Hsuan L. Hsu & Martha Lincoln

Health media & global inequalities

Since its emergence in the nineteenth

世纪, public health has primarily
been the charge of nation-states acting
to maintain the health of populations.1
In addition to taking steps to prevent
疾病, governments deploy the rheto-
ric of health and “hygiene” to police the
behavior and movements of immigrants
and colonial subjects.2 Yet the mobility
of microbes that circulate “through air
travel, 商业, and the circuits of
capital”3 has given rise to transnational
institutions such as the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and the World Health
组织, which track disease vul-
nerability worldwide and pursue im-
provement in the health of world pop-
ulations. How is the project of global
health bound up with the uneven ex-
changes of globalization,4 以及如何
does it attempt to produce “healthy”
subjectivities across lines of race, gen-
这, 班级, 语言, and citizenship?

Public service campaigns deploy mass

media to frame health as the responsi-
bility of individuals and communities.
From instructing parents to have their
children vaccinated to warning against
the risks of illegal drugs, media cam-
paigns provide states and other agents

with a means to shape citizens’ health
behaviors. This “hypodermic” model
of education, as media studies scholars
term it, presumes that information can
be “injected” into passive audiences to
produce desired changes in attitude or
behavior.5

Not only the content, but also the nar-

rative and aesthetic features of health
communications mediate and impact
their reception. These features, 实际上,
“create a range of publics”6 and resist
association with any idea of a universal
“public” to be educated. Public health
活动, 所以, demand interdis-
ciplinary analysis that combines textu-
al interpretation with research that ad-
dresses local and transnational forces
that affect the health of populations.
We know that discourses about health
shape and direct people’s experiences of
embodiment and subjectivity, their per-
ceptions of risk, and their health behav-
iors; so how do educational campaigns
that intend to transmit health informa-
tion across national boundaries affect
these experiences? What kinds of sub-
jectivity are called forth when health in-
formation travels?

While epidemiological data con½rm
the quantitative aspects of global dis-
parities in health, mass-mediated health
discourses allow us to study the cultural

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and political dynamics of these dispari-
领带. Two such discourses–Bodies . . .
the Exhibition, which displays anatomi-
cal specimens produced in China for
consumption in wealthy ½rst-world na-
系统蒸发散, and a comic book produced by
international health and human rights
agencies to raise hiv/aids awareness
among young people in the developing
world–illustrate the role of global in-
equality in shaping the production and
consumption of health messages. 两个都
are international public health commu-
nications complicated by the fact that
their materials have originated in loca-
tions far removed from the sites of their
consumption. 身体 . . . the Exhibition
both leverages and conceals the econom-
ic inequalities and health disparities be-
tween its sites of production and con-
消费; the hiv/aids comic book
campaign attempts to redress global
health disparities, but ultimately avoids
engaging questions of inequality. 这些
representations of health, 身体, 和
human rights circulate between devel-
oped and underdeveloped nations, 超过-
emphasizing universal human qualities
and neglecting the critical role of eco-
nomic and social vulnerability in distrib-
uting health disparities unevenly around
全球.

身体 . . . the Exhibition pro½ts from

global inequalities, which are disguised
through images of anatomical universal-
ism.7 A controversial and well-attended
international exhibition of chemically
preserved, “plastinated” corpses, 身体
has drawn criticism from human rights
groups as well as experts on health edu-
阳离子. Setting aside questions about the
exhibit’s self-designation as a resource
for public education, Bodies nonetheless
conveys a tremendous amount of infor-
mation regarding cultural constructions
of health, selfhood, and the body to an

audience that numbers in the millions.
Bodies has been on tour since 2005, 和
is currently on view in nine internation-
al cities, including New York, Madrid,
维也纳, 布达佩斯, Las Vegas, and Co-
penhagen. Addressed to middle- 和
upper-class visitors (the price of ad-
mission in New York, 例如, 是
$27.50), the exhibition’s didactic texts
privilege voluntary health behaviors. A
closer look at the exhibition’s sourcing
of its specimens, 然而, shows that
this voluntaristic model–which encour-
ages individuals to take responsibility
for their own healthy “lifestyle”–at
once requires and conceals global dis-
parities in environmental toxicity, 生态-
nomic resources, and availability of
卫生保健.

Although exhibitions of preserved
bodies have proven tremendously lu-
crative, their curators often appropriate
the rhetoric of “public health” to legit-
imize the private, for-pro½t traf½cking
of corpses. Bodies couches its display of
preserved corpses in a populist claim:
that specimens should serve not only
the medical establishment and its edu-
cational apparatus, but also the edi½ca-
tion of the public at large. In the words
of Gunther von Hagens, inventor of the
“plastination” process, the public dis-
play of dissected cadavers attempts to
“democratize anatomy.”8

While the gallery displays of Bodies
borrow from the cool, distancing rep-
resentational techniques of science mu-
seums and anatomy textbooks, 他们的
rhetoric also relies on psychological
processes of identi½cation. “With edu-
cational relevance for all ages,” Bodies
advertises, “this exhibition of real hu-
man specimens immerses visitors in
the complexities of the human body,
telling us the amazing story of our-
selves with reverence and understand-
ing.”9 Bodies orchestrates the “story

健康
媒体 &
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不平等

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代达罗斯之泉 2009

Hsuan L.
Hsu &
Martha
Lincoln

of ourselves” through visual and textual
strategies of “immersion” that cue visi-
tors to identify both with idealized bod-
ies and with the social, 经济的, 和
technological forces that underwrite
their display.

At the entrance to Bodies in New York,

an inscription announces, “To see is
to know.” Yet many of the bodies on
display seem posed for theatrical effect
rather than anatomical instruction.
While individual galleries include glass
cases ½lled with body parts–a spinal
柱子, a shoulder joint, a smoker’s
lung–most also include one or two
elaborately posed bodies designed to
exemplify the beauty and complexity
of the human form while also illustrat-
ing the interdependence of corporeal
系统. These idealized, partially dis-
sected bodies are posed on pedestals
as athletes handling footballs and bas-
ketballs to exhibit the movement of
joints and the interdependence of skel-
etal muscles, or as a musical conductor
wielding a baton to illustrate the work-
ings of the nervous system.

Bodies actively encourages viewers
to recognize themselves in the plasti-
nated corpses on display, 哪个是
rendered super½cially universal by the
removal of their skin and the insertion
of arti½cial blue eyeballs. The placards
that accompany individual bodies ask
viewers to try moving their own body
parts to feel the muscles, joints, 和
cartilage they are looking at: “Bend an
ear toward your face and notice how it
instantly regains its shape.” Thus Bodies
is not only an anatomy lesson, it is also
a lesson in self-recognition in which
viewers learn to grasp, 操纵, 和
manage their own bodies. As John Zeller,
the exhibition’s co-curator, puts it when
describing the bodies’ “approachable”
appearance, “You’re seeing this mirror
image of yourself.”10

Compared with the carefully labeled
body fragments displayed under glass,
the freestanding bodies that comprise
the main attraction convey only a mod-
icum of anatomical knowledge, 和
excess of theatrical display. Poised to
pitch a baseball or conduct a symphony,
they are exemplary specimens of athlet-
icism and self-care. Through them, 这
exhibition instills a desire to live what
Michel Foucault calls a “medically in-
formed life,” by endorsing normative
health behaviors.11 For example, a Plex-
iglas box located near displays featur-
ing diseased tissues is accompanied
by a placard suggesting that the viewer
“Leave your cigarettes here and stop
smoking now!” Elsewhere, visitors ob-
serving a body posed as a basketball
player are advised to “do your sit-ups.”
More broadly, the exhibition aims to
shape visitors’ routine conduct: “Mus-
cular weakness is easily reversed by nor-
mal everyday activity. It is never too late
to start that workout.” These rehears-
als of apparently common-sense advice
on physical habits recall Foucault’s com-
ments on the “generalized medical con-
sciousness” that accompanied the emer-
gence of clinical medicine, wherein
“the consciousness of each individual
must be alerted; every citizen must be
informed of what medical knowledge
is necessary and possible.”12
In addition to asking viewers to identi-

fy physically with the plastinated speci-
mens on display, Bodies also moves view-
ers to af½rm a health care system based
on notions of “freedom” and formal
equality in which the individual, 不是
国家, is charged with the responsi-
bility of maintaining life and health.
This model of health care, which as-
sumes the individual exercise of volun-
tary activities and rational decision-
制作, has been tied to a clinical per-

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spective that tends to “blame the victim”
while disregarding structural contribu-
tors to health. As anthropologists Paul
Farmer and Arthur Kleinman put it:

The concept of autonomous individuals
who are solely responsible for their fate,
including their illnesses, is a powerful
cultural premise in North American so-
城市. . . . Individual effects of powerful
social forces beyond personal control
are discounted.13

This premise of individual responsi-
bility masks numerous inequalities that
render Bodies’ specimens available in
the ½rst place. While Bodies claims to up-
hold a commitment to public health,
the exhibit carefully obscures connec-
tions between subject and society. 这
dissections in Bodies maximize exposure
of physiological content, label constitu-
ent parts selectively, and are stripped of
demographic and individual identi½ers.
Exhibit spokespeople claim that the
full-body specimens originate as “un-
claimed” cadavers that have become
the property of the Chinese state. Citing
legal protections of con½dentiality, 这
organizers of Bodies have refused to re-
lease information pertaining to individ-
ual specimens, and the exhibition’s di-
dactic materials indicate the circum-
stances of death only “where appropri-
ate.”14 Though a concern for the “digni-
ty” of the bodies is cited as justi½cation
for these measures, the removal of phys-
ical and legal identi½ers symbolizes–
and facilitates–the removal of citizen-
ship from the cadavers: their eviction
not only from particular demographic
团体, but also from the category of
persons with enforceable rights.

The designations “body,” “specimen,”
and “exhibit” prioritize the status of the
cadavers as bearers of biological content,
eliding the social and cultural contexts
from which these individuals have been

abstracted. If these subjects are “hu-
男人,” however, the exhibitors of Bodies
must demonstrate that they consented
to this posthumous use of their bodies.
Paradoxically, by refusing to disclose the
names and life circumstances of these
subjects, and by ensuring that they can-
not be physically identi½ed, the exhib-
itors of Bodies assert that their probable
violations of the subjects’ rights to in-
formed consent cannot be ascertained
without violating those subjects’ rights
to privacy. Stripping away both the skin
and the personal histories of its speci-
mens, Bodies produces a category of
anonymous beings who are bearers
and exemplars of humanistic qualities
和价值观, but disarticulated from his-
tory and agency and rendered beyond
the reach of “human rights.” Here it is
worth recalling Hannah Arendt’s con-
tention that the “universal” condition
of humanity, recognized as suf½cient
for the protection of “human dignity”
or “human rights” by liberal humanist
political discourse, proves insuf½cient
to establish the physical and political
security of stateless subjects. In the case
of Bodies, legal guarantees of (certain)
individual rights actually enable abuses
by denying access to documentation.15
The most signi½cant factor contribut-
ing to both a flexible labor reserve and a
continuous supply of anonymous bod-
ies in China is a massive population of
dislocated “floating people” who have
moved to urban centers in search of em-
ployment. “[自从] the state sanctioned
the entry of peasants into the newly
marketizing cities after 1983,” political
scientist Dorothy Solinger writes, A
floating population numbering between
forty and one hundred million has resid-
ed and worked in China’s cities.16 The
dif½culty of identifying and counting
these people attests to their vulnerable
status as itinerants who “reside in a

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媒体 &
全球的
不平等

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代达罗斯之泉 2009

Hsuan L.
Hsu &
Martha
Lincoln

realm of uncertain legality.”17 Now com-
prising up to a third of China’s urban
人口, floating people, 根据
political scientist Michael Dutton, 是:

[时间]he Chinese subaltern. 他们是
floating outcasts of a society that is or-
ganized to ensure that everyone has a
地方. . . . Economic reform has left . . .
internal migrants, the poor, the desti-
图特, the criminal, and the undesirable
–more vulnerable than at any time
自从 1949 revolution.18

Dutton contends that floating people
represent a form of marginalization and
vulnerability that has been overlooked
by Western discourses of human rights,
which tend to focus on overtly political
dissidents. 相似地, much of the outcry
against Bodies has been generated by al-
legations of the use of executed prison-
ers in such exhibitions and the lack of
government oversight in Chinese “body
factories.”19 Focusing on the floating
人口, 相比之下, draws attention
to larger demographic issues that predis-
pose some subjects to early and anony-
mous death.

Studies of the health of Chinese urban
migrants show that the floating popula-
tion is at disproportionately high risk for
infectious disease, employment-related
injury and illness, and premature death.
Predominantly male, young to middle-
aged, and often far removed from their
家庭, floating people may constitute
a major source of unclaimed urban
corpses. These factors are compounded
by poor housing and sanitation, 社会的
stigmatization,20 and the relative inac-
cessibility of health care for floating
人们. Most importantly, as anthropol-
ogist Judith Farquhar and professor of
Chinese medicine Quichang Zhang have
显示, the desocialization of China’s
health care system initiated in the 1980s
has introduced a rapid shift toward a

代达罗斯之泉 2009

“fee-for-services” model that leaves
many citizens unable to afford medical
care.21 The dead may be “unclaimed”
due to lack of nearby relatives or the dif-
½culty of identifying rural kin, but other
因素, such as the rising costs of burial
and cremation, probably play a role as
出色地. The predicament of the floating
population shows how inequalities–
between capitalist and post-communist
国家, country and city, resident
and migrant, permanent worker and
undocumented laborer–contribute to
the availability of unburied dead in
Chinese cities.

While Bodies’ privatized displays make

spurious claims to public health educa-
的, our next example is a formal global
health campaign intended to redress the
effects of health vulnerability and hu-
man rights abuses in underdeveloped
nations. Unlike Bodies, it does address
directly the relation between health
and human rights; 然而, like Bodies,
it remains constrained by ideals of uni-
versalism and individual responsibility
that implicitly gloss over political and
economic inequalities, speci½cally in
terms of the global epidemiology of hiv.
Whereas the pedagogical ef½cacy of

body exhibits has been questioned, 在-
formal illustrated texts often convey
information more readily than doctors,
medical journals, or public health agen-
cies themselves. Although the entertain-
ment industry has generally shied away
from depictions of aids and has avoided
including hiv-positive characters in sto-
rylines,22 aids awareness campaigns
have often appropriated the comic book
format to disseminate their message.
Building on a long-established genre of
cartoons designed to spread health in-
形成,23 the World Health Organi-
扎化 (WHO) and the United Nations
recently launched a series of comic

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books including The Right to Health
(2002), hiv/aids: Stand Up For Human
Rights (2003), and hivand aids: 人类
Rights for Everyone (2006). Translated into
several languages and distributed among
“poor, vulnerable and marginalized
population groups” in the global south,
these materials aim to spread awareness
of the universal right to health and dig-
nity.24 Yet they do so by calling on read-
ers to “stand up” to their own communi-
ties and national governments and make
claims for rights that may be supported
neither by material circumstances nor
positive legal entitlements. hiv/aids:
Stand Up For Human Rights presents a par-
ticularly clear example of both the im-
portance and the dif½culty of developing
a rights-based approach to global health.
在 2003, the who, the Joint United

Nations Programme on hiv/aids
(unaids), and the Of½ce of the Unit-
ed Nations High Commissioner for Hu-
man Rights (ohchr) developed hiv/
aidsas a twenty-page comic book and
launched a campaign to circulate it to
a growing list of countries, 包括
博茨瓦纳, 加纳, Mozambique, 南
非洲, Thailand, 乌干达, and Zambia.
With the support of the Fédération In-
ternationale de Football Association
(fifa), whose head stated that the
“universal nature of football” made it
an ideal medium for messages about
health and human rights, the comic
book was distributed to youth via na-
tional football associations in some
African countries.25

The comic’s action takes place “one
day at the football ½eld,” in a geograph-
ically unspeci½ed location and among
a multiracial group of youths who col-
lectively stand in for the global village.
The football game is postponed when a
young black man named Freddy refuses
to play because he has to stay home and
help his sick mother. As the other foot-

ball players discuss whether Freddy’s
mother “should be told to leave the vil-
lage” because she is hiv positive, A
young white man interrupts with a mon-
ologue about aids transmission, risks,
and the duty to “protect ourselves and
help our friends who have hiv instead
of leaving them sad and lonely.”26 He
then leads the group of friends to Fred-
dy’s home, where Freddy’s mother in-
forms them tearfully that the doctor at
the village health center refused to help
她. 幸运的是, one of the other foot-
ball players, a South Asian woman
named Alisha, is the daughter of the su-
pervisor at the health center. She speaks
with her father that evening, 和
next day he orders the doctor to “treat a
person with hiv/aids with respect and
dignity like everybody else.”27 Freddy’s
mother is admitted to the hospital, 和
the group of friends discusses other ways
to defend human rights by ½ghting dis-
crimination based on gender, 班级, 和
种族. As the youths and their neighbors
assemble to make posters about the uni-
versality of human rights, the white man
who ½rst stood up for Freddy’s mother
explains why he knows so much about
hiv: “because actually I am hiv positive
as well.”28 The ½nal pages of the comic
are left blank so that readers can design
their own posters and write down ideas
for combating discrimination.

By populating its global village with
subjects whose differences are racial,
种族的, 和文化, but not economic,
政治的, or behavioral, hiv/aidsen-
ables almost any reader to identify
with a character who looks “familiar.”29
Whereas Bodies produces a negative ver-
sion of universalism by encouraging its
predominantly white, privileged viewers
to identify with a stripped-down and ap-
parently raceless body, hiv/aidsen-
courages readers in the global south
to identify with one of the diverse char-

健康
媒体 &
全球的
不平等

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代达罗斯之泉 2009

Hsuan L.
Hsu &
Martha
Lincoln

acters who physically resembles them.
This enables the comic to be exported
without rescripting to address factors
that shape the local epidemiology of
aids: the distribution of wealth and
贫困; constructions of gender and
性欲; access to hiv prevention
and treatment programs. hiv/aids
has been translated into French, Por-
tuguese, 西班牙语, and Thai, but its illus-
trations and storyline have undergone
no revisions for distribution to individ-
ual nations, and no data have been col-
lected regarding the comic’s impact on
its readers.30
While at the level of language the text

connotes universal ideals of multicultur-
alism and equality, its illustrations and
characterizations reinforce particulari-
ty and social strati½cation, recruiting ra-
cial and gender stereotypes to drive the
plot and command the identi½cation of
读者. Readers are allowed to identify
with the person who physically resem-
bles them, yet simultaneously they are
encouraged to identify with the person
who speaks for them: the white male
特点, who dominates the cartoon’s
dialogue. The young, well-informed
white man intervenes at a key moment
to instruct his friends in both scienti½c
and humanitarian aspects of the hiv
epidemic, convincing them not only to
tolerate Freddy but to visit his mother’s
home and think of ways to help. 铝-
though he turns out to be hiv positive
他自己, this character is positioned as
an “outside expert” who does not share
in the material hardships that render
Freddy and his mother vulnerable to a
range of health risks. The comic repre-
sents the white character as an exem-
plar of the universal: unlike Alisha or
Freddy, he has no name, and is never
shown with his family or with markers
of obvious ethnic or national belonging.

(His appearance and clothing, 实际上,
are reminiscent of the Belgian cartoon
character Tintin, whose international
adventures have been critiqued as a cele-
bration of colonialism.) While his atten-
tive friends sometimes appear baffled
by his discourse, he speaks the language
of human rights as if it were intuitive.
His rhetoric, 然而, reinscribes
the very differences of race, 班级, gen-
这, and geographical location that the
comic’s setting suspends. His warnings
against needle sharing and unsafe sex
are accompanied by panels depicting
stigmatized scenarios of deviant, risky
行为 (see inside back cover). Unsafe
性别, 例如, is illustrated by silhou-
etted ½gures performing a sex act in an
orientalized setting, possibly a brothel.
相比之下, an example of safer sex is
provided by a white couple civilly nego-
tiating condom use in a cozy bedroom.31
While the comic’s emphasis on “human
rights” is grounded in the universalizing
metaphor of a level playing ½eld for the
multicultural football players, these pan-
els reinscribe the geographically and de-
mographically uneven distribution of
贫困, drug abuse, sex work, condom
availability, and gender equality that un-
derlie differential vulnerability to hiv/
aids.

The plot of hiv/aidsdeemphasizes

these differences, modeling human
rights interventions in terms of individ-
ual and interpersonal actions. Interper-
sonal sympathy crosses the boundaries
of race and hiv status, undoing the so-
cial stigmatization of people living with
hiv. 第一的, the white football player in-
tervenes by educating his playmates
about hiv transmission and persuading
them to sympathize with Freddy and his
母亲. 下一个, Alisha’s sympathy moves
her to speak with her father, who directs
the hospital staff to provide Freddy’s
mother with care. 最后, in a scene

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that resembles a political demonstra-
的, the football players gather near
the hospital and make signs with slo-
gans like “Stand up for human rights”
and “Do not discriminate.” In all of
these instances, sympathy for people
living with hiv stands in for concrete
political and material changes. It is thus
not surprising that Freddy and his moth-
er are absent from the demonstration,
and instead are seen making their way
back into the clinic, while one of Fred-
dy’s friends calls out “Well done Alisha
for talking to your father!” By contrast
with the hiv-positive white protago-
尼斯特, the black woman’s case for human
rights does not appear self-evident, 也不
does the comic depict her as capable of
standing up for herself. hiv/aidsmar-
shals a politics of sympathy, not a poli-
tics of self-advocacy or an ethic of self-
关心. The interventions it depicts are
voluntary, exceptional acts that normal-
ize the absence or selective removal of
material entitlements. Freddy’s mother
ultimately receives care not on account
of her independence or her claims upon
the health care system, but owing to the
sympathy of others.

These individual interventions in the
name of human rights stand in for politi-
cal action and substantive changes that
might secure material entitlements to
卫生保健. The protagonists ultimately
translate their concern for Freddy and
his mother into a public demonstration
of concern, but their appearance in the
street with handmade signs is not a tool
of political pressure. 反而, they work
to transmit a human rights message to
fellow citizens, some of whom join
them and contribute statements about
the rights of women and the poor. 尽管
hiv/aidspresents the process of learn-
ing about human rights as contempora-
neous with simulated social justice activ-
实体, the right that is enacted most ro-

bustly is the community’s right to frame
concerns in terms of human rights lan-
规格, not its right to the economic or
material inputs to health. 因此, one de-
sired outcome of the comic, as evi-
denced by the pages left blank for read-
ers to “Draw your own poster for a cam-
paign on hiv/aids discrimination,“ 是
to self-replicate by generating more me-
dia about the universality of human
rights.32
The interpretation of human rights as

comprising political entitlements rather
than economic and material needs has,
as Farmer argues, traditionally informed
the mandate of agencies working to re-
lieve poverty and social affliction.33
Drawing on his experience as a health
worker in Haiti and other resource-poor,
justice-starved countries, Farmer notes
the frequent mismatch between the pri-
orities of aid agencies and their client
人口:

Although those we served ardently desired
civil and political rights, they spoke more
often of what are termed “social and eco-
nomic rights.” These rights include the
right not to starve to death or die in child-
birth; the right to treatment, even for . . .
dif½cult-to-treat afflictions such as aids;
the right to primary schooling and the
right to clean water.34

In hiv/aids, we are not shown whether
Freddy’s mother is in need of food, 嗯-
ployment, health insurance, or a clinic
equipped with suf½cient medication,
电, and latex gloves: the discus-
sion of her “rights” does not bring these
questions into focus. 反而, the comic
implicitly depicts the hospital as fully
equipped, but staffed with prejudiced
医生.

In an essay on the discrepant priorities

of human rights organizations and Af-
rican citizens, the human rights lawyer

健康
媒体 &
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代达罗斯之泉 2009

Hsuan L.
Hsu &
Martha
Lincoln

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu notes the need
for a movement that “evoke[s] respons-
es from the political process.”35 Since
the traditional mandate of ½rst-world
relief agencies has eschewed political
and economic solutions in preference
to narrowly conceived legal agendas,
他认为, “real-life struggles for social
justice are waged despite human rights
团体 . . . by people who feel that their
realities and aspirations are not ade-
quately captured by human rights or-
ganizations and their language.”36 By
framing human rights primarily in
terms of individual altruistic actions
and calls for state governments to re-
spect human rights, hiv/aidsdeem-
phasizes transnational factors, 这样的
as the legacy of racialized colonialism,
the impact of structural adjustment pro-
克, and legal protections for phar-
maceuticals as “intellectual property,”37
which have contributed profoundly to
the globally uneven distribution of dis-
ease and premature death.

In a press release announcing the
launch of hiv/aids, 博士. Jim Kim, 为了-
mer director of the who’s hiv/aids
部门, stressed the importance of
a rights-based approach to public health:

[氮]ot only ensuring access to treatment
as part of the realization of the right to
健康, but equally addressing hiv-relat-
ed stigma and discrimination, paying par-
ticular attention to vulnerable population
团体, incorporating a gender perspec-
主动的, and making sure that other related
human rights aspects, such as the right
to information and the right to partici-
pation, are integral components in our
response to the epidemic.

Although hiv/aidsdirectly addresses
the issues of stigma and discrimination,
it does so by naturalizing two social
团体: one of informed, 赋权
activists like Alisha and the white pro-

tagonist; and one of “vulnerable,” mini-
mally characterized victims. Characters
like Freddy and his mother receive ac-
cess to treatment and the right to partic-
ipate only by proxy, through the excep-
tional individual interventions of more
socially and economically privileged
subjects. The comic’s shortcomings il-
lustrate the dif½culties of representing
and realizing the substantive entitle-
ments that Kim endorses.

With its cosmopolitan ½rst-world au-

dience, its commercial motivations, 和
its connection to human rights abuses
among vulnerable populations, 身体
puts forward a deeply problematic
health message. By encouraging audi-
ences to identify with its anonymized,
“universal” human specimens, 前任-
hibit conceals and compounds the so-
cial strati½cation that contributes to ill
health worldwide. Where Bodies turns
global political and economic disparities
to its advantage, hiv/aidsrepresents
an attempt to articulate the connections
between human rights and health. 在-
tended as a readily translated document
accessible to diverse audiences, 文本
presents of½cial, authoritative knowl-
edge on hiv, human rights, and risk be-
haviors. 然而, the comic’s universal-
ist commitments neglect the material
needs and social stigmas tied to local
上下文. More critically, hiv/aidsfails
to provide insight into the large-scale
factors that contribute to ill health, 和
inadvertently reinscribes racial hierar-
chies by scripting an omniscient white
male character who takes charge of a na-
ive, tractable “global village.” As both
examples illustrate, public health repre-
sentations that fail to contextualize their
interventions within inequities of power
and access to resources fail to address
the roots of long-standing global health
差异.

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尾注
1 Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (达勒姆, 北卡罗来纳州:
杜克大学出版社, 2008), 51.
2 Alan Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace” (纽约: Basic
图书, 1994); Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s China-
town (伯克利: University of California Press, 2001); Warwick Anderson, Colonial Patholo-
吉斯: American Tropical Medicine, 种族, and Hygiene in the Philippines (达勒姆, 北卡罗来纳州: Duke
大学出版社, 2006).
3 Wald, Contagious, 25.
4 David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: A Theory of Uneven Geographical Development
(伦敦: Verso, 2006).
5 Everett Rogers and F. Floyd Shoemaker, Communication of Innovations: A Cross-Cultural
Approach (纽约: New York Free Press, 1971).
6 Charles Briggs, “Why Nation-States and Journalists Can’t Teach People to Be Healthy,”
Medical Anthropology Quarterly 17 (3) (2003). Briggs argues, 在 311, that health messages
reinforce preexisting social hierarchies by “differentially interpellat[英] people on the
basis of their perceived relationship to hygiene, medical knowledge, and ways of prevent-
ing and treating diseases. Public health has thus involved, since its modern inception, 方法
of addressing ‘the public’ that create a range of publics. Health discourse has thus played a
crucial role in de½ning and naturalizing social inequality.”
7 This section draws on a longer discussion of the Exhibition, published as Hsuan L. Hsu
and Martha Lincoln, “Biopower, 身体 . . . the Exhibition, and the Spectacle of Public
健康,” Discourse 29 (1) (冬天 2007): 15–34.
8 Quoted in Mary Orr, “Anatomy as Art, Unsettling But Drawing Crowds,” 纽约
时代, 七月 9, 2002.
9 可在 http 上获取://www.bodiestheexhibition.com/ (十一月访问 19, 2007).
10 Quoted in Bruce J. Navarro, “Exhibition Gives a Look Inside the Human Body: Skinless
Cadavers, Variety of Organs on Display in New York Show,” msnbcHealth News,
十二月 1, 2005; 可以在 http 上找到://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10137337/ (访问过
八月 12, 2007).

11 米歇尔·福柯, The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, 卷. 3, 反式. Robert Hurley

(纽约: 优质的, 1986), 100.

12 米歇尔·福柯, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, 反式. A. 中号.

Sheridan Smith (纽约: 万神殿, 1973), 31.

13 Quoted in Paul Farmer, aidsand Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame (伯克利:

University of California Press, 1992), 247–248.

14 “Frequently Asked Questions,” Bodies . . . the Exhibition Press Materials (2007), 2.
15 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (纽约: Harcourt Brace, 1979).
16 Dorothy Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasants, Migrants, the State, 和

Logic of the Market (伯克利: University of California Press, 2003), 17–23.

17 同上。, 17.
18 Michael Dutton, “Street Scenes of Subalternity: 中国, Globalization, and Rights,” Social

Text 60 (17) (1999): 63–86.

19 David Barboza, “China Turns Out Mummi½ed Bodies for Displays,“ 纽约时报,

八月 8, 2006.

20 See Li Zhang, Strangers in the City: Recon½gurations of Space, 力量, and Social Networks

(斯坦福大学, 加利福尼亚州。: 斯坦福大学出版社, 2001).

健康
媒体 &
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不平等

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代达罗斯之泉 2009

Hsuan L.
Hsu &
Martha
Lincoln

21 Judith Farquhar and Quichang Zhang, “Biopolitical Beijing: Pleasure, 主权, 和

Self-Cultivation in China’s Capital,” Cultural Anthropology 20 (3) (2005): 320.

22 Matthew McAllister, “aids and Comic Books,” Journal of Popular Culture 26 (2) (1992):

1–24.

23 For a brief survey of cartoons and other images in public health campaigns since the

1800s, see Allison Grady, “Use of Images in Public Health Campaigns,” Virtual Mentor:
American Medical Association Journal of Ethics 9 (8) (2007): 583–590.

24 “New Cartoon Hopes to Catalyze Activism on the Right to Health,” who Press Release,
十二月 6, 2002; 可以在 http 上找到://www.who.int/hhr/activities/cartoon_press/en
/index.html (十一月访问 16, 2008).

25 http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2004/pr90/en/; http://www.½fa

.com/about½fa/worldwideprograms/news/newsid=95638.html.

26 hiv/aids: Stand Up for Human Rights (日内瓦, 瑞士: 世界卫生组织,

2003), 3, 5.

27 同上。, 10.
28 同上。, 14.
29 The characters include a South Asian woman (Alisha), several dark-skinned characters

(including Freddy, his mother, and the doctor who refuses to treat her), 一个白人 (这
human rights educator), an East Asian woman, a woman who may be Mayan, an indige-
nous Latin American man, and several characters of indeterminate ethnicity.
30 Authors’ personal communication with Helena Nygen-Krug, 十一月 25, 2008.
31 Unlike other comics treating hiv, safer sex, and safer needle drug use, which have includ-
ed explicit depictions of stigmatized behaviors to promote “harm reduction” (为了考试-
普莱, the 1980s-era “Safer Sex Comix” and the 1990s-era Canadian “Tête à Queue”), 这些
images in hiv/aidsseem to give weight to the notoriously misleading notion that only
“risk groups” are threatened by hiv.

32 hiv/aids, 17.
33 Paul Farmer, “Challenging Orthodoxies: The Road Ahead for Health and Human Rights,”

Health and Human Rights 10 (1) (2008): 5–19.

34 同上。, 5.
35 Chidi Anselm Odinkalu, “Why More Africans Don’t Use Human Rights Language,”
Human Rights Dialogue 2 (1) (1999); 可以在 http 上找到://www.cceia.org/resources
/publications/dialogue/2_01/articles/602.html (十一月访问 23, 2008).

36 同上.
37 Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (Seattle:

Washington University Press, 2008).

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