Performing health: Stand-up comedy and the production of biomedical knowledge.

摘要

In the last three decades, stand-up comedians have played an increasingly prominent role in the production and distribution of biomedical knowledge. As advocates and fundraisers for disease constituencies, patients and caregivers sharing intimate accounts of suffering and loss, and spokespersons for state health institutions addressing disease disparities, stand-up comedians often serve as the public faces of disease and suffering. This is part of a broader proliferation of biomedical knowledge production that increasingly includes popular, and not just institutional, sources. Drawing on and expanding biomedicalization theory, this dissertation examines how the emergence of stand-up comedy in the contemporary US health discourse reflects critical changes in how we talk about illness and suffering, and how we understand health as a personal, moral responsibility.;Defining 'health' in the United States today is as much about ideology as it is about well-being. From the imperative to be positive and cheerful in the so-called culture of 'cancer survivorship' to the targeting of high-risk racial minorities through coded signifiers of race and difference, the language we use to talk about health and illness is deeply constrained. This dissertation examines three key sites where stand-up comedy participates in this ideological negotiation: illness narratives performed by professional comedians, self-help organizations that promote 'therapeutic humor' as a care of the self, and public service announcements that use stand-up comedy to inculcate self-surveillance behaviors within high-risk target populations. Employing discourse analysis and an ethnography that includes participant-observation and semi-structured interviews, I examine how and why stand-up comedy emerged as an important technology of biomedical knowledge production.;From popular discourses around race and gender to class and politics, stand-up comedy has long functioned as a site of social mediation. I am interested in what the emergence of stand-up comedy in the US health discourse uncovers about how we talk about illness, and how that is changing. Located at the intersection of media studies, science and technology studies (STS), and the cultural study of health, my dissertation explores how biomedical knowledge production has become an increasingly popular practice, and what the emergence of stand-up comedy within this transformation reveals about ongoing transformations in the pursuit of health and this mode of comic performance.