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Afterword
Published in Jamie White-Farnham, Bryna Siegel Finer, Cathryn Molloy, Women’s Health Advocacy, 2019
More disconcerting, what should scare any woman like me the most about our risk of heart disease has nothing to do with lack of ovaries or high cholesterol. If I experience symptoms of a heart attack, I am quite likely not to be diagnosed as such; a doctor is likely to suggest I am having a panic attack, that I have acid reflux, or that I have some other issue only because I am a woman. A recent study showed that more than 50% of the time, doctors misdiagnose women’s heart attack symptoms (Lichtman et al., 2018). These were women who went to their doctors with symptoms such as palpitations and arm pain, were told by their doctors they were fine, and then ended up in hospital with what could have been a preventable heart episode. Multiple other studies spanning the last two decades have shown similar results (see, for example, Yong, 2018; Spatz et. al., 2015; Anand et. al., 2005). This sexism, like pinkwashing, is a material reality, yet it is also a rhetorical and discursive phenomenon; this discourse is being studied by medical researchers, but not as frequently by those in RHM. Surely, there is much we can add to this conversation in order to improve conditions. So why does it matter how women are treated by healthcare providers? Because too many doctors do not take women’s health seriously, and too many public discourses suggest that women’s health does get plenty of attention, but that attention is disproportionately on bikini medicine. And then women die.
Marching with Pride? Debates on Uniformed Police Participating in Vancouver’s LGBTQ Pride Parade
Published in Journal of Homosexuality, 2021
Scholars and activists concerned with intersectionality have also productively analyzed practices of pinkwashing by settler colonial states (Dhoot, 2016; Puar, 2011). Pinkwashing describes a political or marketing strategy that presents products, people, or organizations as being LGBTQ-friendly in order to present an image of progressiveness. Academics including queer scholar Jasbir Puar popularized the application of pinkwashing to LGBTQ rights in “Israel’s Gay Propaganda War” (2010), in which Puar critiques Israel for concealing its oppression toward Palestinians by presenting itself as gay-friendly and progressive (Jackman & Upadhyay, 2014; Nash, 2015). Pinkwashing can be defined as “a relatively new concept used to describe a strategy states utilize to rebrand themselves as tolerant and civilized in order to conceal a failure in human rights elsewhere” (Dhoot, 2016, p. 49). Applying pinkwashing to police in Pride parades, Toronto-based sociologists Akwasi Owusu-Bempah and Mariana Valverde argue that police use Pride parades for “public relations opportunities” in order to conceal their oppression of “sex workers, men who like to cruise for sex in parks, and trans and racialized LGBTQ people” (Valverade & Owusu-Bempah, 2017). In other words, pinkwashing references efforts by state (and corporate) actors to burnish their public relations portfolio while at the same time obscuring their complicity in the oppression of marginalized groups (Puar, 2006; Russell, 2018).
Affective Mobilizations: Pinkwashing and Racialized Homophobia in Out There
Published in Journal of Homosexuality, 2021
These concepts not only describe the emerging pathways and citizenizable-subjects of the West’s queer and exceptionalist modernity—as a proliferation of its biopolitical project—but are strategic, analytically, to understand how discourses of sexual liberation have become integrally linked to national and global security. In other words, global LGBT human rights discourse is not really only about gender and sexuality per se. Especially in the post 9/11 context, when mainstream LGBT consent for and endorsement of the “War on Terror” (and the deployment of Islamophobia) is an increasingly urgent goal for Western states, the parallel focus on homophobia “out there” has provided an opportunity for these states to discursively hail their homonationalist subjects and organizational entities into national service.3 This move affords especially (“good”) gay subjects the promise of citizenship (as expendable patriots) in exchange for their participation in and pink-branding of projects of national and global security. Puar (2013, p. 33) describes pinkwashing as “the practice of covering over or distracting from a nation’s policies of discrimination of some populations through a noisy touting of its gay rights for a limited few,” which consolidates a discourse of sexual exceptionalism. The active participation of Western nation-states in global LGBTQ human rights activism adds value to their representational capital (as civilizational superiority) as a result of pinkwashing within the nation. In other words, if the nation-state is judged based on how well it treats its own queers, its stature on the global stage is also measured in terms of its concern and care for queer others who are not treated well by their own nation-states.
Against Whitecoat Washing: The Need for Formal Human Rights Assessment in International Collaborations
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2022
Western scientific and medical institutions have a longstanding history of cooperation with biomedical entities, often state controlled, in nations implicated in severe human rights violations, denials of fundamental liberties and even breaches of the Genocide Convention of 1948. For example, Western engagement with the People’s Republic of China has been largely uninterrupted by that nation’s widespread use of torture in Tibet and the ongoing cultural genocide against the Uyghur people of Xinjiang (Piotrowicz 2020; US State Department, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor 2010). The United States has expanded its scientific cooperation with Saudi Arabia despite the latter’s track record of torturing dissidents and consistent ranking among the world’s most brutal authoritarian regimes (Alarabiya News 2020; Freedom House 2020). Collaboration between scientists in the United States and Cuba has increased notwithstanding that nation’s worsening domestic repression (Ronda-Pupo 2021). In the 21st century, with the exception of a few hermetic pariah states, such as North Korea and Eritrea, the western scientific and medical communities have largely been willing to work with institutions located in authoritarian nations engaged in the worst forms of abuse. Such interactions are frequently justified on the grounds that science is apolitical and that these interactions build bridges between the West and the people inside these repressive countries (Hoy 2019). Yet just because science itself is apolitical does not mean that the choice to collaborate with entities in regimes that engage in egregious human rights violations is also apolitical. Rather, such collaborations are a political choice that, in some circumstances, can lend legitimacy to such institutions or even whitewash such abuses under the veil of outside approval. Analogous to “greenwashing” (distracting from environmental abuses with misleading advertising) or “pinkwashing” (distracting from human rights abuses with gay-friendly policies), the process of “whitecoat washing” lends legitimacy to human rights abusers through biomedical cooperation.