War-Worn Subjects

This chapter explores how humility and autonomy come into play for “wounded warriors” seeking post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) treatment and for the medical professionals treating them within the particular constraints of the military-medical complex. Analyzing military PTSD illustrates how deeply entangled disease construction, diagnosis, and “cure” are with the complex discourse of “choice and control,” or with medicalization under the pressures of neoliberal rationality. Like with birth and death, but perhaps even more so, veteran PTSD as taken up within the Veterans Health Administration is a site of subjection and potential contestation from which we can learn much about the production of citizen-subjectivity in moments of distinct corporeal and psychic vulnerability. This chapter examines how militarism and masculinity conspire with inadequate conceptions of patient (and doctor) humility and autonomy, to produce an assumption of and fatalism about whether “wounded warriors” can be “fixed.”

Arguments over Ends

In the United States, vast resources are put into end-of-life care and there is resistance to wider reliance on hospice, not to mention physician-assisted dying. How does dying get managed, and how do decisions about death get produced, within the logics that pervade contemporary healthcare? This chapter explores this question by considering how dispositions of humility and impulses toward autonomy operate both for dying persons and the caregivers attending to them in death. It argues that a relationally supported process of emotionally preparing for dying provides an experience through which we can learn about humility, autonomy, and other dispositions important for critical democratic citizenship: self-knowledge, self-determination, intellectual courage, generosity toward self and others, openness to uncertainty, and the will to persevere in our aspirations despite undeniable fragility.

Beyond Monks and Mushrooms

This chapter lays the intellectual-historical groundwork for thinking about the “virtues of vulnerability,” by mapping the concept of humility inherited in Western thought from Christianity, and the concept of autonomy inherited from liberalism. After detailing what these inherited concepts are, it argues that they are problematic from the perspective of embodied agency and citizenship-subjectivity, and develops alternative versions that bolster, not undermine, democratic practice. Confucian political theory provides a nontheological but deeply relational conception of humility, including concrete practices for cultivating a distinctly political ethic that is not about lowliness, self-denial, or subordination to authority. Feminist philosophy’s concept of “relational autonomy” provides an account of autonomy as an ongoing process that requires supportive social conditions and networks of relations, not mere non-interference. Bringing these traditions together, this chapter develops the conceptual framework and political vocabulary of the project, and begins to flesh out an important new concept of humility-informed-relational-autonomy.

The Body as a Site of Politics

The body, political theorists well know, has long served as a metaphor for the structure and relations of the polis. But embodiment is something that political theory has frequently bracketed when theorizing citizenship, agency, and the category of “the human.” Against this tendency, how might we reimagine the political potential of embodiment, or make space for considering “the virtues of vulnerability”? This chapter sets up the book as a whole, by raising and situating this question, and introducing readers to the key concepts grounding this inquiry: humility, autonomy, citizen-subjectivity, awakenings, medicalization, and neoliberalism. How does the problem of bodies get taken up within contemporary healthcare, where the consumer-patient gets hailed as an autonomous choice-maker, and what lessons can we learn about health, and health citizenship, from examining the tensions at work here?

Humility, Autonomy, and Birth as a Site of Politics

This chapter offers a critical political analysis of American birth culture, using the concepts of humility and autonomy as ways of thinking about “choice and control.” How do dominant American childbirth practices produce conditions within which women can exercise and value freedom, self-trust, and self-determination versus conditions within which such aspirations are trivialized, disciplined, or foreclosed? This chapter argues that birth, as a site of potential political awakening, is a context within which particular manifestations of humility and autonomy might inform subjugating practices and experiences, but the alternative understandings advanced in this work might inform empowering practices of actual choice and control. The chapter also explores when and why people might “exit” the clinic and choose homebirth, as a form of “systems-challenging praxis” capable of destabilizing the logic of the dominant system and potentially loosening the hold of its norms.

Ethical Sources of Political Strength

This chapter examines the complex relationship between vulnerability and autonomy, in dialogue with two strains of contemporary democratic theory. Engaging Bonnie Honig and Steven White on the debate over whether mortalist humanism displaces from political action, and with theorists of exit and voice about the effects of various kinds of withdrawals from institutional power, the chapter explores when having our vulnerability laid bare functions to orient us toward others and toward generative action aimed at something better, and when it gets stuck at private suffering, or inspires resentment. How might exiting itself become a site of political awakening, where a new citizen-subjectivity takes hold as we say “No” to being interpellated as certain kinds of patients, health citizens, or subjects?