Abstract
Decades after Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic and History of Madness, the role of medicine in producing and sustaining classifications continues to be topical, as scholars have continued to critique normalizing judgments embedded in the practices of medicine, which stabilize identity categories within health care settings. A significant contributor to this area of scholarship, Ian Hacking has articulated a productive and extremely influential account of how certain “kinds” of people emerge hand-in-hand with the categories that are meant to classify them, examining not only medical practices, but a wide range of governmental, scientific, and cultural institutions that contribute to kind-making. In this paper, I examine limitations to Hacking’s looping effects thesis, in an effort to further explore how kind-making may be embodied through intersections of subjectivity, social identity, and the practices of medicine. Employing a field study of HIV/AIDS care in Vancouver, Canada, I push at some of the boundaries of Hacking’s account, attempting to add complexity and nuance by bringing to bear considerations of memory, resistance, and embodiment on the process of looping.
Highlights
In a 1983 essay entitled, “Making up People,” Ian Hacking began what would become a productive and extremely influential account of how certain “kinds” of people emerge hand-in-hand with the categories that are meant to classify them
Classification and classes, according to Hacking, emerge mutually and simultaneously in a process that he would first describe as dynamic nominalism, and later as “looping effects” (Hacking, “Making up People” 228, and “Social Construction”)
Amongst the women who participated in the research study, those who were judged to be “difficult” patients found their ability to navigate the health care system altered; a developing identity as an HIV-positive drug user in the health care system likewise shaped further interpersonal dynamics while in hospital
Summary
With the exception of the branch of moral psychology that refers to itself as “experimental philosophy,” very little philosophical work includes empirical data generated by philosophers themselves.[1]. As discussed at the outset, Ian Hacking’s extremely influential account of social construction presents a view of kinds of people as products of certain institutions, languages, and practices; as “kinds” they are objects of scientific inquiry (Hacking, “Kinds of People” 292) These set conditions that various experiences of self might take. Hacking offers these as compatible with his view, rather than incorporating such insights into his account itself With these limitations in mind, I turn to the notion of “bad reputations,” and the way that the social and cultural domains of memory inform social identity, in order to motivate my claim that looping effects may be embodied, even as classification and categories are resisted
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