Self-Care: Seeking Queer Liberation from the Medical Gaze and Genetic Fatalism
Self-Care: Seeking Queer Liberation from the Medical Gaze and Genetic Fatalism

Summary/Abstract: Genetic diagnostics are radically and rapidly changing perceptions of health. Individuals with identifiable pathogenic genetic differences are now being made into culturalmutants. Unlike other forms of embodied difference, these diagnostics rely on a high statistical probability of developing a disease, known as genetic risk. As such, individuals with a mutation are often subjected to perform the same clinical labor as those who are already sick with a disease, which can involve invasive medical surveillance, preventative surgeries, and familyplanning. Self-Care is my artistic attempt to reckon with these biotechnological ruptures inidentity caused by the rising use of genetic diagnostics in medicine. Using my body, Self-Careweaves a narrative about health, gender, and identity that seeks to resist the confines of themedical gaze. The work features a specially designed chest binder housing living BRCA1 mutantbreast cancer cells, which allows the artist to take on the caring responsibilities of theircancer before it emerges in their body. Building off the artwork, this paper explores contemporaryissues surrounding Hereditary Breast and Ovarian Cancer Syndrome in global healthcaresystems. Traversing the boundaries between sick and healthy, male and female, and parentand child, this paper sets out to both present the scholarly research surrounding Self-Care andprovide a platform of critical self-reflection for the artwork to question how best we can carefor ourselves and others.

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