Governing the health of the hybrid self: Integrative medicine, neoliberalism, and the shifting biopolitics of subjectivity

Abstract

This paper employs a Foucauldian perspective on the shifting spacialisation of medical knowledge to explore the manner in which integrative medicine is discursively represented by its biomedical architects so as to ensure good cultural fit with neoliberal strategies of governance amid the development of transnational global cultural flows in which human subjectivity has itself hybridized, provoking this reconfiguration of medical knowledge. It is argued that integrative medicine represents an expansion of medical rationality into all domains of human life: biological, psychological, sociological, and spiritual. This proposed expansion of biomedical influence rests not upon domination but rather, through enabling the autonomous individual of transnational, neoliberal governance.

Key Words:

• Integrative medicine
• neoliberalism
• biopower
• complementary/alternative medicine
• health sociology