Neoliberal Governance and Health

Duties, Risks, and Vulnerabilities

Jessica Polzer, Elaine Power, Elaine Polzer

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780773599550
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Conservatism & Liberalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Provoking urgent questions about the politics of health in the twenty-first century, this collection interrogates how neoliberal approaches to governance frame health and risk in ways that promote individual responsibility and the implications of such framings for the well-being of the collective. The essays examine a range of important issues, including childhood obesity, genetic testing, HPV vaccination, Aboriginal health, pandemic preparedness, environmental health, disability policy, aging, contingent work, and women’s access to social services.

With specific attention to the Canadian context, contributors reveal how neoliberal practices and policies shape the health experiences of individuals, disadvantaged groups, and communities by cultivating self-discipline while further exposing to harm the lives and bodies of those already marginalized in consumer society. Building on the theoretical conceptualizations of power and government of French philosopher Michel Foucault, the case studies extend our understanding of the effects of neoliberal practices and policies in relation to social class, gender, racialized identity, colonization, and ability, and provide insight into how health-related discourse creates new requirements for citizenship and forms of social stratification.

A timely intervention in the field of health studies, Neoliberal Governance and Health establishes the need for critical interdisciplinary scholarship to counter the individualizing and marginalizing tendencies of health-related policy, practice and research.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Governance of Health in Neoliberal Societies
• 1 Fat Children, Failed (Future) Consumer-Citizens, and Mothers’ Duties in Neoliberal Consumer Society
• 2 Environment-as-Risk and Green Consumerism in Neoliberal Public Health Practices
• 3 Tween Girls, Human Papillomavirus (HPV), and the Deployment of Female Sexuality in English Canadian Magazines
• 4 Risk, Retirement, and the “Duty to Age Well”: Shaping Productive Aging Citizens in Canadian Newsprint Media
• 5 The Political Is Personal: Breast Cancer Risk, Genetic(optim)ization, and the Proactive Subject as Neoliberal Biological Citizen
• 6 Global Biopolitics and Pandemic Influenza Preparedness: Securitization and the Regulation of Viral Uncertainty and Mutual Vulnerability
• 7 Risk and Resistance: Citizenship and Self-Determination through Health Governance in Nunavut, Canada
• 8 “So It’s Always a Dance”: The Politics of Gifts and Governance at a Drop-In Centre for Vulnerable Women in Southern Ontario
• 9 “You Are Free to Set Your Own Hours”: Governing Worker Productivity and Health through Flexibility and Resilience
• 10 Active Citizenship and the Management of Stigma in Contingent Work
• 11 Self-Management and the Government of Disability: Reinforcing Normalcy through the Construction of Able-Disabled Subjectivities
• Contributors
• Index