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Fascistic proclivity, embodiment and health in crisis times

This post follows on from an earlier exchange on this webpage, under the posting: Generalizations on Identity Politics in the Present. Suman originally referred to the growing fascicization of the environment under conditions of crisis, with reference to embodiment and identity politics. This prompted me to reflect upon micro-fascism and body politics, writing: ‘fascism appears to be pervasive as an embodied process, saturating how people think and feel about everyday bodily matters’. I thought I’d offer some additional musings following that exchange and connect with some critical literature from the health field, not least because health issues are inseparable from bodies (physical, social) and structures of power and inequity. A project on the crises of capitalism might usefully interrogate body and society relations, incorporating corrosive power relations, ideologies and what all of this might mean for those who allegedly ‘fail’ to ‘measure up’ as disciplined citizens.

Following Suman’s original post I decided to re-read a paper by Edgley and Brissett (1991). As part of a larger thesis on meddling, they refer to Health Fascism and Health Nazis when critiquing the increasing healthism of American society. Healthism is a term used within medical sociology and it refers to how health is commonly framed as an issue of personal responsibility and a responsibility to others, via moralising injunctions that de-politicise and individualise the socio-structural determinants of health. Virulent healthism and by extension health fascism are firmly tied to the social collectivity, and concerns about its vigour. As with Nazism, Edgley and Brissett discuss inter alia how ‘the restoration and repair of the social body and physical body were indistinguishable’ (p. 260) and how there is the necessity to eradicate ‘the impure’. In today’s healthist landscape that might mean ‘correcting’ those with ‘bad lifestyles and behaviours’ or non-normative bodies that putatively signify their errant ways. Those labelled overweight and obese are obvious villains in this morality play (though one should add that the majority of the population in Britain, for instance, are labelled as such according to the highly suspect Body Mass Index – they are ‘normal deviants’ to draw from classic interactionist sociology, and profitable targets for various entrepreneurs).

Following Edgley and Brissett (1991) and others, Health Fascism incorporates domination, intolerance, marginalisation of alternative voices and evidence, a totalitarian impulse that can take subtle but nonetheless pernicious forms. It is ubiquitous yet perhaps seldom appreciated since fascism is often simply assumed to be propagated by the likes of Hitler and Mussolini, rather than taking the form of everyday micro-fascisms. Some of these themes are taken up in relation to evidence-based movements (e.g. the Cochrane review system in health sciences) (Holmes et al. 2006) and obesity discourse (Rail et al. 2010), with the latter authors challenging the politics of evidence regarding ‘domestic terrorists’ (a rhetoric that became increasingly salient in the USA following 9/11). The themes flagged by Suman in terms of body regulation, control and its multi-directional (and multi-dimensional) character are well appreciated within Foucauldian approaches to the body and health. Using a different theoretical lens, I’m currently working on how we might rethink the stigma of obesity as a process that scapegoats (many) people and to link embodied micro-social process to macro-social structures (notably class in neoliberal capitalism and how the overweight majority are misrecognised as parasitical, expensive bodies that ‘we’ can ill afford – an astonishing inversion of reality given the parasitical nature of finance capitalism which came to full view post-2008).

I don’t have space to elaborate here but hopefully there will be more to follow in terms of publications. I think Suman’s musings on fascism are worth taking up in this context. I would also perhaps reflect on how different minority groups (e.g. fat activists) may unintentionally slip into some of the traps he highlights when mentioning certain categories of people who speak on particular issues and an assumed authority/authenticity to generalize from their embodied experiences and identities. There remains a need here to think big (beyond the body, beyond obesity and health in its corporeal manifestations), and I would maintain that this project on the international dimensions of the financial and economic crisis provides an important context! Yet, all of this remains embodied (the body as the source, location and medium of society: Shilling 2005) and is thus tied to body politics. I remain concerned here that proclivities to (health) fascism may unfortunately flourish in these challenging times, impacting not only national bodies but body relations in the most intimate and personal of (politicised) realms. It will, of course, be sugar-coated. All of this is supposedly in one’s own best interests and to the betterment of society.

Lee F. Monaghan, February 2015

References

  • Edgley, C. and Brissett, D. (1991) Health Nazis and the Cult of the Perfect Body: Some Polemical Observations.  Symbolic Interaction, 25 (2): 257-79.
  • Holmes, D. et al. (2006) Deconstructing the Evidence-Based Discourse in Health Sciences: Truth, Power and Fascism. International Journal of Evidence Based Healthcare, 4: 180-6.
  • Rail, G., Holmes, D. and Murray, S.J. (2010) The Politics of Evidence on ‘Domestic Terrorists’: Obesity Discourses and their Effects. Social Theory & Health, 8: 259-79.
  • Shilling, C. (2005) The Body in Technology, Culture and Society. London: Sage.