This collection of essays on narrative and the politics of health is unavoidably framed by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented global health crisis that has brought to the fore key health disparities and the importance of narrative in medical discourse. As Priscilla Wald articulates, “outbreak narratives” of disease, such as COVID-19, influence “how both scientists and the lay public understand the nature and consequences of infection, how they imagine the threat, and why they react so fearfully to some disease outbreaks and not others at least as dangerous and pressing.” In the Trump presidency era of fake news and misinformation, it is increasingly evident how sociopolitical narratives of health, particularly those grounded in economic interests, have potentially lethal consequences as the number of COVID-19 cases in the United States skyrocketed amidst antimask protests and demands to reopen businesses and schools. While Trump has been publicly condemned for his refusal to follow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's recommendations, that is, scientific discourse, the impetus for a rushed COVID-19 vaccine is also potentially hazardous if it compromises medical rigor in favor of immediate (and profitable) results. Thus, responses to the COVID-19 pandemic are more complex than either trusting or disbelieving scientific narratives, but instead point to how narratives of health are intimately wound up in sociopolitical and economic contexts. As a result, this collection of essays responds to a key research question, namely, “what are the political forces that influence our definitions of health?” While these essays may not directly address COVID-19, they do elucidate the critical role of narrative in the politics of health that has formed the backdrop of the pandemic and arguably influenced which countries have experienced the most significant losses of life based on the outbreak narrative accepted by its government.

As the biopolitical power of Western medicine has exponentially expanded throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, accordingly numerous disciplines have questioned the boundaries of “health” and “normalcy” as defined by biomedical discourse. In particular, theorists have critiqued how standards of health are historically based on white male middle-class cisgendered heterosexual able-bodied experience in order to reinforce social hierarchies of power.