Marginalized Bodies in Caribbean Europe : Between Vital Inequalities and Health (Im)mobilities

Abstract

This chapter deals with unequal health mobilities in one of the most understudied margins of Europe: Caribbean Europe – the territories that form an integral part of, or are associated with, the European Union and one of its member states through their colonial histories and presents. Applying an intersectional lens and drawing on the concepts of vital and existential inequality as well as uneven and unequal mobilities, the chapter argues that Caribbean Europe, already at the bottom of stratification within multiple and unequal Europes, at times offers life-saving therapies for individuals who would otherwise have no or less adequate healthcare in their neighbouring countries of origin. This is illustrated by empirical research on Dominican cancer patients in Guadeloupe and Brazilian and Haitian HIV patients in Guyane. Analysing seemingly paradoxical mobility politics and patterns – from becoming ‘illegal’ in Guadeloupe to the ‘transborder card’ in the French-Brazilian borderland – the chapter reveals how the vital and existential inequalities in the world’s peripheries are further compounded by access to or exclusion from the Western margins of Europe in the Caribbean. These inequalities, it is argued, result in the perpetual production of marginalized and vulnerable bodies in permanent states of exception.