Recent scholarship in health humanities tends to connect the history of medicine to ongoing structural inequalities. For example, Stephen Knadler’s Vitality Politics: Health, Debility, and the Limits of Black Emancipation (2019) tracks the biopolitics of medicalization as it relates to Black “debility,” or the targeted maiming of Black populations in the United States. Jasbir Puar’s The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017) similarly deploys the concept of debility to articulate the effects of violent social exclusion. Finally, Priscilla Wald’s Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (2007) considers the role of outbreak narratives in globalizing late capitalism and the racialization of novel pandemics.
Our panel builds upon this critical foundation but also extends the historical scope for such investigations of the relationships between power, narrative, and medicine. Our three speakers consider how discourses of health and medicine interpret and impose meaning upon bodies. More specifically, our speakers explore the entanglement of medical structures with British imperialism, scientific anti-Blackness, and transgender medicine. Our guiding intellectual questions include: how has the Anglo-European production of medical knowledge buttressed imperial processes of racial formation? What are the tensions between medical gatekeeping and transgender access to gender-affirming care? And finally, how might we imagine new languages of care, resistance, and embodiment outside the medical model?
To begin the panel, Suvendu Ghatak’s paper will adopt a transnational perspective in examining intersecting discourses of empire and epidemiology in British colonial India. More specifically, Ghatak connects the history of malaria’s designation as a tropical disease to the political unrest surrounding the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. He uses his close readings of two primary texts, Fanny Parkes’s travelogue Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque (1850) and Octavius Henry Anson’s mutiny journal, With H.M. 9th Lancers during the Mutiny (1857), to draw out the links between epidemiological and political calamity. Ultimately, Ghatak elaborates on Pablo Mukherjee’s concept of “palliative imperialism” (2013) by demonstrating how such Victorian expatriates rationalized empire through the management of natural disasters.
Paul Allen’s work on medicalized anti-Blackness will continue this focus on the racial history of medico-scientific discourses and structures. Allen’s paper brings us into the United States context and details how the Black female characters of Toni Morrison’s novel Home (2012) heal one of the central characters after she escapes from the forcible experimentations of a white eugenicist. Allen’s work helps contextualize the foundations of modern gynecology in J. Marion Sims’s involuntary medical experiments on enslaved Black women and connects this history to ongoing forced sterilizations of incarcerated Black and Latinx women. Overall, Allen argues that the Black women of Home practice an ethics of care for one another and collectively resist anti-Black biopolitical systems of control.
Finally, Iseult Gillespie will continue to develop this panel’s critiques of medicalization by situating her paper at the intersection of disability studies and transgender studies. As Gillespie highlights, the medical industrial complex has long been an object of ire among trans and disabled individuals. Gillespie thus reads her literary archive for how it both acknowledges yet moves beyond this tension, cultivating a “cripped, transfeminine response to medical treatment” instead. Ultimately, Gillespie’s work illuminates how medical practice continues to function at the nexus of gender, sexuality, and studies of the body.
The inspiration for this session draws mainly from the collaborative work of the presider and respondent in the graduate student reading group, the Literature, Medicine, and Culture Colloquium (LMCC). Established in 2012 with support from the UNC Health Humanities Lab, the LMCC has convened monthly to discuss selected readings in the field of health humanities. As co-directors of this group, we are eager to expand these intellectual conversations to a broader network of emerging scholars. We have thus organized our panel to include three papers, each strictly limited to 17-18 minutes, in order to leave time for the respondent to make closing remarks and frame the final discussion period.