American Studies ETDs

Publication Date

Fall 12-14-2024

Abstract

The Social Matter of Opioids: Glitches in Immunity Beyond the Human examines the contemporary opioid crisis and its relationship to capitalism, imperialism, and biomedicine. This dissertation also considers how the twin processes of crisis and racialization relate to how human-opioid entanglements perform and transgress normative anthropological assumptions of difference. Through theories of biopolitics, Black feminism, queer of color critique, and psychoanalytic insight, I argue for a more critical account of the entanglement of humans with opioids where processes of capitalist and imperial crisis produce novel forms of social ontology. I substantiate this by examining speculative tissue economies, interspecies relationality, draconian brain science, and the moral panics of fentanyl hysteria. These interdisciplinary inquiries prove a generative space to reimagine the taken-for-granted more than human relations endemic to 21st-century opioid use. Ultimately, The Social Matter of Opioids reimagines the stakes of the contemporary opioid crisis and situates opioid social relations as a force of social materialization where resistance, vulnerability, and risk are entangled with subversive ontological conformation that challenges imperial and capitalist social reproduction.

Keywords

Opioid Crisis, Opioids, Racial Capitalism, Post Humanism

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

American Studies

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

American Studies

First Committee Member (Chair)

Alyosha Goldstein

Second Committee Member

Kathleen Holscher

Third Committee Member

Ann Murphy

Fourth Committee Member

Francisco Galarte

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