Morality In Action: Risking Death And Caring For Life In American Food Allergy Worlds

This dissertation investigates the social effects of the food allergy "epidemic" in the contemporary United States, a state of affairs which activists publicize in highly moral terms, based on multi-sited ethnographic research conducted from 2013 to 2016. I argue that the moral framing of this apparent threat to health by mothers, sufferers, and activists is strategic, leveraging gendered obligations to provide care for the young, sick, and disabled, pharmaceutical and food industry approaches to marketing that make moral appeals to customers, and American political sensibilities about who is deserving of accommodations and concern to gain public recognition for food allergy as a life-threatening disease. Situated at the interface of science and technology studies (STS) and medical anthropology, this dissertation brings together risk theory, the anthropology of ethics and morality, STS and anthropological understandings of medical technologies, disability studies, and feminist theory and research on gender and caretaking. This text brings to light how patients and caretakers balance the risk of harm and death posed by a highly allergic body with the desire to live a "normal" social life, how the pursuit of the "hygienic sublime" to minimize risk intensifies the moral stakes of caretaking and self care work, and what is at stake socially, morally, and financially in positioning food allergy as an easily manageable condition versus a serious disability. Shared experiences, including the use of elaborate hygienic techniques to ensure the safety of foods and environments and reliance on biomedical tools like epinephrine auto-injectors, and a shared fear of death unite adult sufferers and caretakers of allergic children with other stakeholders to engage in legislative advocacy and public awareness campaigns to ensure the safety of people with food allergies. The resulting food allergy advocacy community is emblematic of the role played by patient advocacy in healthcare today: through complicated alliances with physician-researchers, the highly professionalized patient advocacy industry, and deep-pocketed pharmaceutical companies, food allergy activists seek to make the formerly private and shameful problem of food allergy a matter of shared, public responsibility.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph. D., Science and Technology Studies

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctor of Philosophy

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Science and Technology Studies

Grantor

Cornell University

Year dc:date.issued

2016

Author dc:creator

• Glabau, Danya

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Welker,Marina Andrea
• Pritchard,Sara B.

• science and technology studies
• medical anthropology
• food allergy

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

DOI

https://doi.org/10.7298/X4G15XSB

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:ecommons.cornell.edu:1813/44290