{"title":"Theater as a Site of Resistance in Haresh Sharma's Good People: Questioning Authorities and Contesting Truths in the Clinic.","authors":"April Thant Aung","doi":"10.1007/s10912-023-09793-2","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Good People, by Singaporean playwright Haresh Sharma, unmasks racial and religious tensions between Singapore's increasingly diverse racial groups and the attendant ramifications on the healthcare ecosystem and the doctor-patient relationship. Drawing upon Michel Foucault's notion of heterotopia, this paper argues that, in Good People, Sharma employs theater as a site of resistance by calling into question state and medical authority. First, state authority is challenged through the play's scrutiny of the ideological principle of multiculturalism and its usefulness in fostering meaningful cross-cultural exchanges and acceptance of different cultural and religious beliefs in the clinic. Second, the play destabilizes medical authority by surfacing the complex relationship between the doctor's unconscious biases, racial and religious prejudice, and clinical judgment, thereby casting doubt on medicine's claims of objectivity. In doing so, this paper argues, the play resists simplistic binary categorizations of the behaviors and motivations of the characters into good/bad or right/wrong, instead raising questions about power, knowledge, and contesting truths within the confines of the cultural space of a hospice.</p>","PeriodicalId":45518,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Medical Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2000,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Medical Humanities","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-023-09793-2","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2023/4/22 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Good People, by Singaporean playwright Haresh Sharma, unmasks racial and religious tensions between Singapore's increasingly diverse racial groups and the attendant ramifications on the healthcare ecosystem and the doctor-patient relationship. Drawing upon Michel Foucault's notion of heterotopia, this paper argues that, in Good People, Sharma employs theater as a site of resistance by calling into question state and medical authority. First, state authority is challenged through the play's scrutiny of the ideological principle of multiculturalism and its usefulness in fostering meaningful cross-cultural exchanges and acceptance of different cultural and religious beliefs in the clinic. Second, the play destabilizes medical authority by surfacing the complex relationship between the doctor's unconscious biases, racial and religious prejudice, and clinical judgment, thereby casting doubt on medicine's claims of objectivity. In doing so, this paper argues, the play resists simplistic binary categorizations of the behaviors and motivations of the characters into good/bad or right/wrong, instead raising questions about power, knowledge, and contesting truths within the confines of the cultural space of a hospice.
期刊介绍:
Journal of Medical Humanities publishes original papers that reflect its enlarged focus on interdisciplinary inquiry in medicine and medical education. Such inquiry can emerge in the following ways: (1) from the medical humanities, which includes literature, history, philosophy, and bioethics as well as those areas of the social and behavioral sciences that have strong humanistic traditions; (2) from cultural studies, a multidisciplinary activity involving the humanities; women''s, African-American, and other critical studies; media studies and popular culture; and sociology and anthropology, which can be used to examine medical institutions, practice and education with a special focus on relations of power; and (3) from pedagogical perspectives that elucidate what and how knowledge is made and valued in medicine, how that knowledge is expressed and transmitted, and the ideological basis of medical education.