The Care of the Body

Abstract

This chapter examines British community care policy and practice in the post-Second World War period in terms of a transition from the dominant corporeal discourse of ‘social efficiency’ to that of the ‘independent body’ from the mid-1970s onwards. When ‘states of dependency’ (Titmuss, 1963) were constituted as social risks, the psychic and social spaces to surround bodies under the Dispensary gaze were elaborated; and human subjects were entitled as citizens to have their care needs met outside the institution. Nevertheless, bodily dependency remained a fiscal problem for the welfare state, managed through disciplinary practices redolent of the old institutional order. With global economic crisis and the resurgence of neo-liberal economic orthodoxy, the ‘burden’ of care grew increasingly onerous and the ‘social’ was displaced by market and `family’. Constituted by the discourse of the independent body, dependency in the new mixed economy of care was ever more tightly managed through a reworking of panoptic norms in neo-Taylorism and the banishment of old, sick and disabled bodies to the hinterland of institutional care.