Health promotion and its biopolitical extend: the sanitary discourse of contemporary society

Abstract

Over the past twenty years, the concept of Health Promotion has been discussed by different social actors; research and theoretical publications have contributed to establish the demarcation of the concepts and practices in this area, in some cases from a critical point of view of its theoretical and conceptual framework. This article examines the sanitary discourse of contemporary society in the context of health promotion policies, identifying these policies as being regulated mainly by the maintenance of a biopolitical project of social control of bodies. We recognize the current discourse of health promotion as a device for regulating life that defines, in a sense, the continuity of the biopolitical project of modern society as described by Foucault. But more than this, health promotion is presented as a form of control and regulation of bodies through an inflection on individual responsibility in the management of risks. Thus, we believe that the discourse of health promotion fits the perspective of the end of the Welfare State doctrines, establishing itself as a project of self-governing of individuals through the allocation of responsibility for their own care. By focusing on the conceptual framework of health promotion, we try and enter into the current debates that take place in the public health field. We emphasize the changes in concepts of health and disease and the engagement of these changes with the end of the Estate protection and their effects on sociability.