The Reconfiguration of 'Care of the Self' and Public Health under Neoliberal Governmentality: Biopolitical Technologies of Subjectivation

This paper explores how neoliberal governance techniques reconstruct public health and self-care ethics into a technology for producing self-responsible and governable subjects. Set against the backdrop of contemporary biopolitical power transformation, the study emphasizes how scientific rationalism and liberal discourse work together as key governance mechanisms. The analysis reveals two main findings. First, scientific rationalism, through health standards, evidence-based medicine, and expert authority, transforms biopolitical norms into moral obligations, health into personal responsibility, and redefines structural inequality as personal failure. This creates a neoliberal subject characterized by self- regulation, optimization, and “responsible freedom.” Second, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, governance expands to a dual mechanism of biopolitics and psychopolitics. Fear, visibility, and datafication, as emotional technologies, induce self-monitoring, emotional resilience, and voluntary obedience. This process shapes “resilient subjects” whose freedom is primarily exercised through continuous adaptation to external directives. These findings suggest that neoliberal public health mechanisms do not merely safeguard life; they restructure life into a governable domain where care becomes a means of control. This article argues that overcoming this paradigm requires reimagining care and resilience that transcends self- responsibility, moving towards creative, relational, and life-affirming forms of subjectivity.