Description
The pressures Asian Americans feel to be socially and economically exceptional include an unspoken mandate to always be healthy. Nowhere is this more evident than in the expectation for Asian Americans to enter the field of medicine, principally as providers of care rather than those who require care. Pedagogies of Woundedness explores what happens when those considered model minorities critically engage with illness and medicine whether as patients or physicians.
James Kyung-Jin Lee considers how popular culture often positions Asian Americans as medical authorities and what that racial characterization means. Addressing the recent trend of writing about sickness, disability, and death, Lee shows how this investment in Asian American health via the model minority is itself a response to older racial forms that characterize Asian American bodies as diseased. Moreover, he pays attention to what happens when academics get sick and how illness becomes both methodology and an archive for scholars.
Pedagogies of Woundedness also explores the limits of biomedical "care," the rise of physician chaplaincy, and the impact of COVID. Throughout his book and these case studies, Lee shows the social, ethical, and political consequences of these common (mis)conceptions that often define Asian Americans in regard to health and illness.
Author: James Kyung-Jin Lee
Publisher: Temple University Press
Published: 12/22/2021
Pages: 233
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.74lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.52d
ISBN13: 9781439921869
ISBN10: 1439921865
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | American | Asian American Studies & Pacific
- Social Science | People with Disabilities
- Medical | Health Care Delivery
About the Author
James Kyung-Jin Lee is an Associate Professor of Asian American Studies and English and Director of the Center for Medical Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Urban Triage: Race and the Fictions of Multiculturalism.