Assigned and politicized vulnerability: A theoretical contribution to analyzing vulnerability in child mental health policies and practices in Chile [Author Accepted Manuscript]

This theoretical article examines a paradox in contemporary uses of the concept of vulnerability: a notion whose critical function is to name exposure to harm and to show constitutive interdependence operates in Chilean public policies as an administrative category that organizes inclusion and exclusion, allocates care and protection, and reproduces inequality. Ontological, relational, and moralizing theories of vulnerability do not specify who defines vulnerability or to whom such definitions must be justified, limiting their resistance to the concept's administrative capture. We argue that the political operation of Ferrarese’s concept of vulnerability strengthens its political force and better equips it to analyze the vulnerability’s administrative capture by subsidiary-state logics as they operate in the Chilean case. Drawing on her conception of vulnerability as living at the mercy of another's agency, structured by institutionalized normative expectations, we develop two analytical categories: assigned vulnerability (AV) and politicized vulnerability (PV). We explore their analytical performance, contrasted with demedicalization, through a secondary conceptual reading of interviews with family physicians who attend to children and adolescents in Chilean public primary care, focusing on ADHD. The analysis shows that AV and PV coexist in clinical practice and that demedicalization and politicization are not equivalent processes, since demedicalizing practices can reproduce assigned vulnerability. AV and PV specify who holds the authority to define vulnerability and when institutionalized normative expectations become open to dispute, helping distinguish effective from ritual participation in child mental health policy.