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(Dis)Embodied Professionalisms: Doctors & Scientists In U.s. Literature, 1895-1935
Richards, Shaun F.
Richards, Shaun F.
Abstract
The United States of America was founded upon patriarchal, white supremacist, and capitalist ideologies that have been concealed from the eyes of the world. (Dis)Embodied Professionalisms offers a viewpoint from which to see and understand how these traditions were mythologized during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in the modern professions and its representative identity: the doctor-scientist. His professionalization consolidated the power-knowledge of the gaze into an ideal figure of disembodied masculine rational and scientific authority premised on a visual epistemology. Through close readings of four novels written by Harold Frederic, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sinclair Lewis, and F. Scott Fitzgerald during a crucial period of social transformation and uncertainty, this dissertation reveals how the paradox of disembodied professionalism culminated in a failed embodiment of authority. Through ocularcentric metaphors of the modern profession of scientific medicine, these writers articulate and elide the promise, ambivalence, and ultimate impossibility of what this dissertation calls the myth of professionalization and, thus, of the hegemony of traditional hierarchies.
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2022-01-01
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American Studies
DOI
https://dx.doi.org/10.21220/s2-cxbe-9g69