Description
The Trump Administration’s cuts to foreign aid have severely impacted health management across the world. Funding reductions have resulted in diminished access to HIV antiretrovirals in Africa, job losses among healthcare workers in low- and middle-income countries and weakened support for sexual and reproductive rights in the Global South. These cuts to foreign aid in analyses of global health tend to be simplified as a manifestation of Trump’s nationalistic rhetoric, rooted in the promise to put ‘America First’. In this paper, I suggest an alternative reading of Trump’s approach to global health and argue that – rather than a mere manifestation of an ultra-nationalist agenda – it enacts a global biopolitics of health management operated both within and outside the US borders. Domestically, this biopolitical approach operates a necropolitics that frames certain population groups as less deserving and increases their risk of health deterioration and death. Internationally, this biopolitics enacts a necropolitical logic that devalues certain forms of life by deploying foreignness as a metric of disposability. While tracing the harmful impacts of this approach, the paper draws on Butler’s concepts of precarity and grievable lives to consider emergent forms of resistance that mobilise body vulnerability as a site of political agency and a means of securing health for those racialised as 'others'.
