Main description:

Our understandings of addiction are rapidly changing. New technologies and biomedical treatments are reconfiguring addiction as a brain disease, and the concept of "addiction" is expanding to cover an ever widening array of substances and behaviours, from food to shopping. This volume looks critically at how addiction has been framed historically, how it is characterized and understood through contemporary cultural representations, how new treatments and technologies are reconfiguring addiction, and how "addiction" is being expanded beyond illicit drugs and alcohol to explain phenomena such as "excessive" eating and gambling and the exponential rise in prescription narcotic use. It also examines how medical, behavioural and punitive frameworks come together to shape and control "addicts." Featuring the work of several up-and-coming scholars working to deepen theoretical perspectives on addiction and its relationship to social control and deviance, this volume fills a gap in addiction studies by offering critical perspectives that interrogate and challenge traditional and/or mainstream understandings of addiction.

Contents:

List of Contributors.
Introduction: Sociology and the Shifting Landscape of Addiction.
Acknowledgments.
Medicalization and Biomedicalization: Does the Diseasing of Addiction Fit the Frame?.
De-Medicalizing Addiction: Toward Biocultural Understandings.
Pharmaceutical Incursion on Cigarette Smoking at the Birth of the Brain Disease Model of Addiction.
Two Tiers of Biomedicalization: Methadone, Buprenorphine, and the Racial Politics of Addiction Treatment.
Intervention: Reality TV, Whiteness, and Narratives of Addiction.
Drawing the Line at Drinking For Two: Governmentality, Biopolitics, and Risk in State Legislation on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders.
Into the Light: Evangelical Rehab and the Seduction of New Life.
Making Addicts of the Fat: Obesity, Psychiatry and the 'Fatties Anonymous' Model of Self-Help Weight Loss in the Post-War United States.
"I Just Couldn't Keep it in Control Anymore:" Weight Loss Surgery, Food Addiction, and Anti-Fat Stigma.
Video Game Addiction: User Perspectives.
Critical Perspectives on Addiction.
Advances in medical sociology.
Advances in medical sociology.
Copyright page.