ABSTRACT
Roughly a quarter-century ago, Robin Kearns’ (1993) critique of medical geography established a conceptual space for a reformed geography of health focused on the dynamic relationships between health and place. Kearns’ (1993) critique sparked responses from across medical geography, one of them by Dorn and Laws (1994), who welcomed Kearns’ reformist argument but argued it overlooked recent advances in social theory regarding the body, its material and representational forms, and the embodied subject positions created and resisted in contemporary society. Dorn and Laws’ challenge was important because it initiated an engagement between post-structuralism and health geography. The post-structuralist geographies of health that have emerged since share a concern for the dynamic relationship between people, place and health but reject the idea that the meaning of these experiences is centered in an autonomous, rational subject’s experience of a physical location. Instead, poststructural geographies of health pursue decentered accounts that relocate the production of meaning from the individual to the way individuals are defined as subjects within discourses, the processes of embodiment by which individuals are placed in the world, and the state strategies by which individual health is politicized.
