Quality of life as a mode of governance: NGO talk of HIV ‘positive’ health in India

Quality of life (QOL) is being increasingly emphasized in healthcare research and practice around the world as a desirable and measurable outcome of health policy, health-seeking behaviour and overall life satisfaction. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of governmentality and biopower, we take the position that the promotion of a universal and apolitical concept of QOL, as it pertains to individual health and well-being, can be seen as being tied to a neoliberal rationality of global socio-economic and health governance. In understanding non-government organizations (NGOs) as a prime catalyst for socio-economic change under neoliberalism, we highlight ways in which HIV-related NGOs in India can be seen to deploy aspects of the prescriptive and regulatory QOL discourse in their promotions of an empowered HIV ‘positive’ health and subjectivity. Implications are discussed in terms of the inevitable tensions involved for many under-resourced HIV-positive people in India who, in the name of QOL, are called upon to identify and act as entrepreneurial and (self)empowered individuals in particular normalizing terms.