Lecture 6: Health and power Flashcards
What is social power?
the capacity to influence another or a social group
enacted through wealth, violence and intimidation, status advantages, authority, responsibility, influence, creative control etc
How does contested diagnoses entangle with social power?
- where both patient and health worker seek to influence the other
How does medical pluralism entangle with social power?
Medical pluralism in health care systems (and the different authorities of various healing experts in our lives - lay, folk, professional)
How does Frank’s typologies of illness stories entangle with social power?
– where the quest story can create social change, and educate by raising awareness of issues
How do metaphors in health entangle with social power?
The power of metaphors themselves to change our selfawareness for the good and as a source of stigma to define or categorize us
How do the norms of health and wellbeing entangle with social power?
The norms of health and wellbeing and the ways in which
Canguilhem argues we can stretch and reimagine them to find our own ideals of health rather than accept the narrowly defined biomedical norms of health – a type of liberation for us
What is biopower?
‘Biopower’ is increasingly the model of social power used by critical researchers in health studies.
- It is a theory of how social power operates in urbanised
societies, not through the use of blatant physical force but
persuasively and almost unnoticed through taken for
granted knowledge and practices (discourses) such as ‘good health’ – ideals promoted by authoritative sources and against which people measure and monitor their lives to try to create a ‘self’ in accordance with these desirable goals
What does dividual mean? eg “at the dividual level”?
“Dividual” describes a person as a collection of parts influenced by social connections and roles, rather than as a single, autonomous individual.
