‘Our Diagnoses, Our Selves’: The Rise of the Technoscientific Illness Identity

Abstract

AbstractBiomedicine situates the definitions, practices, and controls of the medical system within the field of technoscience, which relies on new knowledge, high technology, and biomedical health and risk surveillance. Since the middle of the 20th century technoscientific efforts to understand human phenomena at the microbiological level have secured the place of the biomedical model of disease and the technology used to understand and manage human bodies, selves, and socialities. Specifically, high technology has provoked a paradigm shift from controlling disease and finding cures (medicalization) to transforming bodies and managing risk through technoscientific means (biomedicalization). Though there has been a major shift in the role of the medical consumer since the 1970s and a general recognition of patients’ rights to meaningful information about their health and illness conditions, biomedicine holds significant authority over peoples’ lives to the degree that biomedicalization now involves the production of individual and collective identities that are constructed through technoscientific means. The technoscientific identity has even become a type of illness identity that involves applying biomedical information and characteristics to a person’s sense of self in the face of illness.