AAA 2019 CfP: Whiteness and Its Fractures in the Opioid "Crisis"
*Call for Papers*
AAA 2019 Annual Meeting
Vancouver, BC, CAN
November 20-24
*Whiteness and Its Fractures in the Opioid "Crisis"*
*Organizers *
Allison Schlosser (Case Western Reserve University)
Emily Metzner (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
*Discussant Helena Hansen (New York University)*
*Abstract*Addiction and its treatment are now central concerns in the U.S.
and increasingly worldwide due to the recent stark rise in opioid use and
overdose death. Attention to opioid addiction, treatment, and overdose
prevention has intensified with the emergence of new groups of relatively
socially privileged drug users, with particular attention to White
middle-class users in suburban communities. In the U.S., analysts have
drawn on narratives of opioid addiction as a symptom of social suffering
rooted in Post-Industrial economic dislocation among poor and working class
Whites to frame the current political climate. Shifts in popular news,
social media, and viral video have intensified the circulation of images
and discourses on opioid use. The spectacles of suburban White prom queens
in recovery, parents overdosing in cars with children present, and “mobile
morgues” used to manage the overwhelming number of dead bodies rapidly
circulate online. This social, political, and economic context has
intensified the moral panic of what is now commonly referred to as the
“opioid crisis,” and has troubled fundamental beliefs about “addiction” and
“addicts,” but also about whiteness.
Anthropologists have long understood race as culturally constructed. In the
last two decades, whiteness studies has emerged as a theoretical and
methodological approach to examine whiteness as a discursively constructed
social category and psycho-social experience performed in local historical,
cultural, political-economic, and relational contexts. As opioid use and
related death among broader socioeconomic swaths has intensified moral
concern, scholars have analyzed the shifting meanings and consequences of
whiteness in relation to the opioid “crisis” (cf. Hansen, 2017; Hansen &
Skinner, 2012; Netherland & Hansen, 2016; Mendoza, et al., 2018). Yet, as
these scholars emphasize, whiteness is not a monolithic social category but
intersects with ethnicity, gender, and class, among other social
identities. Additionally, whiteness takes shape in particular local
contexts. These complexities render whiteness “fractured” (Levine-Rasky,
2016): rife with internal contradictions further strained by the racialized
moral panic of the opioid “crisis.”
Brodkin (2001) calls for increased attention to the “variations,
ambivalences, and contradictions within whiteness and alternatives to it”
(p. 149). The papers in the panel respond to this challenge, leveraging
ethnography to trace the fractures in whiteness in diverse local contexts.
Panelists examine shifting meanings of whiteness in relation to the rise of
opioid use among Whites in particular cultural, geographic, and
institutional contexts. We examine strategies that uphold and reproduce
White privilege in the criminal justice system, healthcare, social
services, and recovery communities. We draw particular attention to how
whiteness emerges in local contexts of daily life: how it is performed,
internalized, incorporated with intersecting social identities, contested,
and transgressed. In doing so, we aim to contribute nuanced understandings
of whiteness as ineluctably entwined with local contexts, intersecting
social identities, intimate relationships, and the stakes of survival in
everyday life. We propose that the current “opioid crisis” thus presents a
unique opportunity to throw whiteness into “crisis.” By rendering whiteness
and its fractures visible, we aim to interrupt it, and to imagine more just
alternatives.
*Interested participants are invited to submit a proposed title and
250-word abstract to Allison Schlosser (avs29@case.edu <avs29@case.edu>)
and Emily Metzner (emilymetzner@gmail.com <emilymetzner@gmail.com>) by
March 11. Decisions on panel inclusion will be made by March 18. *
*References Cited*
Brodkin, K. (2001). Comments on “Discourses of Whiteness.” Journal of
Linguistic Anthropology, 11(1), 147-150.
Hansen, H. (2017). Assisted technologies of social reproduction:
Pharmaceutical prosthesis for gender, race, and class in the White opioid
“crisis.” Contemporary Drug Problems, 44(4), 321-338.
Hansen, H. & Skinner, M. (2012). From white bullet to black markets and
greened medicine: The neuroeconomics and neuroracial politics of opioid
pharmaceuticals. Annals of Anthropological Practice 36(1), 167-182.
Levine-Rasky (2016). Whiteness fractured. New York: Routledge.
Mendoza, S., Rivera, A., & Hansen, H. (2018). Re-racialization of addiction
and the re-distribution of blame in the white opioid epidemic. Medical
Anthropology Quarterly, 00(0), 1-21.
Netherland, J. & Hansen, H. (2016). The war on drugs that wasn’t: Wasted
whiteness, ‘dirty doctors,’ and race in media coverage of prescription
opioid misuse. Culture, Medicine, & Psychiatry 40, 664-686.