The basis of Pleasure Consuming Medicine is a contemporary distinction between
the institution of health and medicine and, on the other hand, commodified
forms of health and medicine. These two entities or institutions, Race argues, were
separated from one another during the course of the twentieth century via a
process of institutionalisation, licensing and authorisation. The institution
of health has been defined as objective, disinterested and focused solely on
the promotion of good health. The commercial business of health consumerism, on
the other hand, has been represented as self-interested, focused on consumption
rather than health and as quackery.
Race argues that institutional health
insists on defining its role in terms of a return of a “normal” state - as
recuperative. This can be seen in the way that health promotion strategies
focus on the negative implications of ostensibly unhealthy practices. Poor or
negative health behaviours are defined as an aberration from a right, proper or
better path. These behaviours therefore need to be corrected. This logic can be
seen in almost all tobacco cessation interventions. This contrasts with a
commercial approach to the promotion (or marketing) of health. At a basic
level, you won’t see Diet Coke (for example) specifically invoking health
concerns about obesity- even though these concerns might inform its corporate
marketing strategies. Rather, these healthy products are marketed in terms of
gendered and cultural norms about style, pleasure and performance.
Race argues that this distinction
between institutional and commercial health is unsustainable. He is especially
interested in politicising the “normal” or healthy body that underlies
institutional health’s claim to distinction (its sense of objectivity or
disinterestedness). His work places seemingly objective institutional forms of
health and drug consumption next to commercial or self-interested forms of
health and drug consumption.
More specifically, Race advocates an
emphasis on pleasure as the basis of health and health promotion. The rationale
for this is Foucault’s suggestion that pleasure is “less caught up in the whole
apparatus that extracts a truth-value from embodied experience” It is capable
of considering “different practices and conceptions of responsibility” and more
open to “historical construction, practical variation and creative
experimentation.” (pp. viii-xi).
Race’s book is principally concerned
with the lessons that can be learned from the response to the AIDs epidemic. What
is the nature of this response? Race talks about the importance of the kinds of
“pleasures”, imagination and “fantasies” that animated the gay “community” in
Sydney in the 1990s (p.22). These pleasures and fantasies can be defined, in
part, through an analysis of the gay dance party, with its origins in the disco
movement in New York in the 1970s.
What, in turn, are the implications of
this emphasis for health and health promotion initiatives? In a consideration
of an event entitled the Wheel of
Misfortune, set up to provide “clear and accessible information around [AIDS]
treatment side effects”, “part educative intervention, part peer support, and
part good night out” (p. 128), Race
talks about the importance of style and, more specifically, camp (pp. 132-33). “This embodied
style”, Race writes, “has been actively and usefully deployed to throw these
matters up for public consideration, elaboration and concern” (135). This
emphasis on style can be understood in terms of the work of Bourdieu and which has
been applied to the “embodied character of cultural discrimination” which is
apparent in popular music tastes (for example) (pp 150-1). The emphasis on
style remains important whether or not that style is condoned by normative
morals and norms.
As a critical analysis of contemporary public
health policies, Races book is a tour de
force. Given the wide range of analytical tools it brings to bear on its
subject, the book should be high on the reading list of all in critical public
health (or “counterpublic health”). The broad scope of Race’s focus can be confusing.
In the first few pages of the book he defines the object of his critique as “medical subjectivity”, “medical
rationality”, “medical authority”, “the medical sphere”, “the scene of health
and medicine”, “the current biomedical context”, the “sociomedical” and “drug
regimes”. The use of these inter-related terms is very difficult to follow.
Nevertheless, it does not detract from (and may even contribute to) the
suggestive power of the book.
Ultimately,
Race’s book is a challenge and provocation. It highlights the fact that health
is a contested term. Different entities - ranging from the institution of
health to the pharmaceutical industry, to entrepreneurs working in the market
for health, and beyond - invoke health in differing ways. The book suggests
that institutional health, despite its claims to moral authority, might not
always have the best or only answers. It suggests the need for these different
and at-times opposing parties to sit around the same table and to share ideas.
Finally, The book has practical and important
implications for health promotion through its focus on the “situated nature of serious
harms”, “particular embodied styles”, “collective subjectivities” and,
specifically, the “articulation of pleasure” (p. 154-60).
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