Can Medical Interpreters Transcend the Medical Gaze? A Case Study of Biopolitical Pervasiveness within Medicine

• In Event: 343 - Section on Medical Sociology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 08. Healthcare Professions II

Abstract

Undocumented immigrants are expected to become the largest uninsured population in the United States after the full implementation of President Obama’s Affordable Health Care Act (ACA), creating a social context that health practitioners must be attentive to in order to provide adequate care. However, following Foucault’s “medical gaze,” health practitioners are focused myopically at addressing where the body hurts, rather than where the hurt body comes from. Medical interpreters have been presented as possible circumventers of this medical gaze. Through the use of in-depth interviews with two nurses and two medical interpreters from a community health clinic in the Twin Cities, this study complicates that notion, demonstrating that despite their social position proximate to (im)migrant patients, medical interpreters also perpetuate the medical gaze, facilitating symbolic violence and substantiating biopolitics within the institution of medicine. Three explanations for why medical interpreters have difficult transcending the medical gaze are offered: (a) the neoliberalization of medicine, (b) the compression of interpreters’ emotional work, and (c) an underestimation of medical interpreters not only as cultural brokers but also as decipherers of biomedical suffering.

Author

• Anthony Michael Jimenez, University of Minnesota