ABSTRACT
The rise of the body in sociology has mirrored the increasing prominence of human physicality as a malleable phenomenon open to scientific, medical and biotechnological advances. This chapter explores both the contemporary idealization of healthy, economically valuable bodies, and the exploitation of those excluded from biological citizenship. It examines how developments in science and medicine transformed the systemic status of the body by rendering it open to institutional interventions. The chapter analyzes how a shift from the 'sick role' to the 'health role' has altered social relationships among the recipients of health provision while leaving those excluded from biological citizenship in danger of being reduced to the status of 'bare life'. It also explores how changing conceptions of health have shaped social relationships among biological citizens, and deals with Talcott Parsons's enormously influential conception of the 'sick role'. Social forms associated with productivist notions of health are neither all encompassing nor inevitably alienating, and individuals have stepped outside of them.
