that transform abstractions into lived practices. Each of them depicts a peripatetic actor, one who walks to make the strange familiar. Phaedrus is one of the few dialogues in Plato’s canon where his heroine leaves the walls of Athens, signaling the unusual nature of the text and metaphorically encapsulating the dangers of rhetoric’s promiscuous circulation outside the bounds of discreet contexts. Anzaldúa is likewise on an excursion, consumed by the beauty and stench of nature, hoping her stroll will draw inspiration for the very exercise Plato suspiciously castigates. Socrates scans the plane trees for cicadas; Anzaldúa the cypress trees that exist harmoniously with the pelicans. They are both preoccupied with invention and spiritual creativity, a yearning for revelations that spring from engagements with the environment, an interlocutor, and oneself. They achieve philosophical clarity through methodological messiness. Plato seeks to rethink the postulates of rhetoric and love; Anzaldúa narrates a morning in her life to craft a poetics of illness in all its inglorious forms.
Plato and Anzaldúa offer alternative paths for contemplating the process of knowledge creation, be it about disease or philosophy or love, and the fruitful rewards of digressing from socially sanctified practices. Their musings invite us to deliberate anew about how diabetes’s public persona might be actualized in ways not often attended to in public culture. This section aspires to perform such labor by joining in the chorus of works that investigate, queer, and complicate traditional maps of health and medicine. Once left to the auspices of the social sciences, studies of health and medicine have vaulted into the center of humanistic research. As Anzaldúa’s quote conveys, humanists are not new to such endeavors and have long been captivated by the bewildering nature of the body. Luminaries such as Virginia Woolf, Susan Sontag, Audre Lorde, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick are among the many thinkers who have sought to trace the amorphous silhouettes of disease. Today these works are taught globally to students in courses focused on health and medicine, especially in the United States, where medical humanities programs have exploded. The number of health humanities programs for undergraduates has quadrupled since 2000, providing opportunities to study the scope and influence of medicine in disparate realms of life.58 This popularity stems in part from the enhanced focus on interdisciplinarity in higher education. So-called cluster hires, for example, have been implemented by administrators to focus research programs and brand their institutions with specializations that deliver grant money. These clusters often incorporate faculty from medical schools and encourage topics that revolve around health and wellness. When I was in residence at the University of Iowa, for example, a cluster hire was approved by the provost to explore the subject of obesity, and diabetes research was a key element of that work. These programs point to the economic imperatives of the modern university, which were crystallized during the financial crisis of the late aughts. As Belinda Jack has succinctly argued, “There’s money in medicine and not so much in the humanities.”59 On a more optimistic note, there is also no denying that there has long existed a dynamic relationship among pedagogy, scholarship, and advocacy in the humanistic investigation of health and medicine. After all, what would AIDS look like without activism? Indeed, what would queer theory look like without studies of HIV/AIDS? What would reproductive rights be without feminist critiques of science? How remiss would the designation of “mental health” be if reduced to definitions outlined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and without the correctives found in art, music, and literature? The humanities elucidate the fixations and deficiencies of clinical perspectives and highlight the generative possibilities of worldmaking among those living with diabetes. The objects of study and methodologies pertinent to the humanities permit a robust examination of the political climates in which knowledge is conceived.60 The power relations that privilege some bodies over others might give prominence to questions of disability, race, gender, and sexuality that are occasionally lost in objective renditions of science, even as they are fundamental to the inquiries being performed.
Management, then, is not best engaged as a purely medical heuristic. Rather, we might treat management as an intrinsically rhetorical construct that is best studied by spotlighting ecologies of context, the negotiation of meaning-making across publics, and the mystifying complications that escort the circulation and reception of ideas about its functions. There is no shortage of scholarship, from the sciences to the humanities, illustrating that knowledge production is not an inherently impartial process but one underwritten by the realm of human affairs.61 Skeptics of scientific objectivity who are suspicious of nominal claims to neutrality have repeatedly dissected normative medical assumptions to discern how culture both enables and restricts interpretive schemas for assessing health expectations.62 The words used to describe “natural” phenomena matter. The contexts in which those words are used matter. The bodies putting those words into discourse matter. Critical heuristics that focus on the intricacies of meaning-making processes can yield valuable insights about health, identity, and power.
As a scholar who is indebted to the fields of cultural studies, feminism, and queer theory, I accord much consideration to the norms that guide the intelligibility of bodies, the stigma that marks people with disease as polluted or impure, and the symbolic possibilities for public activism. The inclination toward social change strikes me as particularly relevant to this project because diabetes is so rarely treated as an object or effect of political power structures. Privileging the voices and experiences of those who live with diabetes can offer matchless rejoinders to public scripts that overlook diabetes’s more unconventional, though no less critical, forms. For example, a posting on the widely utilized tudiabetes.com by a blogger who uses the alias “queer diabetic for universal healthcare” illustrates how meanings not typically foregrounded in the public sphere can subtly shift attitudes in productive fashion. Centralizing an intersection that I have not often come across, she asks: “how exactly are queerness and diabetes connected for you?” Her points are worth relaying in full, reproduced here as they are in the forum. She reports:
-im queer and diabetic. they both exist in me and make me who i am. the simple presence of queer diabetics makes them related.
-i have felt shame and pride at different times about being both queer and diabetic.
-i constantly have to come out as queer and diabetic. the process of coming out always reminds me of my otherness, my deviation from normal, which reminds me of unearned privilege (mine and others) and the subsequent inherent discrimination and oppression created in society. the need to come out also reminds me that (good) health and (hetero)sexuality are constantly presumed. and that is inherently homophobic, diabetaphobic, and ableist.
-im queer and i fight for queer liberation in the streets. but im afraid to get arrested and detained without sugar, insulin, test strips. shouldnt the queer liberation movement be flexible enough to make it safe for me to participate? shouldnt i still be able to be a “hardcore activist” without going into a coma?
-im diabetic and i want a cure, goddammit. would kid-friendly type 1 groups want me to join them in the search and fundraising if they knew about how i have sex? would they be willing to risk their benign-wholesome-white-family/friendly-we-didnt-do-anything-wrong image for my liberation? why not? their fear, my fear must be tied.
-what good is a cure if only rich folks with jobs and health insurance and money can afford it?
-what good is liberation if only some people are allowed to be free?
-what good does it do to “dismantle the police state” if the liberators police and judge our bodies, our medical decisions, our food choices, our worth (based on our ability)?
-i need my meds. i need health insurance. i need love. i need respect & acceptance for my full self.
Management here necessitates health care, medicine, and healthy food choices. But it also demands publics that are sensitive to privilege and marginalization, freedom from fear, mental wellness related to sexual acceptance, and the recognition of one’s personhood. The blogger’s list posits not simply an arduous subject position, but a queer positionality situated by norms of capitalism, white middle-class respectability politics, and the constant prospects of danger
