Regulating Health:
Medicine, Identity and Power
Panel Chair: Meredith Miller
Sabya Sachi Mishra, Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad
‘(Dis)figuring the Feminine: Prostitutes and the Lock Hospitals in British India’
This paper narrates feminine experiences in Nineteenth Century India in the wake of implementation of the Contagious Diseases Acts. The paper is based on archival research, where my attempt has been to recover some of the 'silenced' voices of Indian women in the official discourses on the prevention of Venereal Diseases.
Prostitute and not prostitution as a profession was the subject of the colonial laws which sought to check the spread of VD in this period. And if there was any concern for the profession it was only secondary or to the extent that it helped in distinguishing the necessities of control and supervision of the state on the members of the profession. By focussing at the genital organs of the women- within the sanitary parameters of what was perceived as ‘sick’ and ‘healthy’ and its utility for the soldiers, the laws deprived the women of a purely professional existence in which the functional norms of the profession got dissolved or were sacrificed at the alter of the need of the state.
Marsha Henry, University of British Columbia
'Immigration Can Kill You': Narratives of Gender, Nation and Health in Canada’
This paper is concerned with the ways in which new immigrants, refugee claimants and 'foreign' visitors to Canada are constructed as public heath risks in contemporary popular media such as newspapers and internet news groups. In particular I will focus on the relationship between gender and these representations and examine how the metaphors used are based on various models of gender, nation and health.
Megan Stern, University of North London
'Bodies in Crisis: Medical Panic and Representations of the Human Body in Contemporary Medicine."
In The Birth of the Clinic Foucault establishes the link which modernity makes between the physical well being of individuals and the moral health of society. Modern medicine, he proposes, grows out of this assumption and consequently invests the human body as a sign of the larger social body. In this paper I will be arguing that while an association between these ideas still has powerful resonance in contemporary western culture, the nature of this association has, in recent decades, undergone a significant transformation. In medical discourses of the body (for example The Visible Human Project and The Human Genome Project) as well as in areas such as sport, fitness and beauty, the body ceases to function as a symbol of the society in which it exists, and has increasingly become the location in which social ideals are realised. The body is no longer a sign of society; it contains the limits of social ideals and aspirations within itself.
I will be putting forward this argument as a means of explaining shifting values and attitudes towards healthcare. For example, I will consider how moves toward private healthcare, market economics in the NHS and the growing public demand for increasing regulation of medical practitioners, can be understood in relation to this new version of the human body. I will, however, also be reading this shift in the relationship between social values and the human body as a sign of the current status and integrity of modernity. The bodies which medicine confronts us with today are at once symbols of the extent to which modernity has mastered the human body, and the site on which fantasies and anxieties about the limitations of modernity and the modern human are played out.