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3. Medicine: Cherrie Moraga's Boundary Violations
- Fordham University Press
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3 M E D I C I N E : C H E R R Í E M O R A G A ’ S B O U N D A R Y V I O L A T I O N S Second day after Rafaelito’s surgery. To our relief, no more intestine was lost. ‘‘A simple procedure,’’ the doctors told us, simply reconnect the small and large intestine, sew up the stoma. Two days later, Ella holds Rafa in her arms with a respirator down into his lungs, two IV’s stuck into the veins of his head, and a tube running down his throat to suck out leakage in his stomach. He has dehydrated, is unable to urinate. And my baby has bloated up to twice his body-size. His face is a monster’s—his eyes, black seeds buried into a mass of fluid. When I put my hand to his cheek to caress him, the imprint remains, deforming him. Cherrı́e Moraga, Waiting in the Wings Pain, illness, and disability are politically significant, in part, because they defy contemporary norms for how bodies should look and act. When Gloria Anzaldúa struggled to find spiritual transcendence through the fluctuations of diabetes, this struggle was always in friction with medical diagnoses and treatments. Similarly, when Ana Castillo’s disabled heroine in Peel My Love Like an Onion dances flamenco, the euphoria of physical capability lies in direct resistance to institutionalized boundaries for ‘‘handicapped’’ identity and the limited mobility associated with post-polio syndrome. The power of boundary-crossing is partially produced by the boundaries being crossed. This chapter turns to representations of medical treatment to analyze the competing interests that meet in the bodies of the sick. 114 CHERRÍE MORAGA’S BOUNDARY VIOLATIONS In The Birth of the Clinic (1963), Michel Foucault’s ‘‘archeology of medical perception’’ uncovers two ideological dimensions of medicine that are foundational to my argument: first, the awareness that diseases reflect the complex social sphere in which they emerge (Foucault 16– 17), and second, the understanding that modern medicine dictates a ‘‘normative posture’’ as it heals. Clinics create ‘‘a definition of the model man’’ as they outline ‘‘knowledge of healthy man’’ (34, original emphasis). These two dimensions must meet in tension. Medical treatment attempts to ‘‘normalize’’ individuals whose diverse illnesses—since they reflect a complex web of social, cultural, and economic forces—surely resist the limited ‘‘model’’ imposed by the clinic. As with the image of the epigraph to this chapter, there are competing imprints on the malleable bodies of patients. When Foucault writes, however, that ‘‘we have not yet emerged’’ from the era (dating from the nineteenth century) when disease, pain, and symptoms are perceived to be contained ‘‘within the singularity of the patient’’ (x) and ‘‘a science of the individual’’ (197), his use of ‘‘we’’ does not encompass the diversity of medical perceptions that shape the world. Though I am certainly not alone in noting the limitations of Foucault’s pronouns, noting this particular limitation opens the door for seeing bodies and medicine otherwise. If we look beyond Foucault’s ‘‘we,’’ we can notice how disease and society intersect in ways that deviate from the dominant trends of modern medicine. Many contemporary thinkers—including Chicana feminists and those interested in alternative spiritualities—have adopted Native American conceptions of the links between individual, communal, and environmental health. The Aztecs, for instance, viewed health as a property of the community, negotiated through rituals linking humans to plants, animals, and the gods.1 If bodies are connected to outside forces, then corporeal forms are subject to continual change, unmoored from individual culpability, and invested in the ‘‘health’’ of others—defying the institution of any singular bodily norms. This opening of corporeal possibilities is perhaps one of the reasons Chicana lesbian writers like Cherrı́e Moraga have turned to Native American 1. In an extensive study of indigenous medicine in Mexico, Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán writes: ‘‘La salud constituye parte integrante del proceso social; la imagen del cuerpo, como unidad orgánica, una continuidad con la naturaleza; y la enfermedad, por consiguiente, la expression de una inadaptación social [health constitutes an integral part of the social process; the image of the body, as an organic unity, a continuation of nature; and illness, in consequence, the expression of a social imbalance/ maladjustment]’’ (Aguirre Beltrán 258). 115 [44.202.90.91] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:53 GMT) CHERRI...