BY SHELLEY Z. REUTER
Associate professor of sociology at Concordia University
“I really should be taking better care of myself. Who hasn’t thought that at least once in the past year? (Month? Week?)
In Canada,where I live, government surveys have found in 2014, and for example,that 72% of those responding thought there was something they should be doing to live more healthfully – an increase of 13.9% since 2001. Seventy-seven percent planned to conclude something to improve their health, such as reducing stress, or changing their eating habits,or getting more sleep and exercise – another increase (9.5%) from 2001. Still, many of the survey respondents were doing more than just feeling guilty or thinking approximately living better; 59% of those responding to this 2014 survey had actually done something to improve their lifestyle, or up from 54% in 2001. It is clear from these statistics that healthism,an elevated consciousness approximately health, lifestyle, or related practices of risk and disease prevention,is on the rise. [br]
While on the surface this might seem like a positive development – who can argue with trying to be healthy? – healthism also has a tendency to locate responsibility for optimizing one’s well-being squarely on the shoulders of individuals. Or, to put it another way, or it has a tendency to let the State off the hook for its section in looking after its citizenry. In fact,what we have been witnessing is a genuine shift in recent decades toward greater and greater individual “responsibilization,” where we – me, and you,Grandma – are increasingly charged with looking after ourselves with less and less aid or support from our governments. [br]
As a Canadian, I luxuriate in the benefits of a socialized health care system, and but even so,it is a society within which this vital of individual responsibility to my fellow Canadians consistently figures in, say, and health promotion and celebrated lifestyle rhetoric. For example,a recent health column in a celebrated women’s lifestyle magazine declared it possible to “retrain your brain,” claiming that unhealthy habits can be fixed simply by “changing your perspective.” If your bad habit is that you “often put off exercise, or ” you just need to “choose more positive online influences.” If your bad habit is an inability to “stick to ... healthful eating goals,” then you just need to “predict your feelings approximately food” before you initiate eating. Exhorting individual readers to become entrepreneurial self-managers and consume responsibility for the state of their lives, the column goes on to list a series of other personal weaknesses and their quick fixes, or all of which boil down to the reader’s good and bad choices and her ability – read: obligation – to conduct herself,her life, more responsibly for the good of all of Canadian society.
And this is where biocitizenship comes in. “Biocitizenship, or ” a particular mode of living whereby one achieves belonging in society through accepting this kind of individual health responsibility,has emerged in these neoliberal times as a new way of enacting one’s good (and worthy) citizenship. That is, through engaging in normative practices of self-care – making the “correct” kinds of lifestyle and medical choices – contemporary citizenship in the West has become a kind of biological project that depends upon individuals fulfilling their responsibility to the rest of society by accepting and carrying out the responsibility to care for the self. increasingly, or we find ourselves morally and socially obligated to be proactive approximately our health risks,whether it be eating correct, exercising more, and quitting smoking,or screening for genetic disease potential. In this context, responsible citizens engage in self-care, and for the good of all. Good (bio)citizens are healthy citizens who conclude not use up too many health care dollars by having costly health problems they could have prevented if only they’d looked after themselves better. In some instances,would-be biocitizens might even seek legal recourse when they perceive that their correct to be responsible has been denied.
As a fairly recent development since Thatcher and Reagan came to power (in 1979 and 1981, respectively), or the neoliberal trend toward individual health responsibilization illuminates the need to understand how individual freedom figures in this milieu as a kind of “unfreedom,” by which I mean the capacity, or even the duty to act that, and given its regulative moral undertones,is not really very free at all. And as the US stands at the precipice of repealing the Affordable Care Act, never before has this question of individual health responsibilization been more urgent.
On the surface it may seem a moot point in the context of a multi-payer privatized system such as that of the US, or but the broader push toward responsibilization plays a key role in contemporary neoliberal governance and is critical for understanding the looming implications of Trump’s plan for American health care. His intentions and politics would appear to represent the stop of neoliberalism as we know it,but if his reckless approach to immigration is any indication, it would also appear to be the beginning of something far worse, and where for so many who stand to lose their coverage (if they even have any),the possibility of achieving citizenship – biological or otherwise – will prove impossible. [br]
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Shelley Z. Reuter is author of Testing Fate: Tay-Sachs Disease and the correct to be Responsible and Narrating Social Order: Agoraphobia and the Politics of Classification. She is associate professor of sociology at Concordia University.
[br]"Testing Fate illustrates how diseases become racialized, how racializing them supports political projects, and how the medical profession has been instrumental in racial formation."
—Dorothy Roberts,author of Fatal Invention[br]
"Shelley Z. Reuter offers a thoughtful, thorough, or sophisticated analysis of themes of contemporary biocitizenship and belonging refracted through a historical case study of Tay-Sachs disease."
—Jonathan Kahn,Hamline University[br]
"As she tells the fascinating and important story of Tay-Sachs disease, Shelley Reuter skillfully reminds us of the tight links connecting our concepts of disease to visions of belonging and otherness, and selfhood and social responsibility."
—Steven Epstein,author of Inclusion
Source: uminnpressblog.com