The Virtues of Vulnerability Humility, Autonomy, and Citizen-Subjectivity

"There are many locations, relationships and experiences through which we learn what it means to be a citizen. Contemporary healthcare - or "the clinic" - is one of those sites. Being drawn into the complex "medical-legal-policy-insurance nexus" as a patient entails all sorts of learning, including, it is argued here, political learning. When we are subjected as a patient, frequently through a discourse of "choice and control," or "patient autonomy," what do we learn? What happens when the promise of a certain kind of autonomy is accompanied by demands for a certain kind of humility? What do we learn about agency and self-determination, as well as trust, self-knowledge, dependence, and resistance under such conditions of acute vulnerability? This book explores these questions on a journey through medicalized encounters with giving birth, navigating death and dying, and seeking treatment for life-altering mental illness (here PTSD among veterans). While the body has always posed a problem for Western thought, and been treated as an obstacle to freedom and independence and something our rational capacity must master and control, this book aims to counter that intellectual-historical and political tendency by asking how might we reimagine the political potential of embodiment, or make space for considering "the virtues of vulnerability." In particular, the book offers a novel conception of democratic citizen-subjectivity, grounded in an ethical disposition of humility-informed-relational-autonomy"--