Jonathan Bell, Professor of American History at the UCL Institute of the Americas talks about his forthcoming book.
What impact did the lack of a universal health care system available to all have on the sexual politics of the United States since the 1960s? In my forthcoming book, I seek to understand how the nation’s unique system of valorized for-profit, private health insurance through employment combined with a limited and parsimonious welfare state predicated on categories of “deserving” poor to shape the ways in which sexual minorities became political subjects during decades of rapid social and economic change between the 1970s and the early twenty-first century.
The sexual liberation movements of these decades, both in the United States and elsewhere, focused on sexual and bodily autonomy, but the US was distinctive in its reliance on a health care marketplace to realize full sexual citizenship. The resultant centrality of the question “who pays” shaped the relationship between individual agency and collective responsibility in rights politics. It did so precisely at the time when both the welfare state and the private health insurance industry came under profound pressure in the context of global economic shifts and a political assault on the social contract of the post-New Deal era.
In addition to considering the inequalities in access to health care intrinsic to such a system, I explore the multiple ways it shaped the formation of sexual identities and then connected to larger understandings of political economy and society in ways distinct from countries with publicly funded health care and more generous social safety nets.
The exploration in the pages that follow of an emerging crisis in health care access through the lens of sex and gender offers suggestive insights into the impact of market economics on sexual identity and activism at a critical point in the reshaping of political economy in the United States
