Illness Identities and Biological Citizenship: Reading the Illness Narratives of Hepatitis C Patients

A growing number of social scientists are asking important questions about the dawning of a new kind of citizenship – biological citizenship – and its implications for how we understand the relationship between the state and civil society actors. The perspective of biological citizenship can be expanded to include the emergence of illness as a new political cleavage, as an identity through which citizens frame their political demands and challenge authorities for forms of redress. Using the case study of hepatitis C in Canada, this chapter asks whether these new forms of citizenship, rooted in illness identities, undermine other dimensions of citizenship. Is biological citizenship contributing to a new wave of contentious politics which takes as its starting point the citizen’s relationship to his/her biological body? Or, rather, must we examine how in the process of contestation, illness activists may reinforce particular ways of seeing and knowing the biomedical body? The illness narratives of Hepatitis C patients also reveal how biological citizens are “made up” from above (by government, scientific and medical authorities) and from below, by patients themselves who work to contest biological and biomedical truth claims. Patients’ ability to problematize official knowledge regarding hepatitis C, however, depends on a number of factors, including the social status of infected individuals, in this case whether they were infected through intravenous drug use or through the