Blood, lungs, and passports

This chapter explores the material conditions of residence in Dubai, showing how they are inexorably tied to the materials of health-screening processes (x-rays and vials of blood for TB and HIV, respectively). These medical materials, due to their nature, are a microcosm of both the physical and social body and person. They are also locally known as potent symbols of the body and dirt, informing the ways in which people understand health and purity in relation to the human body. This ethnography follows migrant men as they participate in residential health-screening and navigate these medical materialities to develop a highly sought-after form of social and political legitimacy in personhood. Migrant men in Dubai are highly aware of their precarious position. They are made subject to human rights abuses, but they often have their own motivations in making themselves subject to these regimes. Failed medical testing results in immediate deportation from the country, and these men are not given the results of their tests. Following these medical materials’ ‘disjunctures,’ rather than simply following the objects themselves, highlights how migrants are made subject to processes of biopolitics that construct notions of cleanliness and dirtiness through bureaucratic medical hegemony

Anthropological Studies and Insights · Medicine · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Sex work and related issues

• Objects of safety and imprisonment

  Open Access•Kate Binnie, Coreen Mcguire et al.•Journal of Material Culture•2021

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