Living fast and dangerously? Spatio‐temporalities of happy and healthful smoking futures

Abstract

This paper gathers together young smokers' senses of present-futures in the context of Singapore, where smoking is generally frowned upon. Accordingly, I examine how young smokers perceive and perform a multiplicity of healthful subjectivities, which is set within the context of an aggressive state-driven pre-emptive politics striving to nip the 'problem' of smoking in the bud. In providing a range of justifications for their smoking practices, young smokers have attempted to redefine their own spaces of healthfulness and happiness beyond those imposed by public health discourses. More specifically, although some of them are able to recognize the mutual imbrication of the present and future, others are more inclined to privilege the hereand-now over the there-and-then. In this way I disrupt stereotypes of young people as being only emblems of the future and as passive victims of their own irresponsibility. Rather, I argue that in responding creatively to anti-smoking messages that propagate the inevitability of dystopic smoking destinies, young smokers play an active role in reproducing their own futural geographies. In so doing, I hope to extend critical geographical perspectives by highlighting the influence that the future can have on the spatio-temporalities that young people experience.

The “here and now” of youth: the meanings of smoking for sexual and gender minority youth

“…A second foundational component arguably underlying mainstream youth tobacco prevention is an emphasis on future health [ 39 , 40 ]. Diprose describes this type of approach as a “paradigm of preemption” shaped by a “cautious and fearful comportment toward the future it fosters” [ 41 ].…”

“…For example, qualitative studies have examined smoker identities among youth, illustrating the ways in which various smoker identities may be held by youth simultaneously, shifting over time and place, and that these identities are formed within a context where youth acknowledge both negative and positive meanings of smoking [ 6 , 8 , 48 , 49 ]. Other studies have investigated the role smoking plays in identity construction more generally for youth, emphasizing youth as an authentic period of life that is not necessarily connected to adulthood [ 7 , 40 , 50 – 52 ]. Existing critical research on youth and tobacco has also centered structural inequity at its core, considering meanings of smoking with a broader structural framework, particularly emphasizing how economic disadvantage and gender, separately and at its intersections, shape meanings of tobacco and experiences with tobacco-related stigma [ 18 , 50 , 53 – 61 ].…”