Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality

by Metzl, Jonathan M.; Kirkland, Anna

• ISBN13: 9780814795934
• ISBN10: 0814795935
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-11-23
• Publisher: New York Univ Pr

Summary

You see someone smoking a cigarette and say,"Smoking is bad for your health," when what you mean is, "You are a bad person because you smoke." You encounter someone whose body size you deem excessive, and say, "Obesity is bad for your health," when what you mean is, "You are lazy, unsightly, or weak of will." You see a woman bottle-feeding an infant and say,"Breastfeeding is better for that child's health," when what you mean is that the woman must be a bad parent. You see the smokers, the overeaters, the bottle-feeders, and affirm your own health in the process. In these and countless other instances, the perception of your own health depends in part on your value judgments about others, and appealing to health allows for a set of moral assumptions to fly stealthily under the radar.Against Healthargues that health is a concept, a norm, and a set of bodily practices whose ideological work is often rendered invisible by the assumption that it is a monolithic, universal good. And, that disparities in the incidence and prevalence of disease are closely linked to disparities in income and social support. To be clear, the book's stand against health is not a stand against the authenticity of people's attempts to ward off suffering. Against Health instead claims that individual strivings for health are, in some instances, rendered more difficult by the ways in which health is culturally configured and socially sustained.The book intervenes into current political debates about health in two ways. First,Against Healthcompellingly unpacks the divergent cultural meanings of health and explores the ideologies involved in its construction. Second, the authors present strategies for moving forward. They ask, what new possibilities and alliances arise? What new forms of activism or coalition can we create? What are our prospects for well-being? In short, what have we got if we ain't got health?Against Healthultimately argues that the conversations doctors, patients, politicians, activists, consumers, and policymakers have about health are enriched by recognizing that, when talking about health, they are not all talking about the same thing. And, that articulating the disparate valences of "health" can lead to deeper, more productive, and indeed more healthy interactions about our bodies.

Author Biography

Jonathan M. Metzl is Associate Professor in the Women's Studies Department and the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Michigan, where he also directs the Program in Culture, Health, and Medicine. He is the author of Prozac on the Couch Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wander Drugs and Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease. Anna Kirkland is Associate Professor of Women's Studies and Political Science at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Fat Rights: Dilemmas of Difference and Personhood.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction: Why ôAgainst Healthö?	p. 1
What Is Health, Anyway?
What Is Health and How Do You Get It?	p. 15
Risky Bigness: On Obesity, Eating, and the Ambiguity of ôHealthö	p. 26
Against Global Health? Arbitrating Science, Non-Science, and Nonsense through Health	p. 40
Seeing Health through Morality
The Social Immorality of Health in the Gene Age: Race, Disability, and Inequality	p. 61
Fat Panic and the New Morality	p. 72
Against Breastfeeding (Sometimes)	p. 83
Making Health and Disease
Pharmaceutical Propaganda	p. 93
The Strangely Passive-Aggressive History of Passive-Aggressive Personality Disorder	p. 105
Obsession: Against Mental Health	p. 121
Atomic Health, or How The Bomb Altered American Notions of Death	p. 133
Pleasure and Pain after Health
How Much Sex Is Healthy? The Pleasures of Asexuality	p. 157
Be Prepared	p. 170
In the Name of Pain	p. 183
Conclusion: What Next?	p. 195
About the Contributors	p. 205
Index	p. 209
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