Complicating cure: How Australian criminal law shapes imagined post-hepatitis C futures.
Sociol Health Illn
; 45(1): 179-195, 2023 01.
Article
en En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-36254737
ABSTRACT
In recent years, highly tolerable and effective drugs have emerged promising a radical new 'post-hepatitis C' world. Optimism about medical cure potentially overlooks discrimination and stigma associated with hepatitis C and injecting drug use. Legal frameworks are especially relevant to hepatitis futures, since the law has the potential to reinforce or alleviate stigma and discrimination. This article explores how hepatitis C figures in Australian criminal law and with what potential effects. Drawing on Bruno Latour's work on legal veridiction, Alison Kafer's work on futurity and disability and case law data collected for a major study on hepatitis C and post-cure lives, we explore how the criminal law handles hepatitis C in the age of cure. We find that law complicates cure, constituting hepatitis C as disabling despite the advent of effective cures. The law steadfastly maintains its own approach to disease, disability and illness, untouched by medical and scientific developments, in ways that might complicate straightforwardly linear imaginaries of cure, transformation and progress of the kind that dominate biomedicine. We explore the implications of these tensions between law and medicine.
Palabras clave
Texto completo:
1
Colección:
01-internacional
Base de datos:
MEDLINE
Contexto en salud:
2_ODS3
Problema de salud:
2_sustancias_psicoativas
Asunto principal:
Hepatitis C
/
Trastornos Relacionados con Sustancias
Límite:
Humans
País/Región como asunto:
Oceania
Idioma:
En
Revista:
Sociol Health Illn
Año:
2023
Tipo del documento:
Article
País de afiliación:
Australia