"Wasted: Performing Addiction In America | Sociology

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.|Wasted: Performing Addiction in America | Sociology