New materialist perspectives on health, illness and health care

The new materialisms bring to the sociological study of health and illness a perspective that is materialist, relational and post-anthropocentric, while its flattened ontology steps away from the earlier structuralist tradition of historical materialism. It explores health not as an attribute or stock of embodied capital, but as a ‘becoming-other’, measured in terms of capacities to engage with other materialist, both human and non-human. This chapter examines the foundational premises of the new materialisms and shows how these have been used to inform the study of health empirically and theoretically. It reviews a range of studies that have used these approaches and explores the politics of health and health care deriving from the relational, post-anthropocentric and monist ontology of a new materialist analysis of health and illness.