Deregulatory Folkways of Health: Disruption, Aspiration, Awakening

This article situates the ethical function of health within contemporary deregulation, as a broad governing logic focused on individual entrepreneurial freedom. The article presents three US-based case studies that resonate internationally and are positioned across the health spectrum, examining a blood diagnostic company, a popular wellness brand, and conspiratorial health influencers. The author develops the framework of deregulatory folkway to underscore the way deregulation in health (1) stratifies the population, as a means of generating value and profits; and (2) justifies inequality in terms of exceptional individuals, enterprising companies, salvific campaigns, and other claims on the future. The case studies foreground three specific deregulatory folkways — disruption, aspiration, and awakening — that the author scrutinizes as extractive and complicit in guiding health toward individualized entitlement, possessive freedom, and transactional relations with the human body. The triptych reveals a process of value creation — of generating capital (economic, political, social, bodily) — that promises better health awareness, efficiency, enlightenment, even life expectancy, yet depends on and deepens inequality. The article ends by positing political care for interdependency — health as solidarity — against the myth of the individual and deregulation's cynical endorsement of ongoing gendered racialized ills.