Health
by
Health is a decidedly double-edged keyword. Etymologically, health derives from the Old English hælþ as related to “being whole, sound or well,” and thus the verb heal means “to make whole” or “to make robust.” Its figurative usage as a biologized descriptor for well-being—of the economy, communities, the environment—is so widespread as to be taken for granted. Much as Raymond Williams suggested about community, health, too, “can be the warmly persuasive word” that “seems never to be used unfavorably” ([1976] 2014, 76). The double-edgedness of health hinges on the rhetorical sway of leveraging wholeness, wellness, or the implied opposite of disease to naturalize what are profoundly political projects. As I write in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has invoked his office’s public health policing powers to halt requests for asylum made in the US-Mexico borderlands. Meanwhile, Free Them All for Public Health has mobilized health toward abolitionist ends by calling for the release of people held in jails, prisons, and detention centers. These tensions, if not deep conflicts, over human health in its many facets (public, mental, physical, sexual, spiritual), forms (state, nonprofit, for-profit, mutual aid), and modalities (traditional, holistic,...
This essay may be found on page 107 of the printed volume.