- Title
- Disciplinary power and the production of the contemporary 'healthy citizen' in the era of the 'obesity epidemic'
- Creator
- Cliff, Ken
- Relation
- Re-theorizing Discipline in Education: Problems, Politics & Possibilities p. 104-119
- Relation
- Complicated Conversation: A Book Series of Curriculum Studies
- Relation
- http://www.peterlang.com/index.cfm?event=cmp.ccc.seitenstruktur.detailseiten&seitentyp=produkt&pk=54288
- Publisher
- Peter Lang Publishing
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2010
- Description
- In this chapter I examine the process of "making up" the healthy citizen during a time of widespread and sustained concern about the 'obesity epidemic'. With obesity now claimed to be affecting almost all of the world's population, and with dire predictions for health care capacity and costs, the healthy citizen and how it is constituted has taken on renewed importance as a problem for modern government. While the healthy citizen has been a notable part of sociological analyses of health, medicine and schooling for the last two decades, critical sociological work that specifically seeks to rethink the production of the healthy citizen in the discursive context of the obesity epidemic is only just beginning. Furthermore, the work, which docs exist, suggests a range of subde (and not so subde) changes in health promotion, and health education policy and practice in response to this supposedly unprecedented public health crisis. In general terms the analysis in this chapter contributes to understanding the production of the 'healthy citizen' in the context of heightened concern around body weight, wanning morality and spiralling health care expenditure. More specifically it focuses on Foucault's (1995) concept of disciplinary power and its role as a constitutive and productive force in the process of making up a certain type of healthy citizen. Understanding power as productive "generates questions of how power is exercised in the construction of knowledge about health" and turns our attention to the processes that position subjects as 'healthy' or 'unhealthy'. As such I consider how we have come to contemporary understandings of obesity and how these understandings work to produce obesity as a problem of government, which in turn requires intervention into people's lives. Using empirical examples from health promotion and school-based intervention, I suggest that disciplinary power remains absolutely essential to the production of the type of healthy citizen articulated in obesity-era health promotion and policy-though clearly in a manner that sees it tightly entwined with regulative power. I finish with a consideration of the limits of disciplinary power as government through ethics.
- Subject
- healthy citizen; obesity epidemic; health education policy; public health crisis
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/932763
- Identifier
- uon:11457
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781433109669
- Language
- eng
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