Legal Studies Program, School of Social Sciences, La Trobe University, Bundoora, VIC 3086, Australia.
Soc Sci Med. 2012 Nov;75(10):1762-8. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2012.07.026. Epub 2012 Aug 5.
When seeking compensation for workplace injury, workers predictably face examination over the legitimacy of their condition from employers and medical and legal professionals. When the alleged injury is a contested environmental illness, the suspicion aroused and the scrutiny faced by workers is much more acute. In this paper, I analyse the medico-legal experiences of eight chemically sensitive claimants in Australia to reveal the nature and extent of the surveillance they are subjected to in their quest to prove the legitimacy of their disease. Four forms of surveillance are identified: medical scrutiny; legal surveillance, insurer investigation, and self-regulation. Advancing the Foucauldian concept of self-surveillance, I demonstrate that this latter form of regulation has the most deleterious impact on the claimants. The result of this scrutiny is a 'repressive authenticity' (Wolfe, 1999), where the chemically sensitive are expected to adhere to a particular normative ideal of sickness, which becomes therapeutically counterproductive.
当工人因工作场所受伤寻求赔偿时，可以预见他们会面临雇主以及医疗和法律专业人士对其病情合法性的审查。而当所谓的受伤是有争议的环境疾病时，工人所面临的怀疑和审查会更加尖锐。在本文中，我分析了澳大利亚 8 名对化学物质敏感的索赔者的医学法律经验，以揭示他们在证明自身疾病合法性的过程中所经历的监控的性质和程度。确定了四种形式的监控：医疗审查、法律审查、保险公司调查和自我监管。我进一步提出福柯的自我监控概念，证明了这种自我监管形式对索赔者的影响最具危害性。这种审查的结果是一种“压抑的真实性”（Wolfe，1999），要求对化学物质敏感的人遵守特定的疾病规范理想，这在治疗上适得其反。
