CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2013
| Author | Zhukova, Viktoriya Oleksiyivna |
|---|---|
| Title | Racializing Europe: Transnational and National Dimensions of Biopolitics, Health and HIV/AIDS. The Case of Ukraine |
| Summary | Abundant research has been done on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the states of sub-Saharan Africa, discursively marking the African continent as an HIV-positive space on a global geopolitical map. My original contribution to knowledge is that my project expands scholarly debate on the HIV/AIDS epidemic towards the post-Soviet region, Ukraine in particular. In the dissertation, I suggested that the racialization of populations within a schema of medicalization and pathologization of discreet bodies and within discreet borders and territories, is a process that as much characterized European peripheries as it does non-European postcolonies. Given the central role of modern medicine in biopolitical governance, the HIV/AIDS epidemic serves as a useful tool for mapping certain kinds of processes that involve the networking, production and surveillance of bodies and borders, regimes of treatment, construction of population within and without borders, the production of social problems and discourses around them and attributing certain social problems to certain bodies, populations and spaces. Discourse analysis of international and Ukrainian state documents, reports and mass media sources on the epidemic in Ukraine urged me to (re)introduce the concept Race as an analytical tool for this dissertation. With a help of the concept I point to the fact that discourses on HIV/AIDS are involved in racializing post-Soviet states by producing difference through the alliance of medicine and politics. Relying on the Foucauldian concept of modern state racism, I address race as an all encompassing category, which points that at a given time and geopolitical space any other category (e.g. gender, sexuality, class, disability, age, state of homelessness etc.) or better to say the constellation of such categories, play out to justify/conceal the logic of transnational and/or state racism, involved in the production of inequality and domination, which perpetuate deterioration of life conditions and well-being among populations and spaces the most disproportionally affected by (global) power inequalities. In other words, race is a concept which translates social and political-economic inequalities into individual pathologies and inscribes them into marginalized body-subjects. In the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, on the one hand, racist discourses produce certain bodies, populations and spaces as naturally prone to the epidemic. On the other hand, they leave largely unquestioned (global) power inequalities which affect health, well-being and life chances making the populations, bodies and spaces vulnerable to the epidemic. Such discourses preserve the status quo of political interests, social, institutional and economic actors and processes invested in the epidemic throughout the world. In this dissertation I aim to question discourses involved in racializing certain bodies, populations and spaces as diseased and highlight relations of (global) power inequalities as both making those bodies, populations and spaces vulnerable to disease and concomitantly, marking them as pathological (often because underdeveloped) on the global geopolitical map. |
| Supervisor | Loutfi Anna |
| Department | Gender Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2013/zhukova_viktoriya.pdf |
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