Making Limits to the Body: The Production of Somatic Differences to Grant Access to Healthcare

• In Event: Racism and Health II

Abstract

In recent years we have appreciated several reforms in health systems in Latin American countries, oriented by World Bank and other transnational organizations. In the case of Chile, this reform have acquired the figure of a regime of guarantees for a cumulus of health problems that have been prioritised articulating evidence-based medicine, among a meshwork of other epidemiological, economical, social and political criteria. Such regime entails a series of implications for the performance of biological processes. First, it elaborates a series of technologies that affect the meaning -trajectory- of the diseases inscribed in the system. Second, it proposes a biopolitical order based on the criteria set forth, formulating a system of inclusion-exclusion based on socio-technical practices. Third, derived from the above and as more important aspect, the regime enacts a temporality and a somatic configuration that defines which bodies participate of the regime, being part of its benefits. That is to say, the regime constitutes a complex interweave that redefines biological priorities that are economically guaranteed, creating two temporary systems distinguished by the enactment of prioritised bodies and their functions. We problematise and conceptualise the above from a socio-technical perspective based on the notion of somatocracy, elaborated by Michel Foucault. STS provide the possibility to give account of how this regime constitutes a new modality of government which translates the body as a physiology or a set of prioritised organs. Somatocracy is a somatic racism in different scales, of the population biology and the interiority of the body.

Author

• Jorge Castillo-Sepúlveda, University of Santiago de Chile