A Very Troublesome Doctor: Biomedical Binaries, Worldmaking, and the Poetry of Rafael Campo

His erection startled me.

This first sentence of Rafael Campo's autobiographical essay collection The Desire to Heal is itself startling. Opening a description of a clinical encounter between Campo and a patient, the sentence immediately foregrounds what the book's title anticipates: the tabooed coupling of desire and doctoring. In the essay that follows, Campo expands on this highly charged topic. Discussing his training and work as a physician, he asserts that amid the fear induced by AIDS and the increasing technologization of medical practice, it is important for physicians to recognize "the desire inherent in the patient-doctor relationship." ¹ For Campo, the acknowledgment of this desire and the intimacy in this relationship can lead to empathy and healing. This concern with the intimacies of, and even the eroticism inherent in, the medical encounter is also prominent in Campo's poetry collectionsThe Other Man Was Me, What the Body Told, andDiva. Such concerns have startled, or at least unsettled, a number of critics and reviewers in Campo's profession. Although he is generally praised by the medical community and championed in the growing cross-disciplinary area of "literature and medicine" because of his emphasis on empathy and the humanizing of medicine, Campo's provocative concerns with desire cause a certain unease. For example, in an article for Literature and Medicine, medical student S. W. Henderson finds Campo's "Distant Moon" an evocative poem that problematizes "identity" and the "medical/compassionate" binary. He recognizes, and indeed commends, how Campo does this through allusions to desire and through the conflation of the doctor's gaze with notions of a sexual gaze. However, Henderson also asserts apprehensively that such a conflation puts medical authority under "suspicion" and proves a "burdensome concern" for physicians. ² In her review of The Desire to Heal in the Journal of Religion and Health, Ann Akers, a psychotherapist, finds Campo's work a "raw," "emotional," and "powerful memoir." She describes how its first sentence "hurls" the reader "into the writer's sensual and passionate conversation" about poetry, doctoring, and healing. Sharing Henderson's apprehension, however, Akers argues that this sensual, deeply personal style both "enthralls and repels": "Who wants to know how their physician might really feel and think when dressed down to a thin blue-gray cotton dressing gown?" ³

Broaching the issue of intimacy and desire in clinical relations is clearly radical, perhaps too radical, for some of Campo's medical readership. As the pieces by Henderson and Akers demonstrate, reviews of Campo's work tend to concentrate on his admittedly important and incisive concerns with compassion and empathy. They tend not to address other, perhaps more challenging, aspects of his work. As this article discusses, Campo's poetry and autobiographical essays disturb and problematize the assumptions, categories, binaries, and boundaries that run through the biomedical imaginary, particularly the biomedical imaginary surrounding AIDS. ⁴ His works enact critical, often transformative reimaginings of the medical setting and of biomedical thinking, where power, bodies, illness, relations, and identities are envisaged very differently. Most powerfully, his works upturn and rethink the distinctions shored up in the biomedical AIDS imaginary that "other" certain groups, persons, bodies, or identities in order to maintain the "self" or "us" of "normal," clean, and healthy groups, persons, bodies, or identities. ⁵ Campo's works problematize and reimagine, in other words, the crucial self/other binary that is so consistently maintained in biomedical AIDS discourses and that works from and is invigorated by a series of other binaries that other gay men, women, persons of color, the poor, the disabled, immigrants, and the ill.

In many ways, the troublings and reimaginings enacted in Campo's work echo those that take place more widely in contemporary queer studies, disability studies, feminist studies, postcolonial studies, and AIDS studies, as well as...