The heroes of ALS: The social structure of the triumphalist discourses of overcoming and celebrating a patient and legitimizing a disease. A comparative sociology of an ideology of the patient as a hero

Published in Papers: Revista de Sociologia, 2024, volume 109, issue 1: e3225. doi:10.5565/rev/papers.3225.

Objective: The objective of this article is to understand the social conditions of production or social structure of the discourses or ideologies of the patient as a hero from the theory of position taking and positions in the social space by Pierre Bourdieu, placing special emphasis on whether the Welfare and Rule-of-law State plays some role in the production of these discourses, and on whether other types of discourses appear, especially those carried out by religion, if that State is weak or non-existent. Method: For this purpose, a database was built with the 1,068 responses by the 1,068 different individuals who responded on Twitter to a tweet from a person with a legitimate disease such as ALS. Through several analyses (qualitative thematic content analysis, Multiple Correspondence Analysis [MCA], and Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering [AHC]) it was possible to build the social structure of the heroic discourses. Results: Twelve types of responses were obtained, which could be divided into two large groups: overcoming or heroic discourses, and religious discourses about the disease. Conclusion: It was shown that there was a clear relationship between the type of Welfare and Rule-of-law State (more or less weak) and the type of discourse, so that, in environments with relatively stronger Welfare and Rule-of-law States (such as Spain), the dominant discourses were the discourses or ideologies of the patient as a hero, and in those with weaker Welfare States (such as Venezuela), religion monopolized the discourse and ideologies from which the social image of the patient was constructed.