Dissertation: "Mediating Alterity: Transitive Indianness in U.S. Non-Normative Medicine"

Certified Summer 2018

My research is firmly committed to medical humanities and social sciences, a field of critical inquiry dedicated to persistent reflexivity in medicine.  As a communications and media studies scholar, my method and major focus of study takes shape as social and cultural studies of medicine wherein medicine is understood as a scientific and technological phenomenon.  My research is further influenced by and committed to critical indigenous, race, ethnic, and gender studies whereby I consider the ways medicine in culture and society shape and are shaped by notions of indigeneity, latinidad, and gender.  In the case of my dissertation, this led me to thinking about medicine’s mediation of indigeneity as alterity in relation to U.S. multiculturalism and gender at the site of what I call “non-normative medicine.”  I center my examination around the institutionalization of non-normative medicine within the U.S. government, specifically the establishment of the Office of Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health in 1991.  I argue that the event depended heavily on a depoliticized cultural signification of Indianness to construct non-normative medicine as multiculturally inclusive, as evidenced by the appointment of a Mohawk physician and health administrator as the founding director who popular media at the time racialized and gendered as a “medicine man.”  I follow with an examination of the years following his premature resignation, wherein Indianness became obscured, and latinidad and other forms of flattened gendered and racialized difference proved more effective in substantiating non-normative medicine’s multicultural brand.

Rico Kleinstein Chenyek received their PhD in Communications and Media from the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Their major focus of study is in the social and cultural studies of science, medicine, and technology, with graduate minors in American Indian & Indigenous Studies, Latina/Latino Studies, and Gender & Women’s Studies.  Rico’s dissertation, “Mediating Alterity: Transitive Indianness in U.S. Non-Normative Medicine,” is a comprehensive cultural study of the U.S. institutionalization of non-normative medicine at the National Institutes of Health that centralizes the politics of (indigenous) alterity.  Rico received a BA in Chicana/o & Latina/o studies from Pomona College in 2011 and is now at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Chicago completing their MD/PhD training.