Medicalization Aff:

TW: Drug Use, Needles #### Part 1: The Medical Model - Medicalization- Empiricism: Empiricism refers to a metaphysical project of the West that articulates that there is universal truths that have to be uncovered in order to be understood. Specifically, empiricism would articulate that there is a hegemonic way in which the world can be understood and that understanding only comes to be through Western scientific methods. This was a metaphysical project that was universalzed and globalized during the initial settler colonization of the land masses we call the ‘Americas’ and ‘Canada’ as a way to frame indigenous modes of knowledge creation as always already illegitimate and thus justified in being destroyed. - Weaponization: One of the primary ways in which empiricism is instrumentalized is through the construction of difference as something that is biologically ‘impure’ or a deficiency and that ‘impurities’ as something that must be expunged to maintain coherency. This then gets framed as a question of health, i.e that all those bodies who are disciplined by such logic are thus ‘unhealthy’ and need to be fixed in order to once again become healthy. This creates the logic of medicalization in which because the medical industrial complex is the locus for which bodies have to enter to become healthy, all of life becomes sublimated to this paradigm of health in order to become ‘normalized.’ For example, the way in which autism is constructed as a defect that has to be cured through scientific study and doctor operation. - Industrial Complex: Through this, the paradigm of medicalization becomes the paradigm for which all relationality comes into existence. For example, those that we think to be always already unhealthy are forced out of spaces of interrelation out of fear they will taint the healthy social body. Imbricated with capitalism, apparatuses like the hospital, psych ward, pharmaceutical companies are created in order to enforce this paradigm and discipline those bodies that are framed as unruly and unhealthy. For example, look to the ways in which trans women are framed as ‘disgusting’ and ‘mentally ill’ unless they are consulting with a ‘medical professional’ or being overseen by the registers of the medical industrial complex. - Violence: The creation and deployment of medicalization is an inherently violent due to the fact that it produces entire populations as threats that must be expunged in order to secure the ‘safety’ and ‘health’ of what is thought to be the healthy body. This then forces those that are framed as such to either put themselves through violent apparatuses like the medical industrial complex or be eradicated by policing. For example, look to the way in which schizophrenic folks are framed as having to pass as sane, take specific medication, or risk institutionalization or death by hands of the police for being ‘disruptive.’ - The Topic #### Part 2: Impacts- Psychic Violence- Monstrosity: Those of us who are framed as ‘disruptive, scary, or hegemonic displays of Gender’ are framed as monsters par excellence. Subjects who nobody would ever want to be, who nobody would ever want to be around, and whose very presence is always already uncomfortable. This ever presence social reality causes an internalization of these constructions of monstrosity which causes perpetual self hatred. This is due to the fact that the material power of medicalization codes psychic perception itself and thus those of us who are embedded as targets for its violence are still susceptible for this coding. - O/W on timeframe and proximity: This outweighs on timeframe because it is constantly going on regardless of the material realities around a subject they are constantly waging a war against themselves. It also outweighs on proximity because it causes a forced interiorization in which subjectivity is framed as a impure individual and thus is the most proximal because it forces a construction of subjectivity in which one has to turn inward. - Turns education: This turns education because in a reality in which someone is constantly subjected to a psychic environment that is violent engagement with education becomes impossible. To elaborate, education is only important if it can be received as transformative this cannot happen while life is sublimated to medicalization, because constantly being triggered by merely existing means a constant state of dissociation and thus inability to engage with the education being produced. - Imprisonment- Disposable populations: Medicalization sustains the logic of disposable populations because those that are constructed as always already unhealthy to the social body are forced into material segregation from those framed as lives worth saving and relegated to die or forever be separated in prisons. For example, the way in which blackness is read as always already toxic and thus prema facile worthy of imprisonment or those that are ‘too mentally ill’ are relegated to constant psychiatric care. - O/W on magnitude: This is a process of otherization and thus outweighs on magnitude because once life becomes disposable than any atrocity can be justified against it. For example, once antiblackness disciplined blackness it allowed for the justifications for the horrors of chattel slavery and once the US othered and homogenized Japan it allowed for nuclear genocides. - Turns fairness: This turns fairness because fairness assumes that there are bodies for which questions of fairness and unfairness can apply to. The logic of imprisonment that is sustained by medicalization makes that impossible because it forcibly removes bodies from ever engaging within questions of relational procedural fairness in the first place. This also means the aff is a prior question to procedural fairness. #### Don’t tell the doctors, don’t tell TSA, and don’t tell my family but I have tittys and hear voices in my head!!! Medicalization does not know how this is possible, and it shall never know how we have become this way.#### Part 3: Advocacy: Vote aff to reject medicalization and inject nomadic resistance **Thesis: **Our advocacy endorses nomadic wandering as the central framing device for which we should approach and understand life and the way that life has been dominated by the violence of medicalization. Our advocacy is a method that would endorse micropolitical projects like the reveling in trans women sharing unprescribed spironolactone, injecting estradiol without the knowledge of doctors, a stealing of the technologies that the medical industrial complex has captured in order to help aid in the unpredictable becomings of our bodies. Our advocacy endorses the radical injection of madness into the social sphere instead of constructing it as a deficiency that must be cured vis a vis psychiatric intervention.

**Solvency: **

• Advocacy solves- Biohacking: Biohacking critically reorients the use of technology away from the medicalized use of it as a tool to perfect the body to some image of health or perfection but rather utilizes it to free the body to become. This is a key strategy is combating the medicalization because it is able to undermine the material force for which medicalization is able to deploy a central part of its violence; technology. Our method allows for the gutting of the way in which medicalization preemptively codes technology as a vector of violence and instead utilizes it as a tool of liberation. Look to the way in which radical trans healthcare re-codes gender affirming surgery away from racialized-misogynistic plastic surgery and instead as a force to mutate the body to affirm agency. - Nomadism: Nomadism refers to a conceptualization of politics that forefronts the indeterminacy of life instead of forcing it to conform to a determinate method of organization. For example, the way in which the Zapatistas endorse an insurrectional model of revolt against the Mexican government in opposition to the neoliberal politics of representation that gripped movements like Occupy Wall Street. This is key for solvency because not only does it refuse to invest within the empiricist political project that sustain medicalization vis a vis endorsing indeterminacy instead, but also its key for long term solvency because instead of framing political action in a way that will collapse back into justify medicalization it makes sure they are premised off of a force of radical opposition to such. - Fugitivity: Given the foundational violence of medicalization, the only orientation towards it we can have is a criminal one. We endorse liberation of the technologies it has taken through theft and mutual aid. This is key in order to formulate a movement in which trans folks who require access to technology are not sacrificed as excess because of an individualist targeting of technology instead of the systems that situate it. For example, look to the ways in which specific anti-civ organizations in the West reproduce this transphobia and ask trans people to synthesize their own hormones or get out. #### Part 4: FW - Conceptions of subjectivity comes first- Subject/Object: Subjectivity refers to an understanding of what makes the distinction from an object. For example, if a conception of subjectivity determined that one was a subject if they were able to express agency then it would construct all that which is unable to have agency as an object in contradistinction to the subject. We endorse a conception of subjectivity that understands it as a constant process of radical change in which any process of it being stable is but one stop of an indeterminate many. - B4 Epist: Subjectivity is always a prior question to epistemology because epistemology does not refer to the creation of knowledge, but rather the process for which that knowledge becomes learned and understood. This presumes that there are those that are able to absorb epistemological frames in the first place for which subjectivity answers which means it is a prior question. This means even if in the abstract epistemology is able to be generated apart from subjectivity, what makes it intelligible is subjectification via spaces of learning. - B4 Ontology: Subjectivity is always a prior question to ontology because ontology refers to the collection of subjective forces into a coherent being. To elaborate, if ontology is what signifies what is the essence for which [x] represents, [x] first have to have the subjective substance that it collects in order to render it a being. This means that subjectivity precedes the creation of ontology. For example, look to the way in which gender non-conformity gets ontologized as inherently deviant. This requires the subjective creation of a non conforming engagement with capital G gender for that process of ontology to even be created. - B4 Tix: Politics are always grounded in conceptions of subjectivity and enacted depending on what those conceptions justify. For example, look to the way in which gun control legislation within the US is premised off of a conception of blackness as always gun toting and inherent dangerous. - B4 Rules: The rules of debate are premised off of the assumption that there are competing subjectivities within the space that even exist in the first place. This articulates that before the rules of debate can even become intellgible they are premised off of conceptions of subjectivity of what aff/neg debaters and judges are. - **ROB: **Vote for the team with the best revolutionary conception of subjectivity - Medicalization comes first: Cross apply part 1 point 1B, medicalization is the dominant way in which life is understood and thus permeates through every instance for which life is engaged with. Because of this, and the fact that medicalization is inherently violent it means that absent a deconstruction of medicalism it is impossible to have a revolutionary conception of subjectivity. - We meet: This means that any method that does not deconstruct medicalization does not meet the role of the ballot. This is not to say that you have to accept our advocacy under this paradigm, merely that you have to articulate a competing method that is able to deconstruct medicalization