Sociology Research Seminar
Assuming biological citizenship: Injecting drug users and hepatitis C
27 August 2009, 12-2pm Menzies Building W10.10 Monash Clayton Campus (PSI Library)
Suzanne Fraser
Monash University
Abstract
Injecting drug users diagnosed with hepatitis C engage with contemporary injunctions to health and self-care in unique ways. Their status as ‘addicts’ sees them medicalised as illegitimate risk takers suffering from a ‘disease of the will’ and thus lacking self-control. Their status as hepatitis C patients medicalises them in quite a different way: as potentially active and self-regulating health consumers necessarily open to taking legitimate corporeal risks, such as those introduced by treatment. In this paper I draw on 20 in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted with hepatitis C-positive injecting drug users in Melbourne, Australia, to consider this tension. I do this by exploring the insights made available by the encounter between Nikolas Rose’s theorisation of biological citizenship, and injecting drug users’ responses to their hepatitis C diagnoses. What does it mean to be addressed as a choosing, responsible subject largely by virtue of potential exposure to, or acquisition of, a virus? What does it mean in the context of injecting drug use and the many challenges associated with it to be encouraged to undergo an onerous form of treatment, the outcome of which is highly uncertain, or to be told to make significant lifestyle changes, when no symptoms are present? How, in short, do injecting drug users respond to the contrary and intensely morally inflected injunctions to biological citizenship thrown up by the collision of two key ideological notions in the West: addiction and infectious disease? What do their circumstances and responses tell us, in turn, about the nature and limits of contemporary forms of biological citizenship?
Biographical note
Suzanne Fraser is senior lecturer in the Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research at Monash University. Her research explores ideas of compulsion, addiction and enhancement via a range of empirical sites including injecting drug use, hepatitis C, obesity and cosmetic surgery. She is the author of Cosmetic Surgery, Gender and Culture (Palgrave 2003), and, more recently, with Kylie Valentine, Substance and substitution: Methadone subjects in Liberal Societies (Palgrave 2008).