Queer Theory and Biomedical Practice: The Biomedicalization of Sexuality/The Cultural Politics of Biomedicine

William J Spurlin

doi:10.1007/s10912-018-9526-0

Abstract

This article works across multiple disciplinary boundaries, especially queer theory, to examine critically the controversial, and often socially controlling, role of biomedical knowledge and interventions in the realm of human sexuality. It will attempt to situate scientific/medical discourses on sexuality historically, socially, and culturally in order to expose the ways in which “proper” sexual health in medical research and clinical practice has been conflated with prevailing social norms at particular historical junctures in the 20th and 21st centuries. How might the relationship between clinical and cultural spheres be better engaged in biomedical knowledge and clinical practice in understanding sexual health, given the impact of homophobic and transphobic assumptions in the diagnostic histories of homosexuality and Gender Identity Disorder in Childhood, a new diagnostic category introduced into the DSM following the removal of homosexuality from the DSM-III? The article will argue further that biomedical knowledge is always already mediated through culture by analyzing normative racial, gender, class, and sexual ideologies that regulated early understandings of the epidemiology of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the West and in the postcolonial world while informing global health policy on HIV/AIDS. The article concludes by examining the implications of medical education for both LGBTQI patients and medical professionals, for understanding gender and sexual rights as human rights, and for thinking about new kinds of interventions, contestations, and struggles to resist continued homophobic and transphobic assumptions in biomedical practice today and their ongoing effects in the everyday world.

Highlights

This article works across multiple disciplinary boundaries, especially queer theory, to examine critically the controversial, and often socially controlling, role of biomedical knowledge and interventions in the realm of human sexuality
In his book The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault speaks of a significant discursive shift in biomedical knowledge around the end of the eighteenth century centered around Ba new ‘carving up’ of things and the principle of their verbalization^ through the process of the medical commentary (1973, xviii), which implied a new relationship between the perceptible and the stateable, between what is seen and what is said, thereby instantiating a redistribution of the relation between signifier and signified, that is, Bbetween the symptoms that signify and the disease that is signified^ (xviii-xix)
The legacy of these two historical shifts articulated by Foucault, as well as the fusion of the medical and juridical spheres, which often forms the basis for citizenship, rights, and national belonging, are especially important since biomedical knowledge, and its concomitant social authority on sexuality, not without its political biases, had, from the nineteenth century, influenced and buttressed colonial power and rising fascist movements in Europe in the early twentieth century, and, in the aftermath of imperialism, formed the basis for directing social health policies within western contexts and in the postcolonial and developing world