Within the liberal tradition, the physical body has been treated as
a focus of rights discussion and a source of economic and
democratic value; it needs protection but it is also one's
dominion, tool, and property, and thus something over which we
should be able to exercise free will. However, the day-to-day
reality of how we live in our bodies and how we make choices about
them is not something over which we can exercise full control. In
this way, embodiment mirrors life in a pluralist body politic: we
are interdependent and vulnerable, exposed with and to others while
desiring agency. As disability, feminist, and critical race
scholars have all suggested, barriers to bodily control are often a
problem of public and political will and social and economic
structures that render relationality and caring responsibilities
private, invisible, and low value. These scholarly traditions
firmly maintain the importance of bodily integrity and
self-determination, but make clear that autonomy is not a matter of
mere non-interference but rather requires extensive material and
social support. Autonomy is thus totally intertwined with, not
opposed to, vulnerability. Put another way, the pursuit of autonomy
requires practices of humility. Given this, what do we learn about
agency and self-determination, as well as trust, self-knowledge,
dependence, and resistance under such conditions of acute
vulnerability? The Virtues of Vulnerability looks at the question
of how we navigate "choice" and control over our bodies when it
comes to conditions like birth, illness, and death, particularly as
they are experienced within mainstream medical institutions
operating under the pressures of neoliberal capitalism. There is
often a deep disconnect between what people say they want in
navigating birth, illness, and death, and what they actually
experience through all of these life events. Practices such as
informed consent, the birth plan, advanced directives, and the
patient satisfaction survey typically offer a thin and unreliable
version of self-determination. In reality, "choice" in these
instances is encumbered and often determined by our vulnerability
at the most critical moments. This book looks at the ways in which
we navigate birth, illness, and death in order to think about how
vulnerability and humility can inform political will. Overall, the
book asks under what conditions vulnerability and interdependence
enhance or diminish our sense of ourselves as agents. In exploring
this question it aims to produce a new vocabulary for democratic
politics, highlighting traits that have profound political
implications in terms of how citizens aspire, struggle, relate to,
and persevere with each other.
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