Content area
Full text
Depression: A Public Feeling Ann Cvetkovich. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.
In Depression: A Public Feeling, Ann Cvetkovich examines an alarming proliferation of depression in the general population with a rigorous commitment to dismantling preconceived notions about this disorder and what she sees as both a pervasive and unhealthy handling of it. Establishing the cause and cure for this problem has always been relegated to the medical community, a practice to which she heartily objects. Her text is literally a close reading of the book's title with expansive analysis of the overused but under analyzed terms "depression" and "feeling." Using poststructuralist strategies modeling from feminist and LGBT community activities, Cvetkovich reconstructs the word "depression" from its medical roots. She is unrelenting in her political indictment of the cultural complicity that managed to generate a disease whose treatment reinforces and assures its ongoing destructiveness while appearing to cure. Instead, she offers a new genealogy for the origins of depression and further avenues for recontextualization through the development of new cultural communities as found in the "Public Feelings Project."
Cvetkovich initially defines all the terms that constitute her book title, the most unfamiliar being "public feeling." For Cvetkovich, this term refers to a project in...