Abstract:
Medical education is a site for the reproduction of social inequalities: without
emphasis otherwise, healthcare students rely on a default cultural imaginary of a
“typical” patient, “average” person, and “normal” concerns. Within that normative
imaginary, the unanticipated patient becomes a special case, someone to be treated
differently and likely to face discrimination. Gynecological Teaching Associates
(GTAs) attempt to interrupt the reproduction of social inequalities as they teach pelvic
and breast exams within healthcare schools. In this project, I interviewed GTAs—all
of whom act as both instructors and models in their teaching practice, identify as
queer, and bring to established feminist GTA practice a patient advocacy that insists
on the inclusion of queer and other marginalized identities. Driven by their own queer
experiences in conventional health care, participants incorporate routinely left-out
patients by incorporating into their instruction examples of othered behaviors,
identities, and bodies. As they challenge the categories and assumptions that pervade
systems of medical education, GTAs engage in a form of social change activism and
further efforts to queer medicine. However, even as the GTA job description affords
opportunities for queer activism, it also restricts GTAs’ queeress. I examine the
neoliberal, self-advocating patient typography that GTAs may unintentionally
emphasize and explore how queer activism might become more transformative in
GTA teaching, medical education, patient-provider interactions, and other pedagogical
settings.
