20 Oct On citizenship

I’ve been grappling with issues of citizenship as i work toward my dissertation research proposal. This is what i have so far:

The call to invite people to engage in their own health access is not a new, strictly Post-Washington Consensus idea, but is born from the early AIDS activist movements of the 1980’s (Roy & Cain, 2001). Following on this activist movement in the U.S. and Canada, greater involvement of people living with AIDS, or GIPA, was recognized internationally in the Paris Declaration of the Paris AIDS Summit of 1994, and endorsed internationally in the Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS, signed by 189 members of the UN (Boesten, 2008; Magaz & Hardee, 2004). Remarkably, this early intervention into the involvement of HIV/AIDS patients and activists in the construction of training and health advocacy and access policies has been studied repeatedly for it’s importance in developing a kind of democratization of biomedical knowledge (Robins, 2004). Much has been written about the construction of alternative communities that worked to share knowledge and resources within the frame of HIV/AIDS activism, creating a new kind of “citizenship” among the participants (Epstein, 1997; Brown, 1997). As Chantal Mouffe points out, “citizenship is not just one identity among others” – it is not a fixed, immutable character, rather, stands as a forceful antagonism to pre-scribed universalist and cosmopolitan constructs (1992, 378). Citizenship is a dynamic relationship with the body and with civil and social society, transcending binaries of social-political, private-public, and, ultimately, health-sickness (Brown, 1997).
This frame of health citizenship through HIV/AIDS activism and self-care has developed more broadly, in the last 20 years, to encompass behaviours that speak to individualization of health-seeking behaviours, in general, and biopolitical understandings of health and the body more specifically (Rose, 2001; Braun, 2007). Just as Mouffe questions the stagnant national form of citizenship, so too, Rose (2007) points to a “biological citizenship” that moves into a new citizenship project (beyond the three of T.H. Marshal [1950] – economic, political, social) that transcends national territorialization identification projects and reaches more deeply into the personal spaces of the biological existence of individuals and their relationship to the body through multiple scales – local, national, and transnational.

i’m a double vodka-something-or-other and 1.5 beers in after 12 hours of sitting at my desk (the alcohol started just two hours ago)…my word. will it always be this difficult…?