The broom closet4/15/2023 ![]() ![]() I show how the language of ‘evidence-based practice’ affords both gains and losses with regard to the assertion of collective identity and values vis-à-vis the state. This Think Piece traces the ‘therapeutic trajectory’ of alcohol treatment in and out of this subarctic region. In Canada’s Northwest Territories, where rates of alcohol consumption are substantially higher than national averages, there are ongoing attempts to align therapeutic practice with traditional Aboriginal modes of healing and well-being. In Native North America, clinical/healing spaces are caught up in political struggles for autonomy. In our research we found that Foucauldian theorizations on biopower, neoliberalism and environmental governance can help explain how nuclear power as a social institution can require states to sacrifice the well-being of hundreds of thousands of their citizens in ways that affect people in gendered and age-specific ways. To more fully examine why this discrepancy exists – and how it is produced – we investigate the complex geographies of contamination and risk near the damaged Fukushima power plant through the conceptual lens of ‘wet ontologies’ coupled with an analysis of state strategies for the governance of the affected populations. We argue that there has been a significant discrepancy between state policies and the needs of people directly affected by the catastrophe. In this paper we explore the coping mechanisms of people navigating these landscapes of contamination, as well as examine state policies developed to deal with the disaster. The March 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, and the subsequent tsunami and release of nuclear contamination from the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, is clearly one of the largest disasters of the past century and it has devastated large portions of eastern Japan. For them “their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it.” Others leave Omelas but not en masse. At this point, they reason, the child is “too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy.” She is so destroyed and so used to her destitution that liberating her would do more harm than good. Some offer facile excuses for preferring their happiness to the child's. ![]() Every member of Omelas, however, must assume some relationship among his or her present personal happiness, the present happiness of the millions inhabiting Omelas, and the present suffering of one small human being. Some have merely heard of it since they were children themselves. Some actually visit the child's fetid chamber. This happiness is what every average Joe and moral philosopher would wish for, but it nevertheless depends on a child's being constrained and humiliated in a cramped space and on this being known by all Omelas inhabitants. It is experientially unmediated, materially substantive, and morally desirable. It is critical to Le Guin's fiction-based ethical wager that Omelas's happiness is not ideological in Louis Althusser's sense nor is it naive. The Child in the Broom Closet Ursula Le Guin's “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” tells the tale of a city, Omelas, where the happiness and well-being of its inhabitants depend on a small child being constrained to and humiliated in a small, putrid broom closet.
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