ABSTRACT

In recent years medicalization, the process of making something medical, has gained considerable ground and a position in everyday discourse. In this multidisciplinary collection of original essays, the authors expertly consider how issues around medicalization have developed, ways in which it is changing, and the potential shapes it will take in the future. They develop a unique argument that medicalization, biomedicalization, pharmaceuticalization and geneticization are related and co-evolving processes, present throughout the globe. This is an ideal addition to anthropology, sociology and STS courses about medicine and health.

chapter |15 pages

Introduction

Outlining Old Critiques and New Engagements

part |69 pages

Reimaginings: (Bio)Medicalization and Technoscience in the Twenty-First Century

chapter |22 pages

Moving Sideways and Forging Ahead

Reimagining “-Izations” in the Twenty-First Century

chapter |15 pages

A New Biopolitics of Gender and Health?

“Gender-specific Medicine” and Pharmaceuticalization in the Twenty-First Century

chapter |23 pages

Reimagining Race and Ancestry

Biomedicalizing Difference in Post-Genomic Subjects

part |85 pages

Pharmaceuticals

chapter |23 pages

Vital Objects

Essential Drugs and Their Critical Legacies

chapter |25 pages

The Drug Swallowers

Scientific Sovereignty and Pharmaceuticalization in Two International Drug Donation Programs

part |74 pages

Genetics/Genomics

chapter |19 pages

Racial Destiny or Dexterity?

The Global Circulation of Genomics as an Empowerment Idiom

chapter |23 pages

Beyond Geneticization

Regimes of Perceptibility and the Social Determinants of Health

chapter |12 pages

Epilogue

Mapping the Biomedicalized World for Justice