Sars and Security: Health in the “New Normal”

Abstract

The notion of the "new normal" first claimed centre stage in public discourse shortly after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 (referred to as 9/11) during a Republican Party event in which Vice President Dick Cheney remarked that "Many of the steps we have been forced to take will become permanent in American life. They represent an understanding as it is, and dangers we must guard against perhaps for decades to come. I think of it as the new normalcy." 1 This new normalcy (or the "new normal" as it soon became known) quickly came to denote an ongoing state of uncertainty -indeed, of quasi-emergency -in which the "landscape of fear" has changed due to a diminished level of confidence that the world is as safe and secure as it once was. 2 In our analysis, the new normal is a coherent set of discourses and practices that construct the world as newly insecure. It has been especially prominent in the aftermath of the various "crises" that are taken to be hallmarks of a new era of insecurity. 3 As commentators from several disciplines, but above all sociology, have remarked, the contemporary world is often conceptualized as newly and inherently insecure, and insecurity exists at all levels of existence: in biology, in intimate relations and individual careers, and in governmental and economic systems. 4 The new normal encapsulates a way of (re)constructing and responding to this insecurity, at least in the early part of the twenty-first century. What interests us is not so much the exact boundaries of the term itself (which is widely used in colloquial arenas such as blogs and in formal publications) as the parallels and links it generates across different domains: military and political, economic, and (our interest) public health. In the aftermath of 9/11, the new normal perspective served to legitimize changes to long-held understandings of the social and legal makeup of American society, leading to a general loss of freedoms and/or invasions of privacy in various ways: by inter alia allowing government investigators to use roving wiretaps; tripling the number of border patrol and immigration personnel that work the Canada-US border; indefinitely detaining immigrants; 5 and allowing the FBI to secretly access personal information about any citizen, including library, medical, education, internet, telephone, and financial records, without demonstrating that those under suspicion have any involvement in espionage or terrorism. Studies in Political Economy6 In other words, at this time the new normal became a legitimizing discourse for American neoconservativism, a point to which we shall return below.While the discourses and practices of national security have been worrying social commentators for some time, more recently the same kinds of worries have begun to reach into an apparently separate arena: public health. The study of health risks within public health and health promotion has been concerned largely with characterizing target populations' perceptions of specific health risks, with the aims of devi...

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