Images of Addiction: Using the Body as Cultural Metaphor

faces of addiction

the Addicts Body as a Metaphor for Deviance

•  body acts as a symbolic map for the social significance of drug use and addiction, but also DEVIANCE and SOCIAL and BODILY DISORDER
• Turner's "Somatic Society"
• our major political and moral problems are expressed through the conduit of the human body
• persistence of and fascination with the addicts body 
• What are we viewing in the Addict in light of the somatic society? (4 things)
• effects of drug use on the body's physical integrity
• addict is represented as occupying the margins of our society in both social and geographical terms
• addict as "other'
• addict as "marginal"

• Body is conceptualized in 3 ways (Turner)
• body as actualized in a set of social practices through which the body id constantly produced, regulated and sustained
• the body as a system of "signs" (symbolic significance)
• body stands for and expresses the relations of power within a given society

• Metaphors of drug use:
• disease
• demonization
• criminality, sex & drugs
• weakness
• flaw
• contagions (boundary violation -Douglas)
• blood borne illnesses like HIV
• blood outside the body with needles piercing into it
• decay
• breakdown of the skin, teeth, veins and other organs
• seen as an example of how the body can be understood as a set of maps and metaphors for the wider social body, as the ravaged body of the addict is dipicted in ways that aim to discipline and to promote anti-drug messages
• the body in our society has BECOME A PROBLEM which needs to be regulated. this is just one example

• Women & Drug Metaphors:Victims who posses little or no autonomous power or agency
• reflects key themes that area associated with women in other contexts and narratives
• vulnerability
• sexual availability and unreliability
• drug use as something done to them (usually by men)
• decay and threat of decay of natural physical state of the body (including beauty and youth)

• Vampire metaphor: victims injected by their lovers, pale, sunken cheeks, haunted look of despair & self-loathing
• high is better than sex
• symbolic prison of addiction and dependency

• Ciminality & the threat at the MARGINS
• dont let drug dealers change the face of your neighborhood
• transitional cityscape: link between drug use, urban spaces and decaying social order
• images are dark and seedy  "othering"