Our Medicine is a Queer Medicine

Russell attempts a timely post for Gay Pride

I am a queer acupuncturist, and the acupuncture I practice is queer.

This is very much a part of the DNA of my practice, although I’m not certain I’ve ever said it outright or that I’ve said it outright enough.

What I want to say—what must be screamed out, over and over—is that acupuncture, as it is practiced and exists under and against the dominance of Western Medicine in North America, is a queer medicine.¹

“Queer” is what they mean when they call us “alternative medicine.”

“Queer” is what they are saying when they categorize us as "complementary" or "unconventional" or “traditional” or “folk."

All of those semantic gymnastics–what they really mean is we are not the real thing; we are not the right thing. We are the other thing. The “last resort.” They mean to ghettoize us: to put us in our place, way over there, with the lesser things; reduced, surveilled, and occluded.

To be queer is to be told you are outside, looking in. To be queer is to be defined by people who are not you and think less of you.

“Alternative medicine” is polite for “faggot.”

Now, If you have never been called a “faggot” before, you may think this a terrible thing.

But if you have–if you’ve had it scorned at you from a passing car or spat at you by someone who purports to love you–and you survived, you know it magically does the opposite of its intention.

Queerness reclaims the projected stigma and transforms it into solidarity and resilience. It swallows up the degradation and shame that’s trying to be weaponized, and spits it back out as style and splendor and rage.

It doesn’t belittle me. It emboldens me.

Pride is about transvaluing the negation into a delirious fury for creating something new, exploding with a gratuity of self-possession, counter-vision, and of course, beauty. And to do so, not as a gag, but as a strategy for survival.

And baby, look at our profession right now. We’re gonna need a strategy.

This Pride, if you have not already accepted, I invite you into your queer liberation. Even if you don’t self-identify in such a way in any other aspect of your life, I invite you to turn toward the alterity that is implicit in your position and your livelihood as a Western acupuncturist. You are queer, too.

My queerness is why I don’t wear a self-serious white coat or hold myself with the impenetrable detachment of professional austerity in my clinic or online.

My queerness is why I refuse to adhere to textbook stricture or orthodoxy—the literal acu-point therapeutics and the materialist mechanics of TCM diagnosis. Or meat-grind myself into increasingly-narrow syntaxes and definitions of what this medicine “should” do.

My queerness is why I don’t do that thing where we squeamishly preface everything with “In Chinese Medicine, we say….” as if our concepts are so adversarial or far-fetched that we need a little asterisk so as not to offend anyone. Like there’s real medicine, and then there’s what we say way over here, in the tiniest, tight-ropiest, least-likely-to-offend, not-ruffling-any-feathers little corner that the world allows us.

The medicine is queer. We are freed from the nonsense posturing of the conventional, the traditional, the boring, the hegemonic. We are freed from performing the paternalist overconfidence of unimpeachable certitude and flawlessness.

We are free to try new things. To improvise. To make it up as we go along, like how poems are written. To PLAY. To risk flamboyant failure.

Someone is going to email you they hated it; they feel worse than before they came in. That’s ok! Obviously, not desirable, but ok. You are permitted the grace of a growth hierarchy, which demands the time and space for investigation and recognizes that fumbling and “error” are actually necessary steps toward knowing. To work with failure instead of against it. To fail forward.

Chinese Medicine has no allegiance to some totally-imagined straight line to healing. Ours is a queer medicine.  

The goal is not to get it right. The goal is to pay attention; to see things with new eyes; to meet life’s hardness with the elasticity of imagination and compassion; and to ever-radically expand the horizon of possibility. Make the art you need to make.

And this really goes out to the practitioners in the back who work so hard to maintain their beige political neutrality; who refuse to even performatively acknowledge the racism in and around our profession, while cashing their checks on the backs of a proud history of activists who fought for the continued existence of acupuncture.

You can peddle ear seeds at “In GOOP Health” summits, whitewash your social media accounts, refuse to professionally acknowledge anything happening in the real world, and bend whatever reality you need to support a patently racist and anti-immigration political administration. But guess what? Your work is queer, too.

No matter how much you instrumentalize yourself for capitalism, and purport yourself as evidence-based and science-backed to legitimize yourself via some sort of cis professionalism, the truth is the American Medical Association, the DHHS, the pharmaceutical industry, and all of the insurance companies still fundamentally regard us all as subway rats, who shriek and scatter anytime the “true” light of evidence-based biomedicine turns on. You exist entirely at the margins whether you choose to see it or not. You’re queer.

Every year since I have been licensed, since the Bush Administration, I see articles in Time and CNN about how acupuncture is "going mainstream," and our schools' Instagram accounts are quick to repost them, as if the print legitimacy will miraculously boost enrollment or sooth their current students' anxiety about paying the exorbitant tuitions which fail debt-to-earning ratio. And yet every year, more schools are closing, fewer insurance companies cover our services, or the reimbursements become less and less. Can we give this up already?

We are queer medicine. To assimilate into Western models misses the point entirely: our defining feature is as a contrast and criticism of the didacticism, utilitarianism and narrowness of biomedicine. We are anti-capitalist, matriarchal, non-Caucasian medicine which predates the Age of Reason!

Of course the over-cultural imagination deems us silly and without utility! What we do should be illegible, annoying, and adversarial to mainstream medicine.

If I’m doing my job right, I should be baffling and antagonizing to a gastroenterologist. I pray there are urologists out there eye-rolling about me.

Acupuncture will never be mainstream medicine in America, because "mainstream in America" means it must simultaneously appeal to the health concerns of cis straight white men and be grotesquely profitable for them. Hence the only true mainstream medicine in America is Lipitor, Cialis, Prilosec and OxyContin. I have no interest in this form of health.

We are never going to be enough–scientific enough, evidence-based enough, profitable enough, legitimate enough–to make Daddy love us.  

Daddy will never love us.

So keep it, Daddy. Let it go.

Our queer job is to point our finger to the future–to dream of the other and then make it real–insisting on a separate and sovereign set of values; values that might make life worth living.

Not only do I not want to be what they think is the right thing, fuck the right thing.

Fuck Blue Shield. Fuck the Sacklers. Fuck the DHHS. Fuck everyone.

Run from America. Be repellant. Embrace and embody your wild monstrosity. 

Happy Pride from Diet Poke!

“The moment of queer pride is a refusal to be shamed by witnessing the other as being ashamed of you.”
–Sara Ahmed

1. As defined by bell hooks: “‘Queer’ not as being about who you’re having sex with; but ‘queer’ as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”