Individualization of Responsibility for Health and Entrepreneurship of the Self as Neoliberal Strategies of Bodily Subjectivation and Contemporary Life Management

Abstract

This article analyzes discursive strategies by which health behaviors are instituted in the management of people's lives in contemporary times from the entrepreneurial neoliberal rationality. To do so, it resumes utterances about health and physical activity in the pandemic context and discusses their relations with key concepts that operate in the embodiment of the neoliberal management model. Such embodiment refers to the uses of human labor (which include body and health care practices) under the aegis of the individualization of responsibility for health, and the dispositive function that they come to exercise within the system that promulgates the individualized management of survival. Thus, we emphasize the importance of the attention of health professionals to the strategies of bodily subjectivation characteristic of the entrepreneurial neoliberal rationality, and to the social determinants of health, which constitute popular demands from which democratically oriented intervening actions should start.