Abstract for UL's 8th Annual Conference on Language and Literature

This is the abstract I submitted to the conference, which this year is titled Beyond Pleasure: The Force of Desire in Text and Culture.

"Rebellion and the Rhetoric of Invincibility: Smoking and Bodies of Desire in American Culture"

While the dangers and risks of smoking cigarettes are well-documented and widely known, the tobacco industry continues to thrive, its advertisers employing innovative and targeted marketing practices and successfully maintaining the loyalty of current smokers as well as enticing new customers. This presentation seeks to explore cigarette smoking by employing a framework that situates smokers’ desire to engage in this behavior and the pleasure they derive from it within cultural narratives of risk and rebellion. To this end, I will provide some analysis of the factors responsible for constructing these narratives, which are largely identifiable through the representation of smokers in consumer media as socially and sexually desirable.  

I will examine the role that advertising has played and continues to play in inscribing and reinforcing conceptions of individuality, health and vitality, sexual capital and personal efficacy on cigarette smoking, providing a historical explanation of their success with prior generations and tracing the public perception of smoking from the advent of its popularity in America – the period immediately following WWI – through the decades leading up to the tobacco reforms of the late 20^th  century and today.  My consideration of those individuals who choose to smoke in the face of undisputed medical facts, deep public disapproval, and new sanctions against tobacco users (such as higher insurance premiums or the loss of employment), focuses around a rhetoric of rebellion that celebrates risk and allows smokers to imagine themselves as autonomous actors in an increasingly restricted society.

I argue that while anti-tobacco campaigns successfully deter many from smoking and have prompted some smokers to quit, people who continue to smoke do so not only because they are physically addicted to cigarettes (which they ostensibly are), but because they are complicitous in the notion that their choice to smoke imbues them with sexual capital and individuality by virtue of their rebellion against widely accepted social mores. Smokers are well aware of the risks they incur – both physical and social – because of their choice to smoke, but are psychologically compelled to continue this behavior because of the beliefs outlined above.

Continuing to publicly interrogate the logic of these beliefs, in my view, is the only way we can ever hope to see them dispelled; this, then, is the goal pursued by my presentation. I aim to further the exposure of the tobacco industry as a network of corporations that have exploited human desire and warped perceptions of pleasure and individuality in American culture through careful manipulation and shrewd equivocation over nearly a century of advertising and promotion. Finally, I hope this exploration will add to important inquiries into human behavior and will offer insight into some of the circumstances that allow human beings to actively pursue and purchase a product that is very likely to harm or kill them. 

If the proposal gets accepted, I'll be visiting Louisiana from March 5-7, which would be amazing. Keep your fingers crossed!