“The world wants us dead”:stigma and the social construction of health in Pose

ABSTRACT

Through its portrayals of the intersectional identities of race and gender divergence, the FX series Pose illustrates how social structures fail marginalized communities as a disciplinary function of hegemony and perpetuate a biomedical model of health that serves to reinforce health disparities. For this study, researchers took a critical cultural rhetorical approach to the series through the lens of the social ecological model and biomedical model, to deconstruct hegemonic discourses of power present within medical practices. This paper situates Pose as an artifact that condemns the cultural practices of the marginalization and erasure of transgender communities, demonstrating how the show confronts the mechanisms of hegemonic power by exposing the cissexist stigmatization within the healthcare establishment. Through the exposure of the failings of the social ecological model with the biomedical model, Pose exposes the discrimination and stigma inherent within dominant forms of healthcare as they persist today.

KEYWORDS:

• Pose
• transgender
• biomedical model of health
• social ecological model
• critical cultural rhetoric

Notes

1 Those who identify as Lesbian Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, and other gender and sexually marginalized groups.

2 For the purposes of this manuscript, hegemonic refers to the ability of the dominant group or ideology to assert itself onto marginalized and disenfranchized peoples (Hall, 1993).

3 Those who identify as the gender assigned at birth.

4 Meaning, centering the cisgender identity.

5 Cissexism refers to the discrimination of TGD people based on hegemonic norms of gender identity.

6 We situate CCR as a means to expand the cultural critique Pose mounts in order to apply it to healthcare practices far beyond the AIDS tragedy. According to Raymie McKerrow (1989), critical rhetoric, “seeks to unmask or demystify the discourse of power” (p. 91). CCR serves to illustrate and deconstruct underlying forces of power and oppression throughout American culture. Within the context of this study, CCR reveals the oppression and stigmatization present within discourses surrounding TGD people and identity throughout the American health care system. Thus, CCR allows scholars to uncover the social dynamics of power and cultural identity by “pulling together of disparate scraps of discourse […] to illuminate otherwise hidden or taken for granted social practices” (McKerrow, 1989, p. 101). CCR structures an in-depth understanding of how embodied representations impact the cultural understandings of marginalized identities within a historical context that demonstrate the processes of “knowledge and social truth” (Butler & Bissell, 2015, p. 228).