another abstract attempt

The field of medicine acts not only to heal bodies and cure disease, it acts as a repository of power, defining bodies and constituting subjects through discourse. Medicine is a field of knowledge, and as such, can work to conceal its own role in the creation of the gendered subject. In postmodern theory, experience is always “mediated by organized discourses that amount to systems of representation” (Morris 8); in this paper I will examine how the experiences of transgender patients have been shaped by medical discourses. The modern biomedical model inadequately addresses issues of gender and gendered embodiments and offers reductive and mechanistic understandings of illness. I will contextualize the dialogue on postmodern ethics within a discussion of medical care for queer and transgender bodies in order to reconstruct the conceptual territory in which bioethics is presently situated. In order to provide a postmodern critique on gendered biomedical discourses, I will examine the historical conflation of sex and gender as well as heteronormative/gender-policing practices in biomedicine. The purpose of a responsible bioethics is to examine the practices and discourses that enforce gender normativity and consequently erase gender diversity. This critical self-awareness in biomedicine is necessary to unleash the libratory potential within transsituated discursive reiterations. This paper seeks to reveal the cultural contingency of biomedical narratives in order to reformulate a biomedical model which upholds the ethical principals it espouses.