‘Mediation, Affect and Suggestion:Re-positioning ‘Cultural Influence’’

Lisa BlackmanDepartment of Media and

CommunicationsGoldsmiths, University of London,

UK

Reflections on Habit Lighting up – it's

psychosocial, not physiological, according to a new Israeli study. Smoking an habitual response to cues in the evironment

Take Control of the Habit

The Chav

Magdalena Harris (2009) ‘Injecting, Infection, Illness: Abjection and Hepatitis

A Stigma’. Body & Society, 15(4):33-52 ‘The reaction of ‘horror’ to seeing insulin injected in

incongruous settings is not only a very visceral response to the act of injecting, but causes one to think about the spatial demarcations inherent in ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ behaviour. Injecting, it is implied, is a private act that even in medical circumstances, should be conducted in an appropriate indoor setting; in the privacy of one’s home or a locked bathroom. Injecting for the purposes of pleasure and/or intoxication is commonly regarded as ‘improper’ wherever it is conducted. The workshop participants’ reflections also conveyed an element of fascination; one could imagine them stealing glances at the person injecting their insulin – ‘horrified’ but unable to look away. I, too, share their horror/fascination at the act of injecting, perhaps for slightly different reasons. The sight of a dirty syringe lying in a gutter or an actor injecting in some drug-ridden drama still causes my body to contract. My muscles tighten, I glance them look away, fearful of my latent desire, my body’s remembering’ (p. 40).

Towards Relational Understandings of ‘Lifestyle’. See L. Blackman (2008) The Body: The

Key Concepts, Berg. B. Latour (2005) Reassembling the

Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory, Oxford University Press.

E. Gomart (2004) ‘Surprised by Methadone: In Praise of Drug Substitution Treatment in a French Clinic’. Body & Society, 10(2-3): 85-110.

E. Gomart (2004) ‘Surprised by Methadone: In Praise of Drug Substitution Treatment in a French Clinic’. Body & Society, 10(2-3): 85-110.

‘Substances were not fixed, deterministic fatalities; they were described as a subtle array of constraints that might be used in modulating a relation between a drug, a user and a practitioner. …stabilization is implicitly defined as the very capacity to alter, to transform slightly the mode of use of the user, by inserting into his daily routines and habits other routines, skills or disciplines, with the hope, in the end in making a small difference in his mode of use and way of life’ (Gomart, 2004: 97).

Also see J. Demant (2009) ‘When Alcohol Acts: An Actor Network Approach to Teenagers, Alcohol and Parties’. Body & Society, 15(1)- 25-46.

Cohen, E (2009) A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics and the Apotheosis

of the Modern Body (Duke, 2009).

‘other ways of imagining humanness lead to other models of care and treatment’ (2009: 272).