CfP: "Making America Healthy Again: Granola, Guns, and the Gynosphere" at The 123rd Annual PAMLA Conference
This panel title borrows from the article "Granola and Guns: The Rise of Conspirituality" hosted on McGill University's Office for Science and Society that attempts to define and locate in American society a perplexing mindset that blends countercultural mystical thinking and conservative paranoia. "Conspirituality," which PennState defines as "a belief system that blends new age spiritual beliefs and conspiracy theorizing," has also been branded the "crunchy-to-fascism" pipeline, demonstrating how an openness to crystal healing, chakra opening, sonic baths, and celestial alignment has led many—often well-to-do white women—towards "Pastel QAnon," anti-vaxx, and an embrace of alt-right beliefs.
This panel seeks to explore wellness culture influencers, trends, and movements in order to better understand what forces, values, and beliefs give rise to competing definitions of "health" and "wellness" and to explore the various incarnations, iterations, and manifestations of these fraught and unstable concepts and the figures that advocate and advance them. In the essay “Crisis of Medicine or Crisis of Anti-medicine?”, Michel Foucault asserts that medicine “is not a pure science, but part of an economic system and of a system of power,” an argument that undergirds this panel as it seeks to create a space in which to examine media that challenges and at times hopes to undermine institutions of the American ruling class and its influence to define and prescribe healthful practices and the treatment of disease, illustrating how wellness culture puts the power to heal into question and conflict.