It is a commonly known fact that there are two types of diabetes, type 1 (also called juvenile diabetes) and type 2 (also called adult onset diabetes). This medical classification is not without functional value both for diabetes prevention programs and for clinical treatments of the disease and the wide range of symptoms that often ensue, including loss of limb use, internal organ failure, sensory and vision loss, and—for male diabetics—erectile dysfunction. The classification establishes a formal commensurability among diabetics—both type 1 and type 2 diabetics are, precisely, diabetics—that at times serves to efface profound social and economic inequalities underlying incidence of the disease. Indeed, contemporary efforts to treat and prevent diabetes may actually deepen social inequalities because of how they use this classification. Given the rising prevalence of diabetes, a critical analysis of its socioeconomic contexts and the organization of medical knowledge about it is needed.

This essay picks apart the "typing" of people entailed in diabetes classification.¹ I contend that diabetes classification establishes the semblance of equality, in the sense of sameness in kind and worth, but actually reproduces inequality. The application of biomedical expertise and technologies renders diabetic bodies commensurate, even as individual diabetics face profoundly different circumstances of life and death. In the aggregate, the very different prospects of different diabetics hinge on the organization of material resources along with cultural knowledge. If "the power of a particular form of communication to commensurate morally and epistemologically divergent social groups lies at the heart of liberal hopes for a non-violent democratic form of governmentality,"² then medicine is surely as significant as the law in the modern-day politics by which inequality is acknowledged, obscured, or contested.³ The case of diabetes suggests that broader social logics, including the espousal of equality as a social ideal. The concluding section of the essay outlines what a progressive politics that engaged these inequalities might look like.