Session 9B: Camouflaging Bodies, Mapping Minds
Chair: Suzannah Biernoff

Portraying Psychiatry: An Analysis of Images of Mental Disorder in Print Advertising for Medical Journals
Carla Barton
Division of Community Health, Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada

A content analysis was used to examine advertisements for psychotropic drugs from the Journal of the American Medical Association and the Canadian Medical Association Journal for the decades of the 1950s to 2000s.  The ads were first coded according to journal, year, type of drug advertised, gender of subjects, themes, contexts and subject roles, and then quantitatively analyzed using descriptive statistics.  Results from quantitative component were based on the most prominent themes, contexts and roles present in the advertisements, and examples of psychotropic advertisements from the data were included within the body of the thesis to illustrate particular points.  The remainder of the analysis is rounded out by a reflexive interpretation of my quantitative findings combined with inferences based on relevant social theory.
Findings suggested that although methods of psychotropic drug advertising have changed somewhat over the years, many underlying characteristics remain the same.  For instance, a significant gender bias is still apparent in how women are displayed in these ads.  They are still the more frequent subjects in psychiatric advertising and are frequently depicted in passive roles.  Pharmaceutical advertisers use visual metaphors to communicate abstract concepts and to link their drugs to notions of clarity, ‘normality’ and/or a return to the natural world.  These ‘symbols’ represent attempts to visually document ‘the mental state’ by linking psychotropic drugs with concrete signifiers (objects from the natural world) as one way of presenting them as treatments for mental disorders.

The Art of Camouflage: Discourse, Health and the Military Body
Julie Ann Zabinski
Monash Institute of Health Services Research, Victoria, and Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia

The body is a living symbol of its relationship with society, and if that relationship is conflicted, it may be obscured, distorted, or omitted from the discourse.  Where there are negative consequences for the relationship between the body, the military and society, in our culture this information comes primarily from the medical profession.  Bryan Turner maintains, however, that a sociology of the body is not about society and physiology, but involves historical analysis of the relationship of bodies to society. The relationship between the body, medicine and society is complex, and functions at a number of levels. Clinically, the body is a canvas upon which medicine can, through diagnostic and prognostic procedures, illustrate the human consequences of social practices such as war labour.   This can occur in an environment of contestation.  Contestation can occur by the body bearing witness to the effects of war on the human body, through being monitoring by organisations such as Médicin sans Frontières, and International Physicians for the Prevention of War. The body is, then, central to political discourse. In recent years, the body of the Australian Vietnam veteran has been constructed to represent a national therapeutic icon, symbolising both individual and national psychological healing. He is no longer a threat.  Instead, he now represents rehabilitation not only of himself, but also of society.  Thus is the veteran body finally silenced as living expression of unspoken, and unspeakable history.  The need to forget has been replaced by the need to re-member.  This paper discusses how these observations relate to findings of recent qualitative research, which questions an ideology of reconciliation that sanitises war, ignoring essential questions about foreign policy, and thus brackets out of the discourse the possibility of a continuing critical narrative against war.

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Reading Bodies, Reading India
Ananya Ghoshal
Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad, India

In  recent  years , human body has been radically rethought by both science and philosophy. We can no longer view the body as a natural  object . Rather, it is now regarded as a cultural representation, constructed through various media especially language. With writers such as Derrida and Foucault challenging the Cartesian dualism  which subordinates body to mind, the body has emerged as the central object through which power relations are both formulated and resisted. Societies produce ideals of the perfect body in order to define their identities. Yet time and again, the body’s boundaries turn out to be uncertain and by posing questions challenges or reframes how a culture perceives itself. Physical disability is one such concern. Though disability is as old as humankind and archeological evidences go as far back as the Neanderthal period; it has been of limited interest for sociologists, who have preferred to see disability as a medical and psychological problem rather than a social issue. This attitude is a by-product of the widespread tendency to take the ‘European’, ‘whole’, ‘rational’ individual as the standard. Anything departing from this norm has been seen as either irrelevant or abnormal . As a result, common responses to disability have degenerated into stereotypes of fear, pity, revulsion encapsulated in derogatory terms like- invalid, cripple, spastic etc.  Though everybody knows that vulnerability of the body, the loss of the sense(s), is a general problem of all the organic bodies, one tends to stigmatize such losses.  The bodily impairment is often treated as a personal, isolated   problem of individuals who bear the loss.  The deprived appear to be somehow responsible for their condition and  become the target of blame. Thus, disability turns out to be a primarily social phenomenon. It is society that disables people who have impairments, by failing to recognize and accommodate difference, and through the attitudinal, environmental and institutional barriers that it erects against people with impairments. In my paper I want to discuss the condition of the disabled in  today’s India while tracing its history in some the familiar responses towards the disabled through examples from ancient Indian texts like-Ramayana, Mahabharata, Upanishads, Arthasastra etc. I want to explore how our ancient India dealt with disabled, ostracized from the courses of life, and the moral compass it had in hand, while discussing some ways though which we can build  a non-disabling India and a non-disabling world.

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