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.

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.”

In fact, what I really want to say outright—and it must be said, over and over—is that acupuncture is queer, as it is practiced and exists under and against the dominance of Western Medicine in North America. All of it is, by nature, a queer medicine.

Honestly, that’s what they mean when they call us alternative medicine—after surviving centuries of racist political and social oppression—when they categorize us as "complementary" or "unconventional" or “traditional” or “folk." All of those semantic gymnastics.

What they mean is we are the other thing—not the real 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. “Alternative” is polite for “faggot.”

Of course, for the those of us who know, it does the opposite. To be queer is to be told who you are by people who are not you and think less of you. But queerness, as it historically always has, reclaims and transforms that stigma and shame into style, solidarity, and splendor. We transvalue the negation, to make it productive of living fully and deliberately with grace and so much beauty.

It doesn’t belittle me. It emboldens me.

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.

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-grinding myself into increasingly-narrow syntaxes and definitions of what this medicine “should” do.

My queerness is why I don’t like to 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.

Someone is going to email you they hated it; they feel worse than when 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.

We are free to try new things. To say what we want. To PLAY. To risk flamboyant failure. Chinese Medicine has no allegiance to the “legitimacy” of mainstream medicine or 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 did not fight for the continued existence of acupuncture so that a capitalist troupe of contemporary practitioners could peddle ear seeds at “In GOOP Health” summits, whitewash their social media accounts and ignore everything occurring in the actual world.

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 pharmaceutical industry, all of the insurance companies and the NIH 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.

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, fewer insurance companies cover our services, or the reimbursements become less and less, in spite of the increasing demand. Can we give this up already?

To assimilate into Western over-culture 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! What we do should be illegible, annoying, and adversarial to mainstream medicine.

If I’m doing my job right, I should feel I am 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-basedenough, profitable enough, legitimate enough–to make daddy love us.  

Daddy will never love us.

So keep it, Daddy. Let it go. Be repellent. Fuck Blue Shield. Fuck the Sacklers. Run from America. Embrace and embody your wild monstrosity. 

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

Happy Pride from Diet Poke!