(Bio)Aesthetic Geographies and the Governance of Biopedagogical Spect(ato)rs

Abstract

Believing that “place matters” to biopower and to the governance of the new public health, we examine how a children’s hospital setting might be interpreted as a biopedagogical site. We take as the starting point of our analysis a treatment room in Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids)—Canada’s largest pediatric hospital. This particular room, dubbed Cujo’s Crease Satellite Anesthesia Room, was funded by donations from Curtis “Cujo” Joseph, a former Toronto Maple Leafs goaltender in the National Hockey League (NHL). Using trompe l’œil techniques, an artist transformed the room to look like a Toronto Maple Leafs locker room. We examine the range of possible meanings that might be taken up in Cujo’s Crease, paying particular attention to the biopolitical and cultural intersections among medicine, hockey, and biocitizenship. We argue that specific visual signs are employed to mobilize the discourses required by the space: masculinity, hockey as a national civilizing project, normative bodies, health care in a neoliberal age, and the NHL as benevolent care-giving corporation. We concluded that the discursive regimes of Cujo’s Crease are not innocent but are implicated in (bio)economical and biopedagogical imaginaries that render the sick child’s body as an assemblage of neoliberalism’s biocitizenship projects.