Medicated bodies: Mental distress, social media and affect

Social media are increasingly being recruited into care practices in mental health. This paper analyses how a major new mental health social media site (www.elefriends.org.uk) is used when trying to manage the impact of psychiatric medication on the body. Drawing on Henri Bergson's concept of affection, analysis shows that Elefriends is used at particular moments of reconfiguration (e.g. change in dosage and/or medication), periods of self-experimentation (when people tailor their regimen by altering prescriptions or ceasing medication) and when dealing with a present bodily concern (showing how members have a direct, immediate relationship with the site). In addition, analysis illustrates how users face having to structure their communication to try to avoid 'triggering' distress in others. The paper concludes by pointing to the need to focus on the multiple emerging relationships between bodies and social media in mental health due to the ways the latter are becoming increasingly prominent technologies through which to experience the body when distressed.

(Un)covering ground: dance, space and mobility

Ballet and modern dance teachers often exhort students to ‘travel across the floor’ and ‘cover ground’. These instructions invoke metaphors of travel and mobility that capture an array of common assumptions about dance, space and movement. This essay examines the spatial and mobility discourses that these instructions simultaneously build upon and produce while exploring the seductiveness of technique’s promise of mastering space through the moving body. Threading auto-ethnography with critical theory and moving across different disciplinary fields and writing styles, I explore the ways in which these instructions leak outside the perimeter of the dance studio to feed into the narrative of a dancer’s extended physical, geographical and social mobility. Analysing the mobility and travel discourses of my dance training vis-à-vis poststructuralist theorizations of the subaltern power of the nomad and theories of space and place, I argue that this narrative becomes complicit in the construction of an idealized notion of artistic nomadism, which, in turn, aligns with current neoliberal logics organised around the production of mobile subjects.