Image Credit: “The Substance – Official Trailer.” YouTube, uploaded by NEON, 14 February 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNlrGhBpYjc. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), as Victor Frankenstein starts building a female companion for his monstrous creature, he realizes: “…she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness….
Tag: pharmaceuticals
“Edible Panopticons”: Hour-Man, the Pill, and the Superpower of Pharmaceutical Autonomy
Before he was the square-chested, slick-haired icon, Superman was a villain’s pharmaceutical test subject. In their 1933 short story, “The Reign of the Superman,” Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster (who would later create the iconic Clark Kent comics) describe an evil chemist who goes to the bread-line and indiscriminately chooses one of the many “disillusioned…
Technology, Paranoia, and the Therapeutic Encounter
“This isn’t therapy, what we’ve done. We’ve erased things.” — Heidi Bergman, Homecoming (TV version). Roanne Kantor and Anna Mukamal // This fall I had the pleasure of teaching a course on intersections between disability and technology. In putting together the syllabus, I quickly noticed that one of the most potent sites for…
Review—Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds by Lauren Slater
John Carranza // “I wrote this book because I have been taking psychotropic drugs for thirty-five years, with different drugs or drug combinations during different decades of my life.”[1]Lauren Slater’s frank disclosure of taking psychiatric medications and the effect they had, and continue to have, on her body opens her new book Blue Dreams:…