The rise of health activism: the importance of social class

In the past twenty years, the continued rise of health activism—especially but not exclusively in North America, Europe, and Australia—has been taken as emblematic of new trends in contemporary citizenship. While some social scientists have approached the study of health advocacy movements and organizations using social movement theory, many have drawn on Paul Rabinow’s concept of “biosociality” to understand the enactment of new forms of belonging. For Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, patient groups are “biosocial collectives” in which members enact “biological citizenship”: a new form of belonging in the “age of biomedicine, biotechnology and genomics” in which people increasingly think and speak of themselves in biological terms.