Feminist Existentialism, Biopolitics, and Critical Phenomenology in a Time of Bad Health by Talia Welsh

Author:Talia Welsh [Welsh, Talia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9781000480658
Google: kc5JEAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 58204430
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

Sexuality, madness, and criminality are not elements of individual psyches that “exist apart from a relationship to political structures, requirements, laws, and regulations that have a primary importance for it.”41 However, even if one’s sexuality is thoroughly understood and lived within such structures, the wild diversity of humanity suggests that no politics can create a space in which sexuality, for instance, will cease to be a problem, and within this space one can think about how one is constituted without requiring that one can take some kind of universal, God’s eye view, of humankind. Foucault points out that while one cannot exist outside one’s situation, to think that one’s sense of one’s own body is problematic—one’s experience must have become uncertain, have lost its familiarity, or provoked some kinds of difficulties.42

To problematize the good health imperative, we can consider what is not discussed that might equally, if not more so, demand the attention of the social whole. Tracking of the population has permitted us to see trends in weight gain among children. Parallel research in the issues associated with high weight gain encourage the conviction that something should be done. However, such a move requires not just the documentation of weight and overweight-related illnesses, but the rationale that it is this kind of issue, and not others, that justifies governmental and social intervention. For that to work and to compel individuals, we must see a certain kind of attitude and accompanying behavior toward one’s health as universally imperative. With the right measures, it should be necessary for all individuals to have the responsibility and competence to address their health which requires that they identify with this responsibility. In the case of individuals who are not capable of such responsibility—such as children—their caregivers need to pick up this mantle. While this reasoning might seem obvious to many, what a society attends to and what it ignores reveals that this focus excludes while it includes.

Consider the overwhelming documentation about the increasing gap between the richest and poorest in society, and the how the latter’s situation worsens each year, and with minorities having the least gains, the most losses, and the greatest disparities with the wealth which we see magnified under COVID-19. The typical net worth of a white family is “nearly ten times greater than that of a black family” in 2016.43 During the recession, from 2007 to 2013, median net worth for Black families fell 44.3%, whereas it fell comparatively only 26.1% for white families. The Brookings Institution reports that, “the ratio of white family wealth is higher today than at the start of the century.”44 Little organized action on poverty exists, even despite repeated documentation on its adverse effects and its growing racial disparities. Under COVID-19, which kills Blacks at a rate three times that of whites, we also find that job losses are concentrated at the bottom fifth of earners—jobs that are largely held by Black and Latino workers.45 Despite these alarming long-term and short term trends, neither the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.