title: Recovery From Heart Attack, Biomedicalization, and the Production of a Contingent Health Citizenship.
abstract: In this article, I explore the experience of recovery from a heart attack through an analytic autoethnography. I discuss the tensions inherent in biomedical subjectivities of health and ill-health during cardiac recovery through three key themes: (a) the transfer of responsibility and becoming a subject "at risk," (b) technologies of biomedicine and the disciplining of subjectivities, and (c) the transformation of a body toward a new pharmaceuticalized bodily normal. Through an analysis driven by the biomedicalization thesis of Clarke, alongside work on biopower and the governmentality of health by Foucault, Rose, and Rabinow, I seek to provide new insights into the process of cardiac recovery and the relationship between individual experience and broader socio-political processes. Key to this analysis is a focus on the contingent subjectivities brought into being through biomedicalization that constitute a new form of health citizenship that is otherwise not accounted for in narratives of recovery.
authors.affiliation: 1 The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK.
authors.forename: Darren
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Langdridge
mesh_terms: D000884:Anthropology, Cultural; D006304:Health Status; D006801:Humans; D062528:Medicalization; D009203:Myocardial Infarction / Q000523:psychology* / Q000628:therapy*; D011057:Politics; D011582:Psychological Theory
keywords: UK; analytic autoethnography; biomedicalization; health citizenship; heart attack recovery; qualitative; subjectivities of health and illness