Dao, Difference, and Disability: Classical Daoist Contributions to Destigmatizing Health Practices
Charles Dalrymple-Fraser, University of Toronto
The recent “narrative turn” in medicine and bioethics have made more available testimonies from various patient populations that have helped to reveal the biases and stigma about categories of “difference” that affect our health practices and services. In this presentation I situate Classical Daoist thought on the cosmological relationships humanness and Dao in conversation with contemporary discourses on bad-difference and mere-difference accounts of disability and identity more broadly. In particular, I draw from cosmological accounts in the Laozi (Daodejing) and the Guodian bamboo strips, as well as examples of the pedagogy of disability in the Zhaungzi, in order to draw Classical Daoist parallels to more contemporary bad-difference and mere-difference accounts of difference in humanness, disability, and health. While I focus primarily on conversations concerning disability, including those around Elizabeth Barnes’ (2016) The Minority Body in particular, I argue that understanding the Classical Daoist teachings can also help us to understand broader categories of “difference” and stigma in health and “healthism”, such as those across age, gender, race, size, etc. Ultimately, I argue, a Classical Daoist framework for thinking of “difference” provides more support to reinterpreting the dis/ability binary, as well as other categorizations within a broader un/healthy binary. This reconceptualization provides more tools for resisting “healthism” as well as biases and stigmas in health practices across “difference”.
The recent “narrative turn” in medicine and bioethics have made more available testimonies from various patient populations that have helped to reveal the biases and stigma about categories of “difference” that affect our health practices and services. In this presentation I situate Classical Daoist thought on the cosmological relationships humanness and Dao in conversation with contemporary discourses on bad-difference and mere-difference accounts of disability and identity more broadly. In particular, I draw from cosmological accounts in the Laozi (Daodejing) and the Guodian bamboo strips, as well as examples of the pedagogy of disability in the Zhaungzi, in order to draw Classical Daoist parallels to more contemporary bad-difference and mere-difference accounts of difference in humanness, disability, and health. While I focus primarily on conversations concerning disability, including those around Elizabeth Barnes’ (2016) The Minority Body in particular, I argue that understanding the Classical Daoist teachings can also help us to understand broader categories of “difference” and stigma in health and “healthism”, such as those across age, gender, race, size, etc. Ultimately, I argue, a Classical Daoist framework for thinking of “difference” provides more support to reinterpreting the dis/ability binary, as well as other categorizations within a broader un/healthy binary. This reconceptualization provides more tools for resisting “healthism” as well as biases and stigmas in health practices across “difference”.