Matching Items (2)
Filtering by

Clear all filters

156380-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
This project analyzes contemporary U.S. mental health discourse as an assemblage that constantly renegotiates the normative subject through the production and regulation of intersectional mentally ill subjects. It uses feminist disability and biopolitical theoretical frameworks to explore how media discourses of mental illness reveal the regulation of mentally ill subjects

This project analyzes contemporary U.S. mental health discourse as an assemblage that constantly renegotiates the normative subject through the production and regulation of intersectional mentally ill subjects. It uses feminist disability and biopolitical theoretical frameworks to explore how media discourses of mental illness reveal the regulation of mentally ill subjects in relationship to intersections of gender, sexuality, and race. These discourses constitute a biopolitical technology that genders, racializes, and regulates mental illness. This regulation not only reveals the cultural boundaries around who is designated as “mentally ill” (and how they are designated as such), but it also demonstrates how mental illness is normalized when attached to certain bodies in specific contexts, yet perceived as a threat to the social body when attached to other bodies in other contexts.

In order to explore this assemblage, this project is organized around four foundational questions: How is mental illness produced, surveilled, and differentially regulated as a social formation within medicine and policy? How does media reproduce and renegotiate these medical and political mental health discourses? How do these mental health discourses intersect with gender, race, and sexuality? How does our assemblage of cultural, medical, and political discourse produce, observe, and regulate intersectional mentally ill subjects in relationship to shifting ideals of normative subjecthood?

This project answers these questions over the course of several case studies, each of which explores a set of thematically linked texts as a window into understanding how mental illness operates intersectionally and biopolitically in cultural discourses and social institutions. The first section establishes a broad theoretical framework for articulating how discourses of gender and sexuality are central to the production of mental illness in the United States today. The second section explores how this intersection of gender, sexuality, and mental illness is observed and regulated through social institutions like the workplace, the nation-state, and the carceral system. The final section explores emergent discourses of mental illness that move us away from centering individual mentally healthy subjects as idealized entities and toward understanding mental and emotional well-being as a collective social enterprise.
ContributorsHerson, Kellie (Author) / Leong, Karen J (Thesis advisor) / Mallot, J. Edward (Committee member) / Kuo, Karen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
136984-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
This study examines the social construction of the border by researching how frequently select issues are written about by the media of both countries, and in what light two different groups of actors (Mexico and the US) are portrayed. The Dallas-based The Dallas Morning News, and the Monterrey-based, El Norte

This study examines the social construction of the border by researching how frequently select issues are written about by the media of both countries, and in what light two different groups of actors (Mexico and the US) are portrayed. The Dallas-based The Dallas Morning News, and the Monterrey-based, El Norte are the two newspapers chosen to perform the content analysis. Furthermore, this study seeks to examine differences in the way both newspapers portray the US-Mexico border in 1994, or the year NAFTA began, and 2012, the most recent year for which data is available. A major find of this study is the discovery of how even though the frequency that select issues are brought up in the border vary drastically by year and newspaper, portrayals of the actors around the border stay fairly consistent. More specifically, with the exception of NAFTA in 1994, border issues outside of crime, illegal immigration, drug violence, and the economy, are rarely mentioned by the two selected newspapers a significant amount of the time. Also, issues at the border such as crime, drug violence, and national security are often portrayed as the fault of Mexico and Mexican actors, while immigration issues at the border are often blamed exclusively on each newspaper's host countries.
ContributorsCelis-Aguirre, Ignacio (Author) / Lara-Valencia, Francisco (Thesis director) / Diaz McConnell, Eileen (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law (Contributor)
Created2014-05