The breather as patient and plaintiff: biopolitics, labor and the judicialization of tuberculosis

• In Event: Not Global Health (?): Theorizing Biomedical Governance from the South

Abstract

My paper will think through certain aspects of the judicialization of health in South Africa. The “judicialization of health”, as conceptually developed by Joao Biehl and Adriana Petryna, speaks to ways in which demands concerning health have been made through the law, especially in global Southern contexts. I consider two seminal South African cases concerning the judicialization of tuberculosis, one relating to prisons and the other to mines. I show how judicial interventions in such cases are animated by creative interpretations of foundational constitutional principles, and thus speak to universalizing imaginaries of human rights that are intimately connected to postcolonial imaginaries of post-apartheid democracy. At the same time, they are forced to respond to the specific histories and presents of carceral and extractive regimes of neoliberal governance. I will think with Tim Choy’s notion of the “breather” to consider the differentiated biomedical and political subjectivities of tubercular patients who are also prisoners or mineworkers, who make claims for compensation through the courts on the basis that their disease was caused by the conditions of their labor and/on confinement. In what ways do these political claims articulate with, enable or constrain the South African constitutional imagination of health as a human right? Can biomedicalized and constitutionally mediated legal action envisage new modalities of collective struggle?

Author

• Kaushik Sunder Rajan, University of Chicago