Introduction to Queer and Trans Health Justice: A Special Issue of RHM
- Introduction to Queer and Trans Health JusticeA Special Issue of RHM
Introduction: Community as the Future
Futurity, an ever-present touchstone of queer studies, has been on our mind: the future of higher education, the future of the United States, the future of the planet, and the categorical future of what “healthy” means amid tarried climatological collapse across the biosphere. When we proposed this special issue of Rhetoric of Health and Medicine, we (McKinley and Wilfredo) sought to foment further the focus on queer and trans healthcare needs across rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) scholarship as a springboard for building a future—that is, scholarship that seeks more than analysis and scaffolds the necessary moves needed to pave the way forward. This move, we hope, coheres for the field an ancestral foundation of sorts for more queer and trans approaches to understanding the rhetoricity of health and medicine. So, beyond the future of the planet, we are also thinking (and tinkering) around how we as rhetoricians of health and medicine might work together as queer and trans people and scholars to dream, to act, and to build. [End Page 3]
On that note, we are reminded of how queer and trans people within our specific purview (i.e., the U.S.) have a much different relationship to the future at the interface of health and being healthy. Indeed, queer and trans bodies often suffer for the misalignment of their corporealities against cisheteronormative, white supremacist medicine. Providers of all sorts do not know what to do with our bodies (even more so the racialized queer/trans body), filing us into the rhetorical regime of the dis-eased body, “deviant shapes . . . symbolizing the presence of some debilitation that produces unease in the concept of health” (Spieldenner & Anadolis, 2017, p. 98). Neoliberal and white supremacist health logics routinely define wellness around axes of behavioral choice, individual hard work, and rhetorics of contagion, and beyond these incompatibilities, a hyper-surveillance of the queer and trans body perpetuates a totalizing glare of our lifeways. Despite this constrictive grip, however, we persist and flourish—we ease the suffering with a mixture of community and joy.
As Hil Malatino (2020) contends (and as Teresa Williams covers in this special issue in their book review of Trans Care from Malatino), queer and trans networks of care, across contextual foci, are vital to how we keep each other safe when medicine fails at best and harms at worst:
From the community support group to the trans newsletters detailing supportive medical professionals and gender hacks to the Yahoo newsgroups and listservs of the early internet to current forms of transition-related crowdfunding, we have a long history of building solidarity as a direct response to the vagaries of the medical-industrial complex.
(Malatino, 2020, pp. 7–8)
We’ve also seen and experienced how queer and trans bodies are often rendered il/legible through biomedical lenses, as well as how queer and trans communities often craft emergent and transgressive communication praxes to subvert and undermine these infrastructures (e.g., Edenfield et al., 2019; Jolly, 2019; Bennett, 2009). These moves toward a healthy future open space for RHM scholars to extend our critical, practical repertoires into the domain of future building. On that note, we asked a central question that we felt would engender the types of projects and perspectives that not only our contingent of rhetorical studies needs, but also the entire endeavor of understanding how rhetoric shapes (non) human livability: How can RHM scholars work to build healthy, just [End Page 4] futures for and with queer and trans people and especially our BIPOC relatives?
As we move toward answering this question, we believe that the articles comprising this special issue of Rhetoric of Health and Medicine reveal how RHM (in all its interdisciplinary richness) can and should work toward concrete practices and perspectives that not only critique oppressive health conditions or discourse practices but also build those just, healthy futures for queer/trans/BIPOC communities. Here, we especially spotlight the identity confluences of these groups, and we use this special issue as a guidepost for...
