Abstract
In this paper, I offer a treatment of “the clinic” in which the clinic—as concept and space—is que(e)ried, that is, both questioned and made queer. I present two historical case studies that queer clinical thought and practices in the period before AIDS and before the full-blown arrival of queer theory on the western theoretical landscape. These two cases—the practice of self-help developed in the women’s health movement in the United States and the practice of tranversality developed out of and beyond the Institutional Psychiatry movement in France—challenge the practice of medicine in the prehistory of both AIDS and queer theory, yet, they are not generally seen as precursors, or related in any way, to AIDS activism. In a sense, then, I also want to question and make queer the history of AIDS as we conventionally know it today by extending that history backwards and outwards to earlier queer critical and clinical practices like self-help and transversality.
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Notes
In his influential analysis of stigma first published in 1963, Erving Goffman discusses “action groups” as offering a proto-political critique of stigmatization as a form of normalization. These action groups challenge stigmatization via the publication of counter narratives “that give voice to shared feelings” and help to “consolidate belief in the stigma as a basis for self-conception” (Goffman 1963, 27).
This is the title of Sara Evans’s (1980) important history of the emergence of the women’s liberation movement in the United States out of the civil rights and new left movements of the 1960s.
In his introduction to Deleuze’s Essays Critical and Clinical, Daniel Smith explains that Deleuze first links the critical with the clinical in his 1967 essay on Sacher-Masoch (Smith 1997, xi). See also (Deleuze 1989, 14).
Contra Sontag (1979 and 1989), I am intentionally metaphorizing the experience of AIDS to help think about the relationship of a 1990s queer theory—read as full-blown—to earlier theoretical and political formations—read as not-yet queer.
Keyword searches in The New England Journal of Medicine online database show the following: “women’s liberation” is mentioned in 15 articles between 1960–1979, 7 articles between 1980–1999, and once between 2000–2010; “women’s lib” is mentioned in 3 articles between 1960–1979; “women’s health movement” is mentioned twice between 1960–1979, once from 1980–1999, and twice from 2000–2010; “feminist” is used in 19 articles between 1960–1979, 70 articles between 1980–1999, and 17 articles between 2000–2010. Search conducted at www.nejm.org on January 13, 2011.
For accounts of the women’s health movement published at the time of, or just after, the women’s liberation movement, see, for example, Boston Women’s Health Collective 1973; Ruzek 1978; Dreifus 1977; Frankfort 1973; and Seaman 1969. For a selection of original literature from the women’s liberation movement, including a section on Bodies with a subsection on Health, see Baxandall and Gordon 2000. For more recent histories of the women’s health movement, see, for example, Davis, 2007; Morgen 2002; and Wells 2010.
I use the term “medical sovereignty” here to suggest the ways medicine participates in both modes of power—sovereign and disciplinary—that Foucault delineates in his work beginning in the 1970s. Although Foucault has often been read as arguing that disciplinary power replaces sovereign power in the 19th century, I think it is more accurate to understand these two modes of power in relation to each other, and to consider how the relation functions. Elaborating on Foucault’s concepts, Agamben (1998) makes the very important observation that biopower is often exercised in support of a sovereign power.
“Transmission of affect” is the feminist philosopher Teresa Brennan’s (2004) term from her book of the same title. For an influential analysis of the affective in relation to feminism, see Ahmed (2004). In the chapter “Feminist Attachments,” Ahmed discusses how many women, including herself, come to feminism through positive affective experiences like wonder, as much as through negative affective experiences like anger.
In diagnosing the relationship between ars erotica and scientia sexualis in Western culture, Foucault writes, “Scientia sexualis versus ars erotica, no doubt. But it should be noted that the ars erotica did not disappear altogether from Western civilization; nor has it always been absent from the movement by which one sought to produce a science of sexuality” (1978 [1976], 70).
In his fascinating discussion of the clinic and/as tea room, Geoffrey Rees (2010) describes the “inchoate queer ethical potential of the clinical encounter.” For Rees, the clinic itself is an intimate public space, and comparing how intimacy happens in the clinic with other intimate public spaces allows bioethics to draw on an elaborate discourse and practice of queer sexual ethics.
In her discussion of OBOS’s transnational travels, Davis describes the aspects of the project’s theories and practices that are emphasized, downplayed, or deleted in various locations. For example, she notes that the “editors of the Latin American adaptation were critical of the U.S. OBOS, which they regarded as individualistic, consumer oriented, and insufficiently political. In their view, the U.S. text over-emphasized the power of the individual woman to take care of herself as epitomized by the ‘completely Anglo’ notion of self-help” (2007, 180).
Mol shows that often taking care of oneself requires that one act strangely. She writes, “It is difficult to act strangely; difficult to do something that does not fit with the company you keep. Yet this is exactly what the logic of care wants you to do. In order to take care of yourself, you may need to deviate” (2008, 60).
A recent biography of the two together goes a long way to restoring Guattari’s primary not secondary influence on the thought of the pair (Dosse, 2010 [2007]).
According to Julian Bourg, the “term Institutional Psychotherapy was first used in print in 1952 by the French psychiatrists Georges Daumézon and Philippe Koechlin” (2007, 125).
For an insightful account of Fanon as “clinician and revolutionary,” see Keller 2007, and for an interesting reading of Fanon with Deleuze and Guattari, see Musser 2012.
For an interesting account of how they came to work together, see Catherine Backès-Clément interview with Deleuze and Guattari on Anti-Oedipus first published in L’Arc 49 in 1972, in Deleuze 1995, 13–15.
See the interview with Michel Foucault first published in the French gay magazine, Gai Pied, in April 1981 (Foucault 1997, 135–140).
The clinic as a kind of laboratory for social change was one of the tenets of the community health movement. For an insightful comparative analysis of two community health centers—the Delta Health Center in rural Mound Bayou, Mississippi and the Watts Health Center in Los Angeles—established in the 1960s as part of Johnson’s War on Poverty program, see Loyd 2010.
In Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry, for example, David Cooper focuses exclusively on the male child unable to establish an autonomous identity within his family, often as a result of an overbearing mother, who then becomes schizophrenic. In Cooper’s assessment, it is often the case that families (really mothers) are psychotic, and “the identified schizophrenic patient member by his psychotic episode is trying to break free of an alienated system and is, therefore, in some sense less ‘ill’ or at least less alienated than the ‘normal’ offspring of the ‘normal’ families” (1967, 37). On the one hand, Cooper is critical of normalization, but on the other hand, his critique relies on a gender normativity in which boy children must break free of their mothers.
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Diedrich, L. Que(e)rying the Clinic before AIDS: Practicing Self-help and Transversality in the 1970s. J Med Humanit 34, 123–138 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-013-9207-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-013-9207-y