Pedagogies of Woundedness: Illness, Memoir, and the Ends of the Model Minority

by James Kyung-Jin Lee

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781439921869
Publisher:	Temple University Press
Publication date:	12/22/2021
Series:	D/C: Dis/color
Pages:	233
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Sickness unto Death: An Asian American Learning 1

1 The Desification of the Doctor and the Ends of Medicine 27

2 The Doctor, Undone: The Rise of Physician Chaplaincy 67

3 Styles of Asian American Illness 93

4 Illness as Method 127

Epilogue: Slow Time and Unprecedence 161

Notes 173

Bibliography 197

Index 205

Editorial Reviews

"Lee’s book makes important contributions to ongoing and much needed conversations about illness, disability, racism, ableism, and the importance of storytelling and memoir."—Wordgathering

“Lee provides an engaging bridge between Asian American and disability studies, draws skillfully from both fields, and demonstrates the compelling significance of Asian American medical and illness memoirs for the general public.”—American Literary History

From the Publisher