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Feeling Good: the Ethopolitics of Pleasure, Psychoactive Substance Use and Public Health and Criminal Justice System Governance: Therapeutic Jurisprudence and the Drug Courts in the United States of America

Mackenzie, Robin (2008) Feeling Good: the Ethopolitics of Pleasure, Psychoactive Substance Use and Public Health and Criminal Justice System Governance: Therapeutic Jurisprudence and the Drug Courts in the United States of America. Social and Legal Studies, 17 (4). pp. 513-533. ISSN 0964-6639. (doi:10.1177/0964663908097083) (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:13121)

The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided.
Official URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0964663908097083

Abstract

The drug courts in the United States exemplify how mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion are mediated by complex cultural constructions of ways in which we may 'feel good' rather than mad, bad, sad or sick. I argue that such mechanisms, and public health initiatives which seek to persuade us to choose specific means to enhance our health while eschewing others, are engaging an ethopolitics of moralized pleasures associated with the trope of addiction. Technologies of pleasure associated with current public health initiatives encouraging us to manage our risky neurochemical selves are, in some senses, homologous with the practices of the drug courts in the United States. In both, normalization is anchored in the management of pleasures, while notions of addiction support neo-liberal governance strategies. The rhetoric of salvationary narratives is drawn upon as a device of purification which decontextualizes debate, marginalizing counter-theories

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.1177/0964663908097083
Uncontrolled keywords: addiction; criminal justice system; drug courts; ethopolitics; harm reduction; inclusion/exclusion; pleasure; psychoactive substances; public health; self-reflexive practices
Subjects: K Law
Divisions: Divisions > Division for the Study of Law, Society and Social Justice > Kent Law School
Depositing User: Eve Dyer
Date Deposited: 21 Jan 2009 10:28 UTC
Last Modified: 16 Nov 2021 09:51 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/13121 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

University of Kent Author Information

Mackenzie, Robin.

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