ABSTRACT
How do we understand other people? How do we make sense of who they are and what they stand for? What do we know about others and how do we accumulate such knowledge? As Shutz argued, it is primarily through embodied presence and visual interpretation of the symbolic meanings associated with bodies that we come to have a sense of the other. Understanding these signifying cues is part of a complex hermeneutic process that is informed by the dialectical relation between bodies and the contexts in which embodiment takes place. For Richard Huggins such process takes on disconcerting twists when the other is the subject of fear, disgust, moral condemnation, and aesthetic stigma, as is the case with drug addicts. The body of the drug addict – through popular representations – becomes a spectacle of the grotesque, in virtue of embodying decay, decadence, physical weakness, and perhaps the moral panic of a sober, silencing majority, rather than an individual’s self.
