When used as a tool for storytelling, popular culture provides education through the form of vicarious lived experience. It can be used to both perpetuate and dispel myths and stereotypes.
Stigma isn’t all bad:
How storytelling and monster metaphors in Anita Blake challenge existing notions of health-related stigma and generate productive stigma outcomes
Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
My doctoral research explores how popular culture – and in particular, the use of the monster metaphor – can be used as a tool for understanding and reducing stigma encountered by people living with chronic illness and disease. Using the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series as a case study, I examine and draw parallels between the world-building that exists in series with the medical, legal and social institutions that exist outside of it.
My doctoral research project has been presented at various throughout the writing process. At InterCOMM 2022, I prepared a poster presentation outlining a revised model of the stigma process developed in Chapter 1 of my dissertation.
I also presented a preliminary set of conclusions in a presentation titled “Pandemic narratives: Adapting metaphors and fictional worlds to the contemporary pandemic”.
Finally, at the 2022 edition of the Popular Culture Association, I presented on a more fulsome set of findings and conclusions in a presentation titled: “Humanizing the ‘AIDS’ Monster: Exploring the role of metaphors and storytelling in Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter as a health communication intervention strategy for challenging counterproductive stigma outcomes”.