Chair: Johanna Schmidt
Laura Starling - University of Otago (Presenter), Susan Wardell - University of Otago & Cassie Withey-Rila - University of Otago
Fat and Deserving: negotiating the visibility of non-normative bodies in online medical crowdfunding
Medical crowdfunding is an individualising and privatising response to healthcare inequalities, in which citizens use online platforms to share (written and visual) stories about health-related needs, in order to elicit donations. We present data from a multimethodological study of crowdfunding in Aotearoa New Zealand, drawing on critical theory and fat studies to connect emergent findings about crowdfunding in relation to Type 1 Diabetes, Transgender healthcare, and weight-loss surgeries. We highlight the complexities involved in making fat (and otherwise non-normative) bodies acceptable, consumable, and marketable, to networked publics.
Analysis of both campaigner and audience perspectives show that the ability of particular bodies to generate specific moral emotions (that can, through these platforms, be turned into care/healthcare access) depends largely on their relationship to normative ideas of the ‘good’ body. Crowdfunders publicly performed working aspirationally towards a ‘good’ (healthful, productive, controlled, aesthetically-pleasing) body, while remaining visibly fat, through self-objectification, remorse or dysphoria, and eliciting pity or disgust. Medical crowdfunding offers insight into how people negotiate hierarchies of deservingness, based on entrenched normativities, whilst living in non-normative bodies: highlighting the double bind of the digital gaze upon bodies that are unable to access privileged states of health without being made visible to scrutiny.
Cassie Withey-Rila - University of Otago (Presenter) & Susan Wardell - University of Otago
Crowdfunding for Medical Transition, in Aotearoa New Zealand: context and consequences
Gender affirming care involves a range of services, traditionally accessed through the healthcare system, by transgender, nonbinary, other gender expansive individuals. In Aotearoa New Zealand, access to publicly-funded services is inconsistently available, and varies by region. Waitlists and other barriers often motivate trans people to get creative in establishing pathways to meet their needs. One pathway, is for individuals to use online crowdfunding platforms such as Givealittle to seek donations from networked publics, to fund private services instead. In this paper we present findings from one section of a mixed methods study of medical crowdfunding in Aotearoa New Zealand. Qualitative data was gathered through interviews, case studies, and focus groups, the participants including transgender people who had used (or considered using) crowdfunding for medical transition related care themselves, and other community stakeholders. We use our data to compare to international research, unpacking nationally-specific aspects of crowdfunding, including normative expectations placed on trans crowdfunders, and assumed audience. Gender diverse communities are resourceful in finding work-arounds when denied care, however, issues of equity, bias, stigma, and safety, in this type of crowdfunding, highlight the need for a critical eye on both the context, and consequence, of this marketized, individualised, approach to healthcare.
Emma Osborne - University of Otago
Embodied knowing in health professional education
Situated and embodied knowledges of health and illness are often treated as marginal ‘subjective’ perspectives in contrast to dominant ‘objective truths’ in both medical practice (Taylor, 2003) and higher education (Andreotti, Ahenakew, & Cooper, 2011). This paper draws on qualitative interviews with 22 health professional students and graduates who experienced a significant overlap between their own lives and their study, for example, through personal or familial illness. I consider participants’ accounts of: discordance between biomedical ‘outsider’ ways of knowing about health versus experiential ‘insider’ knowing; the role of ‘making assumptions’ or ‘rapid clinical judgements’ as a source of ‘truth’; and differing perspectives on pursuing optimal individual health as a moral imperative (Petersen & Lupton, 1996). Sometimes participants’ counternarratives contrasted directly with the ways health was framed in the curriculum, and at times participants endorsed aspects of the curriculum but saw a need to also include more nuanced understandings stemming from experiential knowledge. Participants combined lived and academic knowledges of health in ways that challenge prevailing “dichotomous, autonomous and disembodied” (Andreotti et al., 2011, p. 45) thinking in higher education and health.
