The not-so-typical patient: gynecological teaching associates and the struggle to queer medicine

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.