T some point last year I spent a bit of time flicking through the health requirements placed on getting visas to Australia. It was in response to a student of mine, who told me in class that while she had been granted the temporary visa she needed to study, her doctor had told her that she wouldn’t be granted anything longer-term, because she was “too fat”. I was horrified that weight could be the basis for exclusion from consideration, so I looked up the forms that doctors had to fill out. As it turns out, doctors can only refuse entry on the basis of weight in the presence of other ‘obesity-caused’ health problems. That is, the document specifically excludes discrimination solely on the basis of weight.
Yet she had been told that it was because she was ‘too fat’ that she wouldn’t be permitted entry. On the one hand, I think that this reflects a tendency amongst doctors to attempt to enforce the medical norm at each and every turn. On the other hand, and perhaps more insidiously, this is a doctor enforcing the exclusions of the body politic on the basis of a medical norm, even where the application of that medical norm has been questioned.
As s0metim3s demonstrates in relation to the sudden panic about HIV+ immigrants (misleadingly described as primarily from Africa countries), these kinds of moves are all about the alleged need to maintain the biopolitical health (of the population) and thus maintain the health of the body politic especially when an election is in the offing. The borders of Australia become understood as the skin that marks the edge of the body politic, always and endlessly under threat of mutilation, invasion, abjection (in Kristeva’s sense). More on this when I have a bit more time: I might post some bits from a paper I wrote last year which looked at the imaginary body of the body politic specifically in relation to the politicised production of (racialised) bodily tolerances of those within it. And I would like the opportunity to think about the excision of certain parts of Australia (for the purposes of immigration) – namely, the sea and island – in relation to this imagining of the body politic: the sea marked as a ’soft’ edge, perhaps even a mucosive border (vulnerable to HIV, of course; ah, and look, there’s Irigaray again!)
June 4, 2007 at 5:15 pm
Though there’s panic precedent in the US (Dialogic has a post on this), the addition of leprosy to the list might be one way to go through the question of excisions – given the association of both with ‘parts’. A curious way, most likely, but maybe …
June 5, 2007 at 4:05 pm
I like this idea; thanks for your comment.
I suppose one way I would want to toss this around is to suggest that the mucosive ’soft’ border of the sea and islands was seen as a threat to a body (politic) whose borders were not yet hard enough, not yet sufficient impermeable (I want to hint at ideals of masculinity here, but having not raised Gaten’s observations of the configuration of the body politic “in the image of man,” it might be a little soon!). Thus the excision. And yet this excision can also be understood as the leprous disintegration of the body politic, in some way… and not least in the effect that such policy has on those within the country (as you pointed out with reference to National Socialism and the exclusions (of superfluity and parasites) within the biopolitical that such excisions enable and indeed, make almost inevitable). I guess it’s akin to the ‘usual’ line of the attempt to make oneself immune creating the autoimmune (that which attacks oneself) itself. I’d need to think some more about this, but Foucault is Dead has been exploring some of these ideas in relation to Baudrillard; and his comment about “condom-like logic” of current politics seems somehow too appropriate here not to mention it.
December 2, 2007 at 10:48 pm
[...] second paper develops out of the train of thought I posted here, and its interaction with this post of s0metim3s. Basically, I’m arguing that the medical conception of the human [...]