Abstracts

Abstracts are arranged alphabetically by author last name.

Nationalist Rhetoric and the American Victory Garden

Samantha Barry, George Washington University
in Day 3, Session 9: Moral Health, Food Health

The victory garden began as a WWI enterprise to persuade citizens to grow their own food, freeing up farm-grown produce in the United States for shipment to soldiers overseas. Nationalist Rhetoric and the American Victory Garden contrasts the victory garden's original federal framing as an extension of military operations with its present use as a platform for promoting healthcare reform. The physical and figurative space occupied by the victory garden reveals fundamental transformations in governmental attitudes about the welfare of the American people, as well as the perceived susceptibility of Americans to changing methods of persuasion.

Unhealthy Confessions: John Berryman and Topographies of Cold War Sentience

Adam Beardsworth, Algoma University
in Day 1, Session 4: Cold War Cultures of Fear, Pain, and "Deviance"

This paper will analyze how the poetry of John Berryman employs a confessional to measure the health of the American Cold War subject. In particular, it will examine how the protagonist of Berryman’s Dream Songs exemplifies the socialization of sentience by a repressive ideological state. While The Dream Songs have often been regarded as suspicious by scholars for their apparent confessional narcissism, this paper will evaluate how Berryman employs confession as subversive form of Cold War rhetoric. By evoking scenes of inquisition, torture, and personal disintegration, Berryman’s confessional style dissolves boundaries between private and public experience. In so doing, it exposes links between the dissolution of the coherent self and external ideological forces invested in the discipline and conformity of individual subjects. Conscious of the complicity between confession and betrayal (of both self and nation), Berryman’s poetic implicates the state apparatus in the loss of coherent subjectivity. By using confession to betray this complicity, Berryman positions the displacement of subjectivity not as predicated upon a linguistic or epistemological impossibility, but as a forceful obfuscation of the traumatic core of reality by a powerful political infrastructure. For Berryman the ideological illusion is not the possibility of the coherent self; rather, it is its displacement by Cold War political forces. The dialectic between pain and confession that is typical of his style figuratively evokes the Cold War state as a political topography invested in curating the illness of the individual American subject.
 

Defying a Deviant Diagnosis: Strategies of Resistance in Lesbian Print Culture in Post-WWII America

Clare Bermingham, University of Waterloo
in Day 1, Session 4: Cold War Cultures of Fear, Pain, and "Deviance"

The image of America as a body under threat from disease dominates cold-war narratives, when a medical discourse invoked tropes of weakness and contagion to frame communism and other ‘alien’ threats such as homosexuality. This paper explores textual and discursive resistance practices at work in lesbian print culture of the period, particularly in the newsletters, The Ladder and The Mattachine Review. It examines key elements of the dominant medical discourse that constructed lesbianism as pathological. It explores how this discursive framework was reproduced, defused, and overturned in lesbian print culture, but always within a larger normative framework, and with an awareness of other forms of alterity that were repudiated by doing so.

Illness, Politics, Identity: Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies

Rita Bode, Trent University
in Day 2, Session 7: Illness as Metaphor

Throughout In the Time of the Butterflies, Alvarez places emphasis on corporeality undertaking the kind of exploration that Suzanne Bost has recently brought to Chicana literature where she engages the “personal matter of bodies” with the “political dimensions of identity.” The Mirabel sisters’ bodies inscribe their simultaneous movement from girlhood to womanhood and from conforming acceptance to political activism. Through the diseased body of Dede, moreover, the one surviving sister, Alvarez articulates the nature and effects of political oppression, and a process of healing that transcends the personal.

“Total Social Services" and the American Patient in Typee

Luke Bresky, St. Mary’s University College
in Day 2, Session 7: Illness as Metaphor

Critics of Melville’s Typee have often connected the intermittent lameness experienced by Tommo, the narrator, with his ill-suppressed anxieties about the alleged cannibals whose hospitality he relies on for survival—is he really the Typees’ honoured and pampered guest, or their possessively and hungrily guarded captive, or somehow both? Recently, diverse critics have situated Melville’s book more squarely than ever within, and not merely in relation to, (proto-) anthropological discourses in the nineteenth century, and thus to see the narrator’s perplexity as symptomatic of doubts and ambivalences about cultural difference inscribed within those pervasively imperialistic discourses. Engaging some of these critics, as well as the present-day concerns of the conference theme, this paper draws on both enlightenment and contemporary anthropological theories of hospitality (Rousseau, Mauss, Derrida) to examine the convalescent Tommo as a revealingly conflicted recipient of what Marcel Mauss called “Total Social Services.” Delighted on one hand to enjoy the lavish ministrations that the Typees’ abundant resources makes possible, Tommo remains a confirmed, if discontented homo oeconomicus who, in the absence of any rational (read: monetary) system of exchange, cannot keep from fretting about the “unaccountable” motives of his caregivers: “why this excess of deferential kindness, or what equivalent can they imagine us capable of rendering them for it?”

Linking Union Demands for National Health Care and Third Party Politics: United Automobile Workers 1935-1970

Amy Bromsen, Wayne State University
in Day 2, Session 7: Exploring Health Care Systems

For the past fifty years, most Americans have relied on employer-sponsored health care benefits to provide medical care for their families. This paper documents the history of the United Automobile Workers’ (UAW) attempts to create a national health care program even as it continued to collectively bargain for greater employer-sponsored care. It further tracks the UAW’s demands for national health care and its relationship to a third political party independent of the Democratic Party. The US health care system today reflects the drastic decline in the number of workers covered by collective bargaining agreements and the decreasing ability of existing unions to maintain such benefits in their agreements during this period of economic crisis.

“When You Get Out of the Hospital:” Jonathan Richman, Health, and Culture in the 1970s

Peter Robert Brown, Mount Allison University
in Day 2, Session 6: Health in Popular Culture: ADD, Celebrity, and Rock and Roll

This paper explores the theme of health in the music of Jonathan Richman, a cult musician most recognizable as the singing narrator of There’s Something About Mary. My focus is the “proto-punk” album The Modern Lovers, a record on which health and illness are conspicuous motifs. Though recorded in the early 1970s, the album was not released until 1976; thus, my discussion of it concentrates on the contexts of its production and its reception, and I examine the ways in which Richman questions the health of certain aspects of American youth culture, a metonym for the nation.

Siamese Citizenship

Ross Bullen, McGill University
in Day 2, Session 7: 19th-Century Rhetoric: Travel and Humour

My paper examines the figure of the “Siamese twin” in American travel narratives written in the wake of America’s 1856 treaty with the Kingdom of Siam. As the only nation in the region never to be colonized, despite being wedged between two major colonial powers (the British in Burma and French Indochina), Siam could not help but recall America’s own revolutionary origins. Accordingly, American writing on Siam fluctuates between passages praising the modern, American aspects of the country and passages that temper this praise with bitter criticisms of the stagnant and archaic aspects of Siamese life. This ambivalent desire for what Homi Bhabha describes as “a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (122) produced as one of its effects a discourse about Siamese twins that imagines America and Siam as unhealthily and intimately conjoined doubles.

In his 1873 text Siam, the Land of the White Elephant, As It Was and Is, George B. Bacon explains that when he was in Siam “there was a kind of Siamese-twin arrangement in the kingdom” (94). Bacon’s text dwells at length on the ways in which the Siamese monarchy is both radically different from, and uncannily similar to, the American presidency. In my paper, I offer a close reading of Siamese “doubles” in Bacon’s text, including his discussion of Siam’s two kings, one of whom is described as being “almost” American, and of Prince Wichaichan, who bears the unsettling (for Bacon) nickname “Prince George Washington.”

Martyrdom as Makeover: Celebrity as Religion in Chuck Palahniuk's Survivor

Chris Button, University of New Brunswick
in Day 2, Session 6: Health in Popular Culture: ADD, Celebrity, and Rock and Roll

In a society where television programs, such as Nip/Tuck and Extreme Makeover, dramatize the efforts of “ordinary” people striving to attain the physical and aesthetic standards set by celebrity, celebrity construction has never been a more relevant topic. I argue that, in Chuck Palahniuk’s Survivor (1999), the types of processes involved in the cultural production of celebrity (image production, commodification, publicity, and media coverage) also function in the worlds of religious fanaticism and terrorism, where public notoriety and symbolic recognizability have media currency. As a focus of both religious and celebrity worship, Tender Branson embodies the material and aesthetic imperatives that characterize the cultic practices of both religion and celebrity. In Survivor, religion and celebrity sell themselves by adjusting their iconography or image according to current trends. Celebrity transforms the body into a superficial marketing tool, important only in terms of its appeal to spiritual consumers. In this context, transformative vanity surgery becomes an expected convention, a prerequisite of celebrity. In a form of enhanced fatalism, Tender gladly damages his body for the betterment of his image. In this context, martyrdom becomes merely a trendy performance. Tender’s manipulation of celebrity and cult religion in order to stage a spectacular martyrdom underscores the ethical ramifications of this obsession with image that celebrity culture encourages. Seeking fame no matter the cost, Tender reflects many recent, widely publicized celebrity downfalls. He willingly sells his identity, faith, morals, freewill, and eventually his own life, all for the sake of celebrity.

“Promoting Water Fluoridation: A Scientific Debate Takes Shape”

Catherine Carstairs, University of Guelph
in Day 1, Session 2: Public, Progress, and Public Health

The US Center for Disease Control describes community water fluoridation as one of the ten greatest public health measures of the 20th century. The World Health Organization, the US Surgeon General and Health Canada all endorse water fluoridation. And yet, recent literature suggests that fluoridation is far from being an unqualified success story. The most extensive systemic review, published in 2000, suggests that water fluoridation reduces the prevalence of dental caries by an average of 15%. While this is not insignificant, it is far lower than the 50-65% reductions promised by fluoridation proponents in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Some dentists are alarmed by the increase in dental fluorosis, a staining that occurs on the teeth when people consume too much fluoride while environmentalists worry about the impact of water fluoridation on waterways. This paper will examine the scientific arguments for and against fluoridation in the 1950s and 1960s. It will argue that legitimate opposition to fluoride was quickly silenced, in large part because the evidence in favour of the safety and effectiveness of water fluoridation mounted quickly. But pro-fluoridation dentists and doctors also had selfish reasons for promoting water fluoridation. Dentists saw fluoridation as a scientific and technological breakthrough that would bolster their somewhat insecure professional status, while public health doctors believed that water fluoridation would prove to be another triumph for public health. Both accused anti-fluoridationists of mis-using evidence and harming children. Ultimately, the extreme nature of the fluoridation debate meant that decisions on water fluoridation were perhaps taken more quickly than they should have been and made it difficult for scientists with concerns about fluoridation to be heard.

A Public Option: A Choice for the Option-less

Michael Decker, Mount Royal University
in Day 2, Session 8: Clashing Visions of Health Care Reform

In response to the recent global economic recession, the Obama administration has understandably and necessarily made US economic recovery its main priority. Yet, even in the midst of this economic uncertainty, President Obama was able to pass a comprehensive health care reform bill. With its passage, public scepticism has grown about the true costs of reform, and about whether the bill goes far enough to address the problems currently facing their health care system.
This paper argues that Obama’s health care reform legislation will not succeed in fixing what ails the American health care system and argues that the real solution lies in a single payer system closer to the Canadian model. While this solution might not be the best political option at present, it would be the best policy option and could actually lead to better health care coverage and delivery in the United States.

The Ethical Dimensions to Reproductive Tourism

Raywat Deonandan, University of Ottawa
in Day 2, Session 5: Ethical and Modern Medical Options

Increasingly, infertile couples of wealthy nations are travelling abroad to obtain reproductive medical services that are either disallowed or overly expensive at home. These include payment for donated gametes, surrogate mothers, and sex selection of offspring. This constitutes a new form of medical tourism called "reproductive tourism". In India, the provision of reproductive services by poor women to wealthy foreigners is now a half billion dollar industry. This paper provides an ethical framework for understanding the unique challenges posed by reproductive tourism to marginalized women, whose fecundity can be cynically seen as resource to be purchased at discounted rates.

Ghosts, Devils, and the Undead City: Crisis and Survival in Detroit

Paul Draus, University of Michigan-Dearborn
in Day 2, Session 6: Dead or Alive? Dissecting Public Space and Community in the American Rust Belt

Since the 1960s, Detroit has been repeatedly portrayed as a city of doom, disaster and death. In films and media Detroit has served as a symbolic stand-in for all of the usual urban ills, such as racial division, illicit drugs, poverty and violent crime. In spite of its being perpetually caught between the rock of postindustrial reality and the hard place of damning popular perception, however, the city itself is stubbornly undead. Drawing on original ethnographic research as well as secondary sources, this presentation asks what the world might learn from Detroit’s stubborn insistence on survival.

The Madness of John Brown; or Pathologizing Insurgency

David Drysdale, University of Western Ontario
in Day 3, Session 9: Political and Cultural Discourses of Madness

In October, 1859, John Brown attempted to lead a mass insurrection against slavery in the United States by launching an attack against Harpers Ferry, Virginia. In the wake of his capture and execution, Brown was publicly diagnosed by newspapers and commentators as suffering from various forms of madness. However, in his "Plea for Captain John Brown," Henry David Thoreau rebuked those who claimed that Brown was insane, insisting instead that he was "the most American of all of us." My paper explores the relationship between madness and insurgency through Thoreau's response to Brown's execution. I suggest that the language of mental illness that developed in the wake of Brown's raid suggests some of the ways in which an insurgent body politic was contained in the midst of the slavery crisis.

Who Cares? Aboriginal Peoples’ Health and Community-Based Diabetes Initiatives

Jessica Dutton, University of Guelph
in Day 1, Session 4: Regional and Community Approaches to Health

The custody of Aboriginal peoples’ health has been a contentious issue in Canada. After a long history of colonization and assimilation, Aboriginal peoples have spent the past several decades reclaiming areas of administration from the Canadian government. Healthcare has been an important point of discussion for Aboriginal peoples because they experience disproportionately high levels of disease and mortality compared to non-Aboriginal Canadians. The traditional, government-funded medical care that has been provided to Aboriginal peoples has been unsuccessful at closing the health disparity gap. Many scholars have attributed this failure to the cultural disconnect between the Western biomedical approach to care and the Aboriginal tradition of care. Aboriginal groups have responded to the widening disparities by asserting control over healthcare activities in order to provide care that is culturally sensitive and locally relevant.

Specifically, many Aboriginal communities have founded community health centres and have accessed government funding to develop programs like community-based diabetes programs. Many communities have levels of diabetes that are well beyond the levels among their non-Aboriginal counterparts and community-based programs are able to provide creative and relevant treatment and care solutions that are designed with an understanding of local clients. The Canadian Government has ceded control of some health acitivities to Aboriginal communities via the Health Transfer Policy, but many communities have determined this policy to be insufficient. Community-based diabetes programs are a useful site at which the struggle for control over community health can be examined.

"The Bowels of the Boats and the Sick Empire in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy"

Cheryl A. Elliot, University of Manitoba
in Day 2, Session 7: Illness as Metaphor

In this paper, I will focus on the significance of seventeenth-century Atlantic crossings in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy. I will examine the representation of the ships, not only as conduits for exploration, settlement, and trade on behalf of nations, but also as extensions of the national body. It is these ships that feed the plantation house in the novel, an edifice built as a statement rather than as a home, one entwined with illness and empire. It is significant, as I will show, that the plantation master is placed in an incomplete house as he lays dying, the gaping windows of a sick and dying empire blowing into a space destined to collapse into itself.

I will analyse how the Middle Passage ships—these floating representations of global capitalism—ingest their human cargoes, transport them in their bowels, and later expel them, contaminating the foundation of America with physical and psychological trauma.

Durable Feelings: Publics and Propaganda in the 1890s

Michael Epp, Trent University
in Day 2, Session 7: 19th-Century Rhetoric: Travel and Humour

In this paper I will ask what grants durability to feelings, and if feelings are such things that they can even be characterized as “durable.” I will also ask what feelings are available to publics, and if publics are such things that they can even be said to feel. I will ask if a public can remain durable only if its feelings remain durable – if publics and their feelings are mutually constitutive – or if publics can take on, shed, or transform their feelings without changing themselves significantly. To answer these questions, I will investigate some durable feelings in U.S. cultural and political history, such as those imbricated in discussions of health, that maintain so robust a life they seem to be inevitable.

The Moral Health of the Nation is in Peril: Harriet Beecher Stowe, House Museums, and the Marshalling of Morality

Jennifer Harris, Mount Allison University
in Day 3, Session 9:  Moral Health, Food Health

The early twentieth century saw a period of enormous growth in America’s historic house museum movement. Increased anxiety about immigration from “non-traditional” locations, in combination with fears of increased industrialization and social fragmentation, led some to fear for the moral health of the nation. In this context the house museum was seen as corrective, a a way to indoctrinate the masses--new and old alike--into an appropriately American way of life. It was at this time that Katharine Seymour Day, grandniece of Harriet Beecher Stowe, began to collect Stowe memorabilia, including, in 1924, Stowe’s Hartford residence, now the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center. Just as Stowe’s book provided a moral exemplar for the nation, so, too, did Day’s museum serve as a reminder of the need for an engaged morality. This paper intends to consider the way in which Day’s collecting, as well as the Stowe Center, were conceived of as a corrective within an ailing nation.

Inglourious Criticism, (Un)Healthy Culture

Jason Haslam, Dalhousie University
in Day 2, Session 8: Cultural Signs: Zombies & Basterds

I argue that Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, Inglourious Basterds, stages a “third way” for readings in popular culture. Rather than denounce the supposedly mundane nature of mass culture, and rather than try to escape the pleasures of spectacular identification, Tarantino’s film instead undertakes the task of reclaiming the intellectual spaces afforded within and by the performances of popular culture. In so doing, Tarantino points to the critical space between material history and mass culture that many branches of materialist criticism, in different ways, have collapsed. Tarantino echoes more closely Jacques Rancière’s vision of a (mechanical) culture that is socially efficacious precisely because it is set at a remove from social relevance as an aesthetic object, and in so doing can present both spectacle and spectator as viable intellectual positions. Rather than deny either the aesthetic values or the political possibilities of mass culture, Inglourious Basterds performs a reflexive recognition of popular culture as constituting its own public intellectual space, a recuperative space built on the analysis of the trauma that it itself helps (re)produce.

From Powhatan Woman to Mass-Market Object: the Neocolonial Biopower of Pocahontas

Sara Humphreys, Trent University
in Day 2, Session 6: Commodifying Bodies: Pocahontas and Whitman's "Prostitue"

This paper investigates the cultural work of literary artifacts in
producing, organizing, and categorizing idealized versions of a national “self.” With a focus on Pocahontas, this paper will show that literary characters endure because they invariably become part of mass market material-culture, enabling American subjects to engage with national narratives in intimate ways. That is, individuals can own a tangible part of the national imagination, such as a Pocahontas figurine or costume, thereby sustaining affective fantasies of cultural superiority and exceptionalism that are not only central to an idealized American identity but also further the continued colonization of Indigenous land and culture.

Viral Fashion: American Commodities in Communist Czechoslovakia

Katarina Kuruc, Carleton University
in Day 1, Session 4: Fashion, Gender, and Health

In this paper, I explore how the infiltration of American fashion in communist Czechoslovakia impacted the economic and political ‘health’ of the communist infrastructure. Due to state intervention into almost every sphere of life, wearing American fashion, in the absence of other resources, emerged as a means of signifying the general dissatisfaction of the state. In the same way a virus impacts the health of an organism, the infiltration and spread of forbidden US commodities within Czechoslovakia can be viewed as a viral form of protest against the regime.

Ask Your Doctor If Commodified Health Care Is Right For You

Jeanne Marie Kusina, Bowling Green State University
in Day 1, Session 2: Health Policy, Commodification, and Modern Subjects

In this paper I argue that there have been significant changes in the United States from the ways in which prescription pharmaceuticals were previously manufactured and administered to how they are frequently marketed and prescribed today and that these changes invite investigation into a relationship between health care and commodification. Specifically, I contend that it is possible to recognize gradual yet significant changes in certain areas of health care that indicate movement toward practices more closely resembling the ways in which business and industry attract and retain customers. As the lines between what has traditionally been delineated as business ethics and bioethics increasingly blur, they merge within an arena that similarly exhibits a growing ambiguity in regard to what gets classified as a preventable, treatable, or curable healthcare condition. Moreover, I will show that when the medical field begins following suit with a recognizable paradigm shift seen in other industries, it raises new ethical questions and concerns regarding how commodification intersects with medical treatment at various junctions.

Abortion in The Lady Doc (1911), a Popular Western by Carolyn Lockhart.

Victoria Lamont, University of Waterloo
in Day 1, Session 2: Literary and Medical Representations of Abortion & Women's Reproductive Health Experiences

When Philadelphia stunt journalist Carolyn Lockhart (pen name Suzette) decided to become a famous western American novelist, so she moved to Cody, Wyoming, to boost her authority as a westerner. There, she was befriended by another local, single, professional woman, the local woman doctor Frances Lane. At first, the two were great friends, but Lockhart mysteriously broke with Lane in a rather public manner, writing a scathing novel that residents of Cody Wyoming immediately recognized as a thinly disguised character assassination of their doctor. Lockhart claimed that she was merely exposing Lane’s shoddy, even fraudulent, practices in her capacity as the town doctor, but many found this account unconvincing, and believed there must have been something more. Lockhart’s memoir, made public many years after her death, held the answer: Lane was attracted to Lockhart, and made advances toward her while the two woman were on a train journey. The deeply homophobic Lockhart not only recoiled, but set out to ruin Lane’s reputation and build her own through her 1911 novel The Lady Doc.
In the novel, the main character, Dr. Emma Harpe, is forced to leave the East for the West after she performs experimental surgery, probably an abortion, on her best friend, botching the surgery and killing her best friend in the process. To escape retribution she moves to the fictional town of Crowheart, Wyoming. There, she successfully dupes the naïve locals into trusting her with their health, grossly overcharges vulnerable farmers for emergency medical care, botches more operations, steals valuables from her own incapacitated patients, and romantically seduces the town’s ingénue. Her sociopathic disregard for others is directly linked to her status as a professional woman, whose abilities to nurture have been warped by greed and selfishness. What discourses underlie this linkage between women’s same-sex attraction, abortion, the professionalization of women, and American frontier mythology? This paper will set out to answer this question.

The Lifeworlds of Women's Experiences of Waiting During In Vitro Fertilization

Tammy Lampley, University of Nevada
in Day 1, Session 2: Literary and Medical Representations of Abortion & Women's Reproductive Health Experiences

Although scientific advances have been made in IVF regardless of the source of infertility women remain the primary recipient of the treatment. The purpose of this research was to understand the experiences of women who receive IVF following embryo transfer and prior to receiving the results of their first quantitative beta hCG pregnancy test; and to discover the meanings women ascribe to their non-implanted embryo(s) following embryo transfer and prior to knowing their first quantitative beta hCG result. Van Manen’s (1997) phenomenological method and Four Existential Lifeworlds were used to guide the analysis and interpretation and lead to the development of a model which illuminated the women’s experiences. The presentation will include results from the analysis, including a model which captures the women’s experiences and their lifeworlds during the phenomena under study. Implication for practice and education are addressed.

The Triumph of Death: Zombie Films and the Nightmare of Excess

Christopher Lockett, Memorial University of Newfoundland
in Day 2, Session 8: Cultural Signs: Zombies and Basterds

The zombie or walking dead film genre has attained a certain critical mass in the past five to ten years or so, moving from B-movie status to a veritable cultural phenomenon. This paper considers the zombie film as a post-9/11 expression of anxiety about abjection and excess, and the abjection of excess. Given that excess is the product of consumption, the zombie's mindless drive to eat the living is the ultimate act of consumption designed to transform us into more excess. This paper thus argues that zombies have become not so much ciphers for the fear of other things, but the thing itself.

Composing the Mind: Rhetoric and Spiritual Health at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary

Craig Love, University of Waterloo
in Day 2, Session 5: Women's Health: Moral Education and Hysteria

This paper grows out of a larger project on Emily Dickinson and the peculiar "thoroughness" of her writing practices. In the paper I explore how the study of rhetoric can shed light on practices of spiritual meditation. The study of rhetoric was chiefly seen as enabling students to think more accurately. I argue that such accuracy was considered useful in bringing students to a better understanding of God and their duties as Christians, as well as being a key ingredient to a salubrious way of life. Drawing upon studies of nineteenth century education, my paper explains how the teaching of “composition” at Holyoke might have complemented its Calvinistic aims.

Censorship, Containment, and the Happy Housewife: Cold War Propaganda in Women’s Magazines, 1950-1955

Erica Lyons, University of Windsor
in Day 1, Session 4: Cold War Cultures of Fear, Pain, and "Deviance"

This paper explores women’s magazines in terms of how they contributed to early Cold War culture between 1950 and 1955, by looking at how Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, and Redbook presented the Cold War to readers. I argue that these three publications facilitated a culture of fear and concern in the way they presented the Cold War to readers. In exploring this argument the editorial and non-fiction content of these magazines were analyzed discursively. Specifically, the paper explores how this culture of fear was facilitated through the use of various tools of discourse in presenting Cold War information. These include: Cold War information presented through startling and alarming article taglines and titles; distressing rhetorical questions presented to readers in articles; content utilizing frightening firsthand accounts to present how the Cold War affected other readers; the Cold War presented as hopeless and dismal using the thoughts and opinions of experts and those whose opinions were respected; finally, feminizing aspects of the war as to hit home with readers about how the war could directly affect themselves and matters relevant to their lives. The goal of this paper is not only to show how women’s magazines contributed to Cold War culture and an overall culture of fear but to demonstrate that they are an understated piece of the Cold War cultural puzzle overall.

When Planning Kills: Urban Renewal and A Dead Downtown District in Cleveland Ohio

Maureen Mahoney, Carleton University
in Day 2, Session 6: Dead or Alive? Dissecting Public Space and Community in the American Rust Belt

Cleveland alderman Frederic C. Howe believed fervently that a city “was a unit, a thing with a mind, [and] a conscious purpose, seeing far in advance of the present and taking precautions for the future.” Yet, At the turn of the twentieth century, Cleveland did not offer its citizens many benefits, opportunities, or beauty. Unprecedented industrialization and urbanization late in the 1800s produced poverty, vice, and dark congested streets. Together with Mayor Tom L. Johnson and Chicago architect Daniel H. Burnham, Howe pushed for the Group Plan of 1903- a central lawn or Mall that opened onto Lake Erie to the north, and was surrounded by palatial Neo-Classical public buildings on its remaining three sides. As the Plan’s strongest proponents, they believed its demonstrated respect for park-space, architecture, order, and beauty would rejuve-nate the decaying city.

Unprotected from the lake’s wind and dissected by downtown traffic arteries, Cleveland’s Group Plan has not proven a vibrant element that strengthens a larger entity. As a windswept social space that is aesthetically imposing and structurally exclusive, it is uncertain how this downtown district qualifies as a ‘living’ space that enriches popular life. By relating downtown urban de-velopment around 1903 to projects today, my paper asks if imposed patterns of spatial behaviour has rendered Cleveland’s downtown a ‘dead zone.’ By so doing, I both expand and question what exactly qualifies as a ‘healthful’ and living city, and how elitist beautification efforts have actually had the opposite effect.
 

Blood, Families, and the Politics of “Ethnic Disease”: Beta-thalassemia in the United States Since 1925

Steve Malone, University of Western Ontario / University of Windsor
in Day 3, Session 9: Fighting Disease: Celebrity, Public Policy, Criminalization

This presentation traces the history of beta-thalassemia major, a genetic blood disorder discovered in 1925 by Detroit pediatrician Thomas Benton Cooley and pathologist Pearl Lee. Despite Cooley’s discomfort, the disease quickly became infused with racial and ethnic associations due to its higher prevalence in certain groups, most notably “Mediterraneans.” After World War II, as physicians developed therapies which allowed patients to reach early adulthood, new community organizations worked to increase the accessibility of these treatments. The outlook changed dramatically in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with the coalescence of new reprogenetic and biochemical technologies, changing attitudes toward reproductive rights, and the legalization of abortion. Although incidence of beta-thalassemia declined substantially, these developments also stimulated intense debate about the trajectory of biomedical funding and the potential stigmatization of non-compliant individuals. Ultimately, beta-thalassemia serves as an effective lens for exploring how particular diseases have become entangled with concepts of race and ethnicity, the process by which “genetic communities” have emerged, and the complex bioethical dilemmas surrounding the ideals of reproductive autonomy and informed consent.

Paying Attention to Deficits in the Attention Economy

Erik Marshall, Wayne State University
in Day 2, Session 6: Health in Popular Culture: ADD, Celebrity, and Rock and Roll

With diagnoses of Attention Deficit Disorder/Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADD/ADHD) in the United States and elsewhere becoming commonplace, questions arise concerning the role of attention in coping with everyday life, and whether medication, education, attention training or some mixture of these is the appropriate way to deal with these disorders.

Some have linked ADD/ADHD with increased exposure to digital media such as email and social networking sites, as well as video games and mobile electronics, while others maintain the disorders are primarily biological in nature. While debates about the causes of these disorders continue, one aspect that remains largely untreated, as it were, is the definition of attention itself. For example, what does it mean to have a deficit in attention? This paper explores the concept of attention as it is popularly represented, and interrogates the rhetoric of attention deficits in conjunction with the idea of an “attention economy,” as explicated by Michael Goldhaber in an article entitled “Attention Economy and the Net” in 1997. The notion that attention is the new coin of the realm in the digital age is interesting in a nation characterized by deficits in that very currency.

In examining these seemingly unrelated concepts, I hope to establish a model by which we can understand attention in ways that will help establish new modes of communication and education that address a shift in ways in which we pay attention in the 21st century.

The Vital Statistics of the Fetus: Edgar Allan Poe's "The Mystery of Marie Roget"

Dana Medoro, University of Manitoba
in Day 1, Session 2: Literary and Medical Representations of Abortion & Women's Reproductive Health Experiences

This paper places the characterization of Poe's Inspector Dupin in the context of the rise of public-health authority in the 1840s, arguing that Dupin views "the fetus"--like the conservative medical men of the time--as a protected abstraction of the population's vital statistics. It is in the name of this "life" that Dupin pits himself against what he sees as the filth of the city and offers to solve the murder of Marie Roget.

Health, Wellness, and Regionalism: The Appalachian Case

Phillip J. Obermiller, University of Cincinnati
Robert L. Ludke, University of Cincinnati
in Day 1, Session 4: Regional and Community Approaches to Health

Employing a theoretical framework outlined by Evans and Stoddart in 1994, this presentation touches on some of the genetic, environmental, sociocultural, behavioral, and systemic determinants of rural Appalachian well-being, then moves on to a data-driven overview of the region's health status relative to that of the rest of the United States. After this basic orientation, those in attendance will be invited to discuss themes embedded in the presentation such as 1) the tension between disease-centered initiatives versus the need for fundamental change in rural health care systems; 2) the utility of a regional perspective in health care; 3) the role of participatory research; and 4) health care insights from Canada that are relevant to the Appalachian experience.

Windsor Medical Services: A Canadian Health Insurance Laboratory for the University of Michigan Department of Health Economics: 1937-1960

Steve Palmer, University of Windsor
in Day 2, Session 7: Exploring Health Care Systems

From 1937 to the late 1950s the the University of Michigan Health Economics unit used the Windsor, Ontario experience with a very successful practitioner-based health insurance scheme as a “laboratory” to test the assumptions, opinions and viewpoints on the merits and drawbacks of various approaches to medical coverage. Windsor Medical Services, set up in 1937 following a feasibility study funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, was from its beginning conceived as a test project that would feed its data into the University of Michigan Health Economics unit for on-going evaluation. One of the Michigan researchers, Nathan Sinai, was developing a pilot plan for voluntary health insurance in the US over the same period, which became the prototype for Blue Shield. The case reveals ways in which the US and Canadian models of health insurance, while being constructed as symbols of the perils or virtues of the “other system”, have also evolved through cross-border dialogue, experimentation and modelling.

Washing the Hands of Government: Constructing the Biopolitical Subject in the University

Janet Phillips, University of Alberta
in Day 1, Session 2: Health Policy, Commodification, and Modern Subjects

With the threat posed by the 2009-2010 H1N1 pandemic, University health policy placed responsibility for health in the hands of the individual. The question to be pursued in this paper is: How has the dissemination of University H1N1 policy to students constructed them as biopolitical subjects? Through discourse analysis of an Ontario University’s H1N1 health policies, this paper will demonstrate that while administrative responses to H1N1 appear to place responsibility for its prevention in the hands of the individual, pointing to freedom of choice, individuals remain governed. This conclusion will be applied to the issue of health care reform in the United States, suggesting that while debate focuses on government institutions, individuals are governed through health policy at the more micro level of the individual institution. 

Mary McCarthy’s Swizzle Sticks: Food, Drink, and Consumerism in the American Depression

Art Redding, York University
in Day 3, Session 9: Moral Health, Food Health

“We had bought ourselves a tall, ‘modernistic’ Russell Wright cocktail shaker,” recalls Mary McCarthy in her Intellectual Memoirs, “made of aluminum with a wood top, a chromium hors d’oeuvres tray with glass dishes (using industrial materials was the idea) and six silver Old-Fashioned spoons with a simulated cherry at one end, and the bottom of the spoon flat, for crushing sugar and Angostura.” “Modernism,” as the architect Philip Goodwin noted in 1933, was “creeping” into the home through the kitchen, where the utilitarian practicality of new labor-saving devices became attractive to both working women and housewives. The functionalist dream of an efficient social order achieved via techniques of scientific management and industrial engineering was grafted onto a consumerist ethic of individual consumer emancipation. This essay interrogates the dovetailing of modernity and domesticity by considering the complex “kitchen practices” of American modernity during the 1930s. Mary McCarthy’s writing about the decade provides an indispensable guide to how modernist design and modernized everyday practice were incorporated into the fabric of American life. Ultimately, my argument is that her work depicts and critiques how characters train themselves and are trained in the interplay of self and commodity. In so doing, McCarthy charts how this interplay comes to triumph during—and as—an American century.

Benjamin Rush on the “Republic of Medicine”

Nina Reid-Maroney, Huron University College
in Day 1, Session 2: Public, Progress, and Public Health

The early history of the American republic was deeply connected to emerging ideas of public health. This was true at the level of language (what sorts of disease would fall away from the body politic once purged of the corruption and vice of monarchy?) as well as in a more immediate sense (what sorts of health and wholesomeness would become the right of citizens who breathed the air of freedom in the republic of virtue?) In the eighteenth century, as much as in our own, health and medicine were political questions and were tied to concepts of republican identity. My paper considers some 18th-century ideas of “health/care/nation” through the eyes of the revolutionary physician Dr. Benjamin Rush—a man who took his medical and political metaphors seriously. By focusing on one particular exchange between Rush and Thomas Jefferson on health and medical practice, the paper draws attention to the importance of this discussion to the larger project of defining the possibilities and limitations of enlightened progress emanating from what Rush like to call “the Republic of Medicine.”
 

“The Formless Mass Within”: Alice’s James’s Articulations of Illness and Authority

Bronwyn Rodd, Dalhousie University
in Day 2, Session 5: Women's Health: Moral Education and Hysteria

As a woman diagnosed with hysteria, Alice James (1848-1892) both experienced her life and undertook her literary endeavours from a position of profound embeddedness within patriarchal discourses working to exclude her from authorial utterance. Just as embodiments of hysteria partially transform the docility expected of privileged nineteenth-century women into a complex performative resistance, James’s fraught authorial voice uneasily integrates the fleeting emergences of her hysterical articulations. Expanding on Susan Bordo’s and others’ discussions of hysteria, my analysis of James’s life-writing expands to include psychoanalytic, autobiographical, and Foucauldian panoptic theories in an attempt to account more fully for the contradictions, interruptions, and silences that comprise her Diary’s textual challenges.

Feral Detroit: The Nature of Public Space in the Growing Metropolis

Eric J. Sandeen, University of Wyoming
in Day 2, Session 6: Dead or Alive? Dissecting Public Space and Community in the American Rust Belt

After decades of depopulation and physical disaggregation, downtown Detroit has become porous, subject to a relationship with emerging forms of nature that makes it unique among American cities. In fact, it may be a new urban form. This paper examines images of the reemergence of nature in downtown Detroit: interstitial space, urban gardens, and the abandoned houses that challenge traditional readings of ruins. This paper posits that Detroit represents a challenging remapping of what we consider to be city space. Key documents in this discussion will be the work of three photographers: Camilo Vergara, Corine Vermeulen Smith, and James D. Griffioen.

Biometrics in Pharma: Politics and Privacy

Daniel Shapiro, University of Ottawa & Sidney Shapiro, Laurentian University
in Day 1, Session 2: Health Policy, Commodification, and Modern Subjects

The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has announced the implementation of the use of both computerized and biometric security protocols in the electronic prescription of controlled substances. Electronic prescriptions which were up until this point not allowed to be prescribed by electronic means will now be easier for physicians and the DEA to monitor and prescribe.

This paper will examine the various practical, political, and privacy issues as well as the potential benefits of the use of biometric information for the prescription of narcotics and other controlled substances. The proposed changes will build in non-repudiation and improve accountability, while introducing problems such as delegation, privacy, cost, and information security. Another consequence of strong biometric authentication is false acceptance and false rejection rates. Not only are there annoyances due to false reject rates, there are serious medical consequences when a drug cannot be obtained due to failed biometric authentication.

National Belonging, “Imagined Immunities,” and the (Re)Criminalization of Queer Sexualities

Christopher Smith, OISE
in Day 3, Session 9: Fighting Disease: Celebrity, Public Policy, Criminalization

This presentation examines the Johnson Aziga case (Canada’s first individual to be convicted of first degree murder for HIV transmission) in relation to the recent lifting of the US Travel ban on Persons Living with HIV/AIDS by President Obama. While the U.S. government’s lifting of the travel ban has appeased some of the political demands made by queer constituents, it is argued that the prior criminalization of non-normative sexual practices (non-monogamous, and/or same sexual) enables the travel ban to become obsolete. In this regard the constitution of HIV transmission as a ‘criminal’ act operates as a form of bio-power that shifts national investments in public health initiatives, to the actions of individual subjects such that legal apparatuses now serve as primary technologies of containment.

Michael Moore and the Politics of Health Care Reform in the United States

Bruce Tucker, University of Windsor
in Day 2, Session 8: Clashing Visions of Health Care Reform

In 2007, Michael Moore's documentary film on the health care system in the United States, "Sicko", introduced viewers not only to several personal narratives about the failure of health care delivery, but also to different models in England, Cuba, Canada and France. Fresh on the heels of his 2004 documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11", which garnered the Cannes International Film Festival's award for the best international documentary, Sicko generated a firestorm of media controversy about health care delivery in the United States. This paper examines the media response to Sicko, analyzing Moore's efforts to shape the debate in the United States. The paper argues that Moore's position oversimplifies the depiction of health care in the comparator countries, using them as foils to articulate his United States centered understanding of health care delivery. The film exemplifies the strengths and weaknesses of Moore's previous work, for example Fahrenheit 9/11, in which ordinary Americans are betrayed by corrupt individuals in government and industry. As a film, Sicko demonstrates both the constraints and possibilities of political thought and action at the end of the Bush era.

White and Blue Collars: Sartorial Signifiers, Masculinity, and Financial Health in HBO’s Hung

Chris Vanderwees, Carleton University
in Day 1, Session 4: Fashion, Gender, and Health

This paper explores the first season of HBO’s Hung and its construction of masculinity and financial health through sartorial signifiers. I will argue that Hung creates a dichotomy between blue-collar and white-collar men which (re)masculinizes the protagonist, Ray, as he works toward “passing” as a white-collar male in order to regain a certain amount of financial health. This dichotomy allows him to retain masculine superiority over other male characters as the show continues to associate his physical endowments with blue-collar dress and masculinity. Over the course of Hung’s first season, Ray becomes a working class, masculine ideal in a time of economic instability. I will argue Hung indicates that while a designer suit might assign the appearance of financial health to the person wearing it, a blue-collar masculine performance is more valuable than any amount of white-collar health/wealth.

The Birth of the Cynic: Discursive Terror, Obama, and the Health Care Debate

Isaac Vayo, Defiance College
in Day 2, Session 8: Clashing Visions of Health Care Reform

Upon taking office, Barack Obama discursively deemphasizes both 9/11 and the “War on Terror.” Accordingly, the Bush-era concern with “terrorism” as a pathogen gives way to an alternately directed microbiology in the virulent attacks on Obama himself as a “terrorist,” as well as on his proposals for health care reform. In this manner, discourses of 9/11 manage to haunt the health care debate, framing it within notions of national pathology. Using Michel Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic as its theoretical lens, this paper examines representations of national health in the U.S. after 9/11, and the manner in which those representations are tied to not only discourses of terror, but the discursive terror exercised by Obama’s critics on the far Right.

The British and American War: Cultural Conflict in the Seven Years’ War

Peter Way, University of Windsor
in Day 2, Session 8: Culture Wars: Military History and “American Character

In May 1758, before launching the assault on Louisboug, James Wolfe opined “North American Rangers [are] the worst soldiers in the universe.” Victory in this campaign did not change his mind. “The Americans are in general the dirtiest most contemptible cowardly dogs that you can conceive,” he contended in August. “There is no depending on them in action. They fall down dead in their own dirt and desert by battalions, officers and all. Such rascals as those are rather an encumbrance than any real strength to an army.” Just as the tide turned in the Seven Years’ War, it would appear that an identity for the American soldier at least was crystallizing. Though Wolfe had been in the colonies but a few months, his opinion of the American had hardened into non-complementary cast, preconceived notions setting to certitude in war. While Wolfe wrote of American soldiers, British army officers such views widely shared such views and extended the criticism to colonial politicians and the general population, deemed unsupportive and obstructionist at worse and ineffectual at best in their support of the war effort. Colonial soldiers, for their part, found regular army officers officious and condescending, and their application of discipline cruel and unusual. Colonists, more generally, deemed the British army to be demanding of resources, unmindful of how colonial politics worked, uncaring of matters of private property and individual liberties, and neglectful of the subordination of military to civil power within British constitutionalism; seeming at times more an occupying than a protective force. From this juncture of allied peoples flowed much conflict producing as often a sense of difference as a shared identity as Britons.
Historians such as Fred Anderson have made much of the cultural conflict that arose between the “Briton” and the “American” in the Seven Years’ War, seeing in the mutual recognition of cultural difference the first step on the road to revolution. Such teleology obscures more than it illuminates. The conflict that developed derived not from distinct “ethnic” difference but from the collision of Britain’s fiscal-military with colonies ill-prepared to bear the economic price of the military revolution. The resulting conflict, at root about control of economic and labour resources, quickly acquired a constitutionalist transcript that was as much about protecting the rights of free-born Britons, albeit colonial Britons, as about generating an American identity. Moreover, the British parliament largely assuaged the conflict by footing the bill for the colonies’ war efforts from 1758. This and the unparalleled military success of the war’s later years cemented the imperial friendship for the time being. The chickens would come home to roost after 1763, however, when the bill came due and Britain decided to station a standing army in the colonies, but that is another tale.
 

STEMming from personal experience: Celebrities and the fight to CELL stem cell research

Bridget Whipple, University of Western Ontario
in Day 3, Session 9: Fighting Disease: Celebrity, Public Policy, Criminalization

The scientific complexity of human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research, coupled with the ethical questions and rhetoric surrounding it, have led to two deeply polarized perspectives. Swaying public opinion and maintaining public awareness of hESC research have become crucial activities for those concerned with influencing this policy area. Celebrities provide one method of reaching the public and personalizing the issue. Individuals such as Michael J. Fox, Nancy Reagan, and the late Christopher Reeve—famous people who have been deeply affected by a chronic condition—have become vocal advocates of hESC research. This paper considers the capacity of such celebrities to increase public awareness of hESC research, and possibly sway public opinion.

Reproductivity: Nation Building, Disability, and Eugenics

Marc Workman, University of Alberta
in Day 2, Session 5: Ethics and Modern Medical Options

In this paper, I identify and discuss some of the connections between the history of eugenics and nation building, with particular emphasis on the United States. I then consider the question of whether contemporary nation-building efforts can be carried out without promoting eugenic outcomes. I argue that the strong link between economic and nation-building interests create a situation in which women and couples experience pressure to avoid having certain kinds of children. To exemplify my argument, I discuss the practice of prenatal-genetic screening followed by selective abortion, as it is understood as a necessary part of prenatal care. Though I distinguish between the state coercion of the past and subtler current forms of pressure, I argue that the practice of prenatal-genetic screening followed by selective abortion is morally problematic. Finally, I argue for the importance of an ongoing dialogue between policy makers, geneticists, and disabled people and their representatives.

The Alienating Metropolis: The Poet and the Prostitute in Walt Whitman’s Poetry

Christine Yao, Cornell University
in Day 2, Session 6: Commodifying Bodies: Pocahontas and Whitman's "Prostitute"

Against the tradition of American anti-urbanism, Walt Whitman asserts the city as a key component of his America: I establish the metropolis is a space both public and private where the poet can participate both as flâneur and as the nation’s visionary. I argue that Whitman creates a counterpart to this poetic persona: the prostitute, the urban dispossessed, acts as the fault line that reveals the inherent tensions in his metropolitan vision by highlighting the tensions between the individual and the alienating metropolis, which in turn gestures to the rift between his mythic “Mannahatta” and the ugly problems of urbanization.