Aspirations to National Health: Social Medicine and Political Subjectivity in Latin America

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

How do Latin American states strive to extend the “right to health” to citizens? And how might such policies generate aspirations or political subjectivities? State officials in Latin America have often used the paradigm of social medicine to signal a commitment to justice and inclusion, whereby mechanisms like universal health care and an emphasis on primary and preventative care serve as the basis for health equity. Yet we argue that the “all” in “health care for all” is not always self-evident, and social medicine remains a crucial locus of political debate among citizens, activist movements, and policymakers themselves. For example, in some contexts, indigenous and afro-descendant movements have questioned the assumption of a homogenous nation that historically underpinned many socialist health care policies and have instead posited pluralism as central to health equity. Yet even as the terms of justice are being expanded in new directions, social medicine policies in Latin America are marked by contradiction; promises of inclusion and reform do not always come through, and state officials often continue to rely on mechanisms of neoliberal governmentality for implementation. We seek to move beyond a binary reading of success versus failure to ask how state narratives of “the right to health” become the locus of political engagements and subjectivities, aspiration and cynicism, and belonging and exclusion. Drawing from a range of national contexts (Brazil, Mexico, Guatemala, and Bolivia), the papers on this panel foreground the lived experiences of health care reform in Latin America.

Sub Track

• Health Studies

Session Organizers

• Gabriela Elisa Morales, Scripps College

• Katherine McGurn Centellas, University of Mississippi

Chair

• Charles L Briggs, University of California/Berkeley

Discussant

• Lynn M Morgan, Mount Holyoke College

Individual Presentations

• The Rural Disadvantage of Popular Insurance: Navigating Mexico’s “Universal” Health Care Plan - Isabel Montemayor

• The Relational Imagination: Bureaucracy, Decolonization, and the Promise of Care in Bolivia - Gabriela Elisa Morales, Scripps College

• The Yatiri in the Telehealth Consultorio: Ethnographic notes on telehealth under SAFCI in Bolivia - Katherine McGurn Centellas, University of Mississippi

• “Understanding the Reality” of the Poor: Physicians’ Experiences of Compulsory Medical Service in Rural Guatemala - Anita Chary, Harvard University

• “More Human”: Race, Class, Gender, and the Humanization of Birth in Bahia, Brazil - K. Eliza Williamson, Rice University