CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Veerhuis, Georgette |
|---|---|
| Title | The Biopolitics of Alternative Belonging: Self-Healing, Self-Making and Spirituality in a Neoliberal Age |
| Summary | This thesis is about the gendered character of biopolitical subject-formation. The subject in question is Dolores: a middle-aged woman living in the Netherlands who ten years ago decided to start her own practice in alternative health care. Since then, she has not only been crafting an empowered feminine identity based on alternative health practices and spiritual practices but also one that is professional and entrepreneurial. In this thesis I therefore tease out how Dolores engages in these processes of self-formation, and how these are tied to larger biopolitical structures of regular medicine, science, and neoliberal capitalism. Importantly, I look at how biopower produces an embodied feminine subjectivity that is premised on gendered notions of care, the body, health, nature, truth and authenticity. At the same time, this thesis is about the biopolitical character of alternative medicine and contemporary spirituality – two systems that intertwine in the context of ‘healing’ in western wellbeing culture. Indeed, it is through health that Dolores turns her lived experience into a narrative of her gendered self. Why is spiritual CAM so powerful for Dolores? It provides Dolores with the technologies to construct her self, her body and her activities as more authentic and essential and thus as more natural and true. In Foucaultian terms, this means that CAM attempts to present a counter-discourse to the hegemonic narratives that are constructed by medicine and science but that the same biopolitical logic applies. Ultimately, CAM intensifies the biopower that flows through it. |
| Supervisor | Renkin, Hadley Zaun |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/veerhuis_georgette.pdf |
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