LISTENING TO HYBRID IDENTITIES IN MEDICAL CONTEXTS

Abstract

The importance of listening in health care is not a novel notion, although it is often ignored in practice. This essay describes an individual experience with listening (and nonlistening) during one health care event, using that narrative to explicate how listening intersects with identity creation and interpretation in medical contexts. Recognizing our complex hybrid identities in racial, ethnic, and disability frames can create new insights for listening. In this brief reflection, I consider how hybrid disability and Asian American identities impact how we may listen to each other. Identities, my own included, evolve as people interact physically and psychologically with personal illnesses that change their abilities. Listening to individual agency and changing identities is crucial in medical contexts, and any context, where hybridity prompts different social and individual privileges and expectations. For those of us embodying mixed race and mixed disability identities, our choices must be listened to and met with evolving strategies for interrogating how identities are defined by existing social structures, defined by individual others, defined by ourselves and, in momentary ruptures of control, sometimes left undefined as well.