A Foucauldian Analysis of Social Production of Disease: The Case of Fibromyalgia

Date

2026-4-16

Author

Günok, Firdevs Ezgi

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This study argues that disease is not a natural entity awaiting discovery within the body, but an object historically constituted through shifting configurations of power, knowledge, and subjectivity. Drawing on Foucauldian discourse analysis of medical journals, parliamentary debates, official public health documents, and patient advocacy materials, it examines how medical knowledge emerges in relation to concrete social problems and, in turn, reshapes the power relations conditioning its production by establishing the norms and techniques through which the body becomes legible and correctable. Fibromyalgia, a condition lacking an objective lesion, is selected as the exemplary case because it renders visible this ordinarily concealed process of social production. The study identifies three grounds of intelligibility across which disease has been produced in twentieth-century medicine. On the somatic ground, disease is anchored to a visible lesion, framing the human being as a laboring body within a class society where medical authority arbitrates national productivity and population fitness. On the psychosomatic ground, pathology is anchored in psychic life, producing a subject intelligible through emotions and social relations. Here, society is framed as an organic whole, and medicine operates therapeutically, guiding individuals to adjust to their social environment. On the statistical ground, disease becomes a deviation from a population average. Personhood coalesces around risk profiles, and responsibility shifts toward prudent market choices of health-conscious consumers within a neoliberal social order. By historicizing disease as a process of social production, this study opens to critical scrutiny the power relations that structure our experience in the present.

Subject Keywords

Sociology of knowledge, Sociology of disease, Discourse analysis, Games of truth, Neoliberal governmentality

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/119070

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis