Dr Anita Hardon: Chemical Futures
The everyday lives of contemporary youth are awash with chemicals to boost pleasure, energy, sexual performance, appearance, and health. What do pills, drinks, sprays, powders, and lotions do for youth? What effects are youth seeking? The ChemicalYouth ethnographies, based on more than five years of fieldwork conducted in Amsterdam, Brooklyn, Cayagan de Oro, Paris, Makassar, Puerto Princesa, and Yogyakarta, foregrounded the agency of youth in making chemicals do things for them through their situated practices, highlighting the creativity of their do-it-yourself chemical regimes, and the dense webs of human relations and things in which chemical efficacies and ways of knowing take shape.
In this presentation I describe how, across the field sites, young people viewed their skin tone, body shape, gendered identity, and mental and creative potential as modifiable through situated chemical practices. They tinker with dosages, shared experiences, and substituted products in order to achieve desired states of being. Chemicals give our interlocutors a sense of control as they faced multiple insecurities in their everyday lives, especially the work-related precariousness that was present across our fieldwork sites although in different ways. However, in many cases, our interlocutors ended up worse off than when they started using chemicals, which they believed would help them achieve their aims in life. Why is this so? And, how can chemical harm be avoided?
For an overview of the ChemicalYouth ethnographies, see www.chemicalyouth.org
[IASH Work in Progress talk]
Please click here to go to the online talk.