Abstract

Contemporary debate over "right to life" versus "death with dignity" issues has increasingly cast doubt over a cherished tenet of modern medicine: the modeling of the clinical encounter as a moment of pure contact between the legible body and the discerning eye of the expert—a contact prior to language and innocent of ideology. This essay analyzes the medico-legal commentary surrounding one of the debate's iconic figures, Terri Schiavo, to argue that current interpretations of the disabled body are deeply motivated by the ideologically-inflected narrative structures into which such bodies come. Western medicine's diagnosis-prognosis-treatment triad constitutes an especially potent discursive instrument through which the disabled body is domesticated and rendered narratable, amenable to analysis, categorization, and disposal as delineated by authorized "readings" of bodily signs. These ostensibly positivist diagnostic/prognostic standards are in fact infused by normative assumptions of the body's proper form, function, and place within the human community.

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