Mediating Life Under Occupation,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 16, no. 1 (2019): 44.

21 Robert L. Ivie, “What We Are About,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1, no. 2 (2004): 125.

22 Ivie, 125.