“Your DNA Doesn’t Need to Be Your Destiny”: Colonialism, Public Health and the Financialization of Medicine

Abstract

Health is increasingly understood as a metric of an individual’s dedication to practices of personal risk management. A cultural logic of atomistic individualism informs both the privatization of medicine in Canada and public health campaigns that address environmental determinants of health. This article contrasts the production of subjectivity in a private health clinic in Toronto to a contemporary public health campaign designed for First Nations, Inuit and Métis children. The study shows how financialization continues to operate through colonial structures today. In this comparison, the two prescribed responses to the presence of risk diverge significantly: the wealthy are interpellated as “health investors” and urged to take preventive measures against future disease, while marginalized and racialized communities are asked to take on the role of self-management to make incremental and necessarily short-term improvements to living conditions that are actually determined by the multifarious effects of colonialism. The logic informing both the personalized health industry and the personal finance industry work to obscure these determinisms, presenting a paradigm in which both genetic predisposition to disease and social class can be transcended through savvy investment, long-term planning, and pre-emptive risk management. These industries offer a vision of transformation based on the liberal fantasy of infinite mobility, claiming to provide the means through which individuals can change their social class and prevent future illness.