Fri. Jan. 6, 2012, 10:15-11:30 a.m., 620 Washington State Convention Center

Critical Healing: Queer and Disability Studies Interventions in Biomedicine and Public Health

Critical Healing:

Queer and Disability Studies Interventions in Biomedicine and Public Health

Literature and Science Division

Presiding: Rebecca Garden, SUNY Upstate Medical Univ.

1.  Marty Fink, Concordia University, “Culture as Prevention: Contemporary Representations of HIV/AIDS”

2.  William J. Spurlin, Brunel University, London, “Queer Theory and Biomedical Practice: New Junctures among Science--Sexuality--Culture”

3.  Stephanie Yorke, University of Oxford, “Activism and the ‘Collective Sick’: Disability and Group Identity in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People”


ABSTRACTS

1.  Marty Fink, Concordia University, “Culture as Prevention: Contemporary Representations of HIV/AIDS”

Can literary studies can intervene in the pandemic of HIV/AIDS?  An analysis of the work showcased within AIDS Project Los Angeles’ Corpus Magazine, reveals that HIV prevention need not only consist of sexual education but can include cultural production as well.   Moving beyond the singular imperative for condom use, Corpus implores that sexual health necessitates having one’s sexual identity represented and validated through cultural outlets including literature, photography, and visual art. Recognizing that our sexualities are far more complex than isolated sexual acts, Corpus advocates a move toward an integrated understanding of how queer and racial representation are inseparable from our embodied practices of desire and health. Re-situating prevention efforts through the production and distribution of visual and literary art, Corpus addresses individual and collective experiences of pleasure and risk within urban queer communities of color.  Through an investigation of Corpus and its literary work, my paper draws on theories of narrative and disease by scholars including Julia Epstein, Steven Kruger, and Paula Treichler to uncover how cultural and literary narratives can impact physical health.  Examining literary and cultural production alongside a broader discussion of homophobia, racialization, gender, violence, and the criminalization of HIV itself, we may begin to employ literary studies to directly confront the continued incidence and devastation of HIV/AIDS within our own communities.

Marty Fink's work explores narratives of incarceration, queerness, borders, and cultural production, uncovering histories of resistance to HIV/AIDS.  Fink also works with AIDS Community Care Montreal and The Prisoner Correspondence Project.  She currently teaches in the English and Women's Studies departments at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.


2.  William J. Spurlin, Brunel University, London, “Queer Theory and Biomedical Practice: New Junctures among Science--Sexuality--Culture”

One of the most politically contested axes of social subjectivity in contemporary culture is that of sexuality.  Whilst analyses of sexuality have occurred almost separately in the humanities and life sciences, the proposed paper works across multiple disciplinary boundaries, including literature, in order to examine critically the diverse ways in which medical knowledge, specifically sexual health and disease, is socially and culturally constructed.  Biomedical discourse is especially apt as a site of analysis since it has produced knowledge about sexuality that often bears the stamp of scientific truth and reason, and often forms the basis for directing social health policies, both within western contexts and in the postcolonial and Third World.  The proposed paper will situate scientific/medical discourses on sexuality historically, socially, and culturally à la Foucault in order to analyse their rhetorical appeals to science and expose the ways in which ‘proper’ sexual health in medical research and clinical practice has been conflated with prevailing social norms at particular historical junctures in the twentieth century. 

The basis for this paper comes out of my previous work in three areas: i) the politics of diagnosis with regard to the history of the listing of homosexuality until 1973 in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; ii) the current diagnostic status of Gender Identity Disorder in Childhood (GIDC) added to the DSM-III in 1980; and iii) the historical and ongoing tension between global health policies on HIV/AIDS and literary narratives of HIV/AIDS that have emerged in South Africa.  Specifically developing the third strand for this paper after developing the theoretical framework mentioned in the paragraph above, I will argue that while biomedicine has played an immense historical role in the colonial regulation of sexuality, with ongoing effects in the postcolonial world, how might we nonetheless engage the plurality of understandings, idioms, and experiences of the sexual (as represented in South African literature and in other indigenous texts addressing HIV/AIDS) that presume ontologies of the self, health, the body, and understandings of sexuality distinct from those articulated by western biomedicine?  How might such an analysis help address the shifting narratives and conflicting intersections of gender, race, sexuality, nation, citizenship, and living with HIV/AIDS in non-western contexts more broadly?  This implies a radical challenge to Foucault’s history of sexuality as a history of western sexuality as well as analyses of new kinds interventions, contestations, and struggles. 

3.  Stephanie Yorke, University of Oxford, “Activism and the ‘Collective Sick’: Disability and Group Identity in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People”

In the novel Animal’s People (2006), Indra Sinha disrupts the metaphorical health discourse which grew out of the 1970’s: while global economics have forwarded a binary in which collective health, democracy, and cross-border enterprise are the unified opponents of collective illness, despotism, and isolationism, Sinha establishes an opposition in which ‘collective sick’ is the premise of democracy, and is threatened by the agents of health. In my presentation, I will apply a disability studies framework to interrogate the role of the Western clinic as it parallels the role of the Western corporation in this text, and will analyse the transformative distinction between the healthy collective, which is configured in terms of biopower within a hierarchical economy, and the disabled collective, which is the site of activism. I will integrate disability criticism which focuses on the metaphorical facility of the body, including the work of David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, with later disability scholarship that keys in on collectivized health discourse, and will thereby highlight the metaphorical tautology and overdetermination of the body which symbolizes the community, which is in turn symbolized by the body. My reading of the primary text will be framed by an analysis of two characters, Ma Franci and Elli Doctress, who function as proponents of the disabled collective. Their role as aides of the sick and disabled, rather than as proponents of a normalising vision of health, catalyzes the activism of the sick community, and defies the relegation of disabled and sick persons to the socioeconomic margins reserved for ‘broken tools.’

Stephanie Yorke is a second-year D.Phil candidate at the University of Oxford where she researches representations of disability in the Indian novel. She holds a Canadian Commonwealth Scholarship. She has published one article on slave narrative, and is also a very active creative writer, having published over thirty poems in leading Canadian literary journals.