The medicalization of the culture wars

Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies was a product of the 9/11 era. In this article, I consider the ways the COVID-19 pandemic displaced 9/11 as the defining event of our time and, in the process, fundamentally altered the intellectual landscape for producing scholarship. The so-called culture wars provide a compelling case study for assessing this contextual transformation. Building on the writings of Paul Preciado, I engage the new-found emphasis on pharmaceutics and their role in the culture wars. I focus on three topoi cultivated from works published in CC/CS to explore these changes: those related to biopower, bureaucracy, and coalitional politics

Medicalization · Political science · Psychiatry · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Medicine