MAKING THE BIOPOLITICAL SUBJECT - CAMBODIAN IMMIGRANTS, REFUGEE MEDICINE AND CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP IN CALIFORNIA

Linking the health profession to the normalization of citizenship, sch olars influenced by Michel Foucault claim that while biomedicine atten ds to the health of bodies, it is also constitutive of the social and bureaucratic practices that socialize subjects of the modern welfare s tate. Yet, we seldom learn about how patients themselves draw the medi cal gaze, nor how their resistances to biomedical intervention both in vite and deflect control. I try to show this by means of clinicians' a nd Khmer refugees' interpretations of their encounters. This study ill ustrates that refugee medicine is a mix of good intentions, desire to control diseased and deviant populations, and the exigencies of limite d resources which often favor medicalization. Californian clinicians, many of them Asian-Americans, display a deep faith in the efficacy of modern medicine for third world patients so that they can function in the new country. Khmer refugees, in contrast, seek rather specific res ources while wishing to elude control over the body and mind that goes with medical care. I argue that the biomedical gaze is not such a dif fused hegemonic power but is itself generated by the complex contestat ion of refugee subjects pursuing their own goals. Clinicians and refug ees are equally caught up in webs of power involving control and subte rfuge, appropriation and resistance, negotiation and learning that con stitute biopolitical lessons of what becoming American may entail for an underprivileged Asian group.