Visualizing children’s health: Transformation of the Turkish state’s biopolitical communication from tuberculosis to COVID-19

This article comparatively explores two distinct cases of children’s health communication on tuberculosis in the interwar period, and COVID-19, to trace the development of biopolitical governance in Turkey. Biopolitical visuality encompasses affective sensibilities and imaginations about the nation by conveying multilayered discourses. Public health discourse aims to ensure the health and optimal development of adult-to-be citizens and to provide strategies for improving parents’ and communities’ awareness of children’s health. Our critical multimodal discourse analysis, based on our TÜBİTAK 3005 (Scientific & Technological Research Council of Türkiye)-funded project, ‘Analysis of Public Health Visual Communication Methods’, demonstrates traits of biopolitical extension through contextual emphasis. We compare the imagery of children through a specific section of the Yaşamak Yolu journal to official visual health communication materials addressing child health during the COVID-19 pandemic in Turkey. We contend that visual discourse on the consideration of medical science, the relation of mental health to the physical and the gender roles of parents, progressively supports an individuation of biopolitics. We conclude that while early Republican visuals allowed some interpretive freedom through enabling a reformulative agency for the citizen subject in pursuit of well-being, the neoliberal era’s COVID-19 materials intensified pedagogical control and individualized responsibility, especially within the family, which expanded biopolitical governance into the routines of everyday life.