This paper examines the social construction of the new wakefulness-promoting drug Modafinil (brand name Provigil) in the British press. Key themes in this newspaper coverage include the potential 'uses' and 'abuses' of this drug in relation to: (i) medical conditions; (ii) lifestyle choices; (iii) military operations; and (iv) sporting competition. The British press, we show, play a dual role in reporting on these trends and developments: on the one hand constructing this as something of a 'wonder drug' in relation to the treatment of a number of medical complaints or conditions, on the other hand articulating and amplifying a range of cultural concerns and anxieties about the non-medical 'uses' and 'abuses' of this drug, both now and in the future. These issues, it is argued, are best interpreted in terms of media concerns over the pharmaceuticalisation rather than the medicalisation of everyday/night life. The paper concludes with some further thoughts and reflections on these issues, including the potential reworking of notions of 'pharmaceutical Calvinism' and the 'elective affinity' between this 'smart' new drug and the spirit of (bio)capitalism.

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In this article we explore the narratives and discursive frameworks which were deployed in the second Age of Consent debate in the British House of Commons in order to identify shifts, continuities and emergent elements in sexual politics in the late 1990s. In the first section we will be looking at questions of theory and method. Here we will draw, particularly, on ideas of narrative and discourse, exploring their relation to each other and how stories provide the warp and weave of discourse. The next section is concerned with the House of Commons as a discursive space. The third section identifies the sexual stories told in the course of the debate. The final two sections of the paper focus on the discursive specificity of Blairism and its characteristic grand narratives of civilization and progress and discourses of rationality.

a b s t r a c t What role do the media play in the medicalization of sleep problems? This article, based on a British Academy funded project, uses qualitative textual analysis to examine representations of insomnia and snoring in a large representative sample of newspaper articles taken from the UK national press from the mid-1980s to the present day. Constructed as 'common problems' in the population at large, insomnia and snoring we show are differentially located in terms of medicalizing-healthicizing discourses and debates. Our fi ndings also suggest important differences in the gendered construction of these problems and in terms of tabloid and 'broadsheet' newspaper coverage of these issues. Newspaper constructions of sleep, it is concluded, are complex, depending on both the 'problem' and the paper in question.

Cancer has long been a cultural touchstone: a metaphor of devastation and a spectre of social as well as bodily anomie and loss. Yet recent years have witnessed significant transformations in perceptions of cancer, particularly in perceptions of the cancer patient. This paper is concerned with the 'struggles of subjectivity' emergent in this transvalued cancer culture. Explored from the standpoint of the 'bad patient', and drawing on media and cultural methodologies, the paper will consider the convergence of medicine, morality and popular iconography as they are embedded in the imageries, imaginaries and representational economies of the cancer culture industry. Of particular concern in this context are the (re)composures of the patient, as liminal figure, caught between clinical imperative and cultural fantasy.