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Article Excerpt
Since its emergence in the nineteenth century, public health has primarily been the charge of nation-states acting to maintain the health of populations. (1) In addition to taking steps to prevent disease, governments deploy the rhetoric of health and "hygiene" to police the behavior and movements of immigrants and colonial subjects. (2) Yet the mobility of microbes that circulate "through air travel, commerce, and the circuits of capital" (3) has given rise to transnational institutions such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization, which track disease vulnerability worldwide and pursue improvement in the health of world populations. How is the project of global health bound up with the uneven exchanges of globalization, (4) and how does it attempt to produce "healthy" subjectivities across lines of race, gender, class, language, and citizenship?
Public service campaigns deploy mass media to frame health as the responsibility of individuals and communities. From instructing parents to have their children vaccinated to warning against the risks of illegal drugs, media campaigns provide states and other agents with a means to shape citizens' health behaviors. This "hypodermic" model of education, as media studies scholars term it, presumes that information can be "injected" into passive audiences to produce desired changes in attitude or behavior. (5)
Not only the content, but also the narrative and aesthetic features of health communications mediate and impact their reception. These features, in fact, "create a range of publics" (6) and resist association with any idea of a universal "public" to be educated. Public health campaigns, therefore, demand interdisciplinary analysis that combines textual interpretation with research that addresses local and transnational forces that affect the health of populations. We know that discourses about health shape and direct people's experiences of embodiment and subjectivity, their perceptions of risk, and their health behaviors; so how do educational campaigns that intend to transmit health information across national boundaries affect these experiences? What kinds of subjectivity are called forth when health information travels?
While epidemiological data confirm the quantitative aspects of global disparities in health, mass-mediated health discourses allow us to study the cultural and political dynamics of these disparities. Two such discourses - Bodies ... the Exhibition, which displays anatomical specimens produced in China for consumption in wealthy first-world nations, and a comic book produced by international health and human rights agencies to raise HIV/AIDS awareness among young people in the developing world - illustrate the role of global inequality in shaping the production and consumption of health messages. Both are international public health communications complicated by the fact that their materials have originated in locations far removed from the sites of their consumption. Bodies ... the Exhibition both leverages and conceals the economic inequalities and health disparities between its sites of production and consumption; the HIV/AIDS comic book campaign attempts to redress global health disparities, but ultimately avoids engaging questions of inequality. These representations of health, bodies, and human rights circulate between developed and underdeveloped nations, overemphasizing universal human qualities and neglecting the critical role of economic and social vulnerability in distributing health disparities unevenly around the globe.
Bodies ... the Exhibition profits from global inequalities, which are disguised through images of anatomical universal-ism. (7) A controversial and well-attended international exhibition of chemically preserved, "plastinated" corpses, Bodies has drawn criticism from human rights groups as well as experts on health education. Setting aside questions about the exhibit's self-designation as a resource for public education, Bodies nonetheless conveys a tremendous amount of information regarding cultural constructions of health, selfhood, and the body to an audience that numbers in the millions. Bodies has been on tour since 2005, and is currently on view in nine international cities, including New York, Madrid, Vienna, Budapest, Las Vegas, and Copenhagen. Addressed to middle- and upper-class visitors (the price of admission in New York, for example, is $27.50), the exhibition's didactic texts privilege voluntary health behaviors. A closer look at the exhibition's sourcing of its specimens, however, shows that this voluntaristic model - which encourages individuals to take responsibility for their own healthy "lifestyle" - at once requires and conceals global disparities in environmental toxicity, economic resources, and availability of health care.
Although exhibitions of preserved bodies have proven tremendously lucrative, their curators often appropriate the rhetoric of "public health" to legitimize the private, for-profit trafficking of corpses. Bodies couches its display of preserved corpses in a populist claim: that specimens should serve not only the medical establishment and its educational apparatus, but also the edification of the public at large. In the words of Gunther von Hagens, inventor of the "plastination" process, the public display of dissected cadavers attempts to "democratize anatomy." (8)
While the gallery displays of Bodies borrow from the cool, distancing representational techniques of science museums and anatomy textbooks, their rhetoric also relies on psychological processes of identification. "With educational relevance for all ages," Bodies advertises, "this exhibition of...
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