Biopower: From Taking Advantage to Taking Action

As I have begun to dive into the readings for this week, I have come across several discussions and examples of biopower and took an interest in the term.  In detail in Chapter 2 of Reimagining Global Health, and more succinctly in Arthur Kleinman’s “The Art of Medicine”, this prominent social theory of global health is portrayed as somewhat of a trick by which governments and other ruling bodies have asserted power and often served self-interests through the control of their subject’s physical bodies and biology.  It seems counterintuitive to me that the examples Kleinman provides of self-serving biopower (using public health initiatives as a guise to increase infrastructure for military movement in 1970s Lesotho, or requiring women to publicly report their menstrual cycles as a form of population control in 1960s China) involve health-based motives to serve a non-health, political desire, as if that is how the government feels they are more likely to achieve national goals. 

Why should public health not be a priority as well as, or even instead of, these economic or political motives? Beyond the social justice rationale, investing in the health of the citizenry is invaluable for any nation-state.  In the example in Lesotho, increasing hospital access would lead to a healthier population, a stronger workforce, a more productive economy, and a more prosperous nation.  Perhaps if the people at the top abusing their biopower realized what gains there were to be made from health as a priority, rather than a facade, we could flip this social theory on its head and use it for the betterment of the nation-state and its individual subjects.  Maybe the government should have a right to exert some form of biopowerful control over its people, for the sake of the individual and the nation. 

Take the U.S. as an example.  With unprecedented rates of preventable lifestyle diseases such as obesity and type 2 diabetes, using biopower as a force for positive action could improve health, happiness, and productivity for our entire nation.  When sodas are removed from school vending machines, is this not a form of beneficial biopower, controlling the nourishment of children’s bodies for the sake of their own health, and as an investment in their future productivity and contribution to our nation?  Though biopower appears to historically represent the abuse of the citizen’s body for the sake of governmental gain, I believe in time it could come to describe a functional public and global health improvement model by which both the government and the individual benefit from health-motivated policy.

References:

Farmer, Kim, Kleinman, and Basilico. 2013  Reimagining Global Health: An Introduction. Chapter 2: Unpacking Global Health. University of California Press.

Kleinman, A. 2010. The Art of Medicine: Four Social Theories for Global Health. The Lancet 375:1518-1519.