Pain’s New Faces

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 5 shows how the opioid epidemic has been made to look the way it does and how people who use opioids are constructed in medicine, politics, and popular culture. In particular, the fifth chapter focuses on attempts to restore order to what now appears to be a system of meaning in crisis. It does so by developing a critical discourse analysis of opioid use in health institutions and popular culture, sites where meaning-making practices have historically named, classified, and characterized people who use opioids as different kinds of persons. Each of the figures in this typology, along with the ways in which they are imagined, performs a specific function within the opioid epidemic. This typology conditions whose pain is seen as legitimate, and it sets the stage for a compassionate approach to opioid use that is selectively applied to only some people in pain.