Abstract
Cynthia Martin takes on the stigma entrenched in public service announcements (PSAs) intended to reduce diabetes incidence. In her essay, “The Monstering of Diabetes: The Failure of Fear and Sarcasm in Public Health PSAs,” Martin accounts for rhetorical strategies in international PSA campaigns that use “appeals to fear and sarcastic humor” in their advertisements. Martin argues that such strategies are not only unsuccessful at changing behavior, but they also reproduce diabetes stigma.
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Notes
- 1.
In her editorial introduction to the September 2005 volume of American Journal of Public Health, Associate Editor Mary Bassett, MD argues with urgency that something must be done to slow the incidence of Type 2 diabetes in the US. “Diabetes is epidemic,” she declares, noting “[T]he high and rapidly increasing prevalence of the disease demands this description.” She also notes that identifying diabetes as an epidemic will empower medical and public health professionals to adopt “established disease control strategies” such as “surveillance, risk identification, and interventions” in their efforts to ensure patients do not develop diabetes (1496). In the fifteen years since publication, both the medical/public health communities and popular media have embraced the analogy, but without realizing the promise of the strategic control methods Bassett proposed. See Politico Staff (2018).
- 2.
Michael Bury (1982) introduced the term “biographical disruption” to describe the way chronic illness threatens an individual’s social and cultural identities. Those experiencing biographical disruption generally perceive social relationships and themselves differently than prior to experiences of disruption. For instance, the reciprocity of friendship starts to feel unbalanced. The resources and commitment required to maintain “normal appearances” (175) in friendships and in social environments become exhausting. Ultimately, those experiencing biographical disruption feel social participation is not worth the effort, which results in isolation (175–176).
- 3.
Erving Goffman (1963) suggests passing as a strategy for managing stigma associated with what he calls “spoiled bodies.” Contemporary scholars working in disability studies have criticized the simplicity of this concept and noted its roots in the medical model of disability, which focuses on the physical body and impairment as problems to be solved. Others who espouse a social model of disability have criticized passing as assimilation and a disavowal of impairment while Bill Hughes has suggested tropes such as the monster offer valuable sites to disrupt the normative ideal of the body. Falling somewhere in between are scholars such as Tobin Siebers, who suggests those who pass are more aware of and thus able to manipulate social organization and human perception, and Ellen Samuels, who notes the disability community doesn’t necessarily make room in the community for those who live with non-visible disabilities.
- 4.
- 5.
See Tannenbaum (2015).
- 6.
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Martin, C. (2021). The Monstering of Diabetes: The Failure of Fear and Sarcasm in Public Health PSAs. In: Frazer, B.C., Walker, H.R. (eds) (Un)doing Diabetes: Representation, Disability, Culture. Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83110-3_16
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