Afterword

Abstract

In the United States, diabetes has become so familiar that it is now necessary to defamiliarize it, to make it strange in order to trouble our assumptions, perspectives, and constructions of it. In Bianca C. Frazer’s and Heather R. Walker’s words, what is needed is an opportunity to offer diabetes as a new case study, and with this edited collection of original work, they not only disrupt our blithe notice of diabetes as it is performed in the popular imaginary but also our automatic assumption that we know what it is, how it is theorized, and how it is experienced. In fact, as they note in the Introduction, diabetes has become so commonplace, so comfortable that we often employ it handily as a moral and medical rhetorical device: both to destigmatize certain conditions such as substance abuse disorder and to normalize once lethal illnesses such as HIV/AIDS, which, like diabetes, is now a “manageable chronic disease.”