Feminist Existentialism, Biopolitics, and Critical Phenomenology in a Time of Bad Health
This book explores the personal value of healthy behavior, arguing that our modern tendency to praise or blame individuals for their health is politically and economically motivated and has reinforced growing health disparities between the wealthy and poor under the guise of individual responsibility.
We are awash in concerns about the state of our health and recommendations about how to improve it from medical professionals, public health experts, and the diet-exercise-wellness industry. The idea that health is about wellness and not just preventing illness becomes increasingly widespread as we find out how various modifiable behaviors, such as smoking or our diets, impact our health. In a critical examination of health, we find that alongside the move toward wellness as a state that the individual is responsible to in part produce, there is a roll-back of public programs. This book explores how this good health imperative is not as apolitical as one might assume. The more the individual is the locus of health, the less structural and historical issues that create health disparities are considered. Feminist Existentialism, Biopolitics, and Critical Phenomenology in a Time of Bad Health charts the impact of the increasing shift to a model of individual responsibility for ones health. It will benefit readers who are interested to think critically about normalization to produce healthy bodies. In addition, this book will benefit readers who understand the value of personal health but are wary of the ways in which health can be used as a tool to discriminate and fuel inequalities in health care access.
This volume is primarily of interest to academics, students, public health and medical professionals, and readers who are interested in critically examining health from a philosophical perspective in order to understand how we can celebrate the value of healthy behavior without reinforcing discrimination.
Talia Welsh is UTAA Distinguished Service Professor and UC Foundation Professor of Philosophy and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, USA. She is the translator of Child Psychology and Pedagogy: Maurice Merleau-Ponty at the Sorbonne and the author of The Child as Natural Phenomenologist: Primal and Primary Experience in Merleau-Pontys Psychology.
Interdisciplinary Research in Gender
Freewomen, Patriarchal Authority and the Accusation of Prostitution
Stephanie Lynn Budin
Spatialities in Italian American Womens Literature
Beyond the Mean Streets
Eva Pelayo Saudo
Womens Suffrage in Word, Image, Music, Stage and Screen
The Making of a Movement
Edited by Christopher Wiley and Lucy Ella Rose
Intersectional Feminist Readings of Comics
Interpreting Gender in Graphic Narratives
Edited by Sandra Cox
Caffie Greene and Black Women Activists
Unsung Women of the Black Liberation Movement
Kofi Charu Nat Turner
Forced Migration in the Feminist Imagination
Transcultural Movements
Anna Ball
The Misogynistic Backlash to Women-Strong Films
Dana Schowalter, Shannon Stevens, and Daniel Horvath
Feminist Existentialism, Biopolitics, and Critical Phenomenology in a Time of Bad Health
Talia Welsh
https://www.routledge.com/Interdisciplinary-Research-in-Gender/book-series/IRG
Feminist Existentialism, Biopolitics, and Critical Phenomenology in a Time of Bad Health
Talia Welsh
First published 2022
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
2022 Talia Welsh
The right of Talia Welsh to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
BritishLibrary Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library
Libraryof Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Welsh, Talia, author.
Title: Feminist existentialism, biopolitics, and critical phenomenology in a time of bad health / Talia Welsh.
Other titles: Interdisciplinary research in gender.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge 2022. | Series: Interdisciplinary
research in gender | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2021026369 (print) | LCCN 2021026370 (ebook) | ISBN
9780367768188 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367768201 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003168676 (ebook)
Subjects: MESH: Health Behavior | Existentialism | Feminism | Attitude to Health
Classification: LCC RA776.9 (print) | LCC RA776.9 (ebook) | NLM W 85 | DDC 613--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021026369
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021026370
ISBN: 978-0-367-76818-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-76820-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-16867-6 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003168676
Typeset in Sabon
by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)
Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity.
Preface: Good health in a time of bad health
As this book goes to press, the world finds itself in the grip of a worldwide pandemic. Millions of people have died of COVID-19, millions have been sickened, and we still are unsure if we can control its spread, given the challenges of new variants, lack of vaccines, and vaccine resistance. Even surviving an infection can often mean that one is a long-hauler with a dizzying array of possible conditions that are created or exacerbated by having had it. No country was able to isolate itself, and even if this super-flu is defeated, we are now all too aware of just how interconnected and vulnerable we are to the next pandemic. At first, exactly how COVID-19 spread was unclear and, as everyone reads this book will recall, we were scrubbing down surfaces and hoarding supplies. What we learned is the respiratory nature of its spreadhow it passes unseen from one person to another, particularly indoors. We find ourselves at the mercy of others behaviors to protect our airways from infection. We live in a time of bad health, and we live in a time where individual health is no longer, if it ever was, possible to make merely a matter of the individuals behavior.
In this book, I will explore what I call the good health imperative. This idea fits in well with ideas of healthism and biomorality. In all these views, there is an emphasis on health and life-extension as primary goals of individuals and societies. My main contribution is to highlight the idea of individual, as opposed to collective or societal, responsibility for health production. What I call the good health imperative is the sense that it is both rational and moral to better ones health when one can. This imperative finds its inspiration both in ongoing research into how consumption, activity, sleep, air and water quality affect a wide variety of health outcomes. It also occurs alongside social and political calls to roll back our shared responsibility in favor of individual responsibility for ones success or failure. One of the reasons that the good health imperative can paradoxically work against the promotion of better public health is that it encourages the justification of rolling back social welfare as everyone is now able to take charge and become healthier. In such a view, poor health is viewed as a personal, or familial, failing, not a social one. Systemic issues such as racism, classism, sexism, and ableism are seen as largely invisible backgrounds to the real issuepeople arent doing the right things for their own health.
