Trabalho, Educação e Saúde - TES (Work, Education and Health) is an open access scientific journal, edited by the Joaquim Venâncio Polytechnic School of Health, from Oswaldo Cruz Foundation.
This article is an attempt to analyze the widespread use of the term 'quality of life' in everyday language and techniques in contemporary Western societies. The broad use of this term is accompanied by an uncertainty with regard to its meaning and a naturalized conception of its origin. The goal, therefore, is to analyze the processes by which the term quality of life was imbued with meaning in our culture and to argue that the major symbolic meaning acquired contemporaneously by quality of life in the biomedical sciences, health policies, and practices relating to individual health is related to a broader process of integrating biological aspects of life in the political field. Thus, I briefly introduce the emergence and development of biopolitics in modernity, and analyze some of the characteristics of contemporary biopolitics based on how the concepts of lifestyle, promotion of health, risk, autonomy and responsibility are presented which, together, constitute the current semantic field in which health is problematized. Therefore, I seek to situate the current concern for quality of life, as well as to present some of the issues that are linked to it, such as individual responsibility for one's own health and the measure of quality of life.
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