Managing Diabetes

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Jeffrey A. Bennett. Managing Diabetes

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MANAGING DIABETES

General Editors: Monica J. Casper and Lisa Jean Moore

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The epigraphs to this chapter share a number of commonalities that speak to the embodied nature of knowledge production and the performative repertoires that transform abstractions into lived practices. Each of them depicts a peripatetic actor, one who walks to make the strange familiar. Phaedrus is one of the few dialogues in Plato’s canon where his heroine leaves the walls of Athens, signaling the unusual nature of the text and metaphorically encapsulating the dangers of rhetoric’s promiscuous circulation outside the bounds of discreet contexts. Anzaldúa is likewise on an excursion, consumed by the beauty and stench of nature, hoping her stroll will draw inspiration for the very exercise Plato suspiciously castigates. Socrates scans the plane trees for cicadas; Anzaldúa the cypress trees that exist harmoniously with the pelicans. They are both preoccupied with invention and spiritual creativity, a yearning for revelations that spring from engagements with the environment, an interlocutor, and oneself. They achieve philosophical clarity through methodological messiness. Plato seeks to rethink the postulates of rhetoric and love; Anzaldúa narrates a morning in her life to craft a poetics of illness in all its inglorious forms.

Management, then, is not best engaged as a purely medical heuristic. Rather, we might treat management as an intrinsically rhetorical construct that is best studied by spotlighting ecologies of context, the negotiation of meaning-making across publics, and the mystifying complications that escort the circulation and reception of ideas about its functions. There is no shortage of scholarship, from the sciences to the humanities, illustrating that knowledge production is not an inherently impartial process but one underwritten by the realm of human affairs.61 Skeptics of scientific objectivity who are suspicious of nominal claims to neutrality have repeatedly dissected normative medical assumptions to discern how culture both enables and restricts interpretive schemas for assessing health expectations.62 The words used to describe “natural” phenomena matter. The contexts in which those words are used matter. The bodies putting those words into discourse matter. Critical heuristics that focus on the intricacies of meaning-making processes can yield valuable insights about health, identity, and power.

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