Short Abstract:

This panel examines how vernacular and alternative practices of health- and self-care challenge and reconfigure biomedical narratives. It highlights how these practices "unwrite" mainstream models and intersect with power, identity, and autonomy in both historical and contemporary contexts.

Long Abstract:

Contemporary notions of health, wellness, and illness are increasingly complemented and contested by vernacular and alternative practices and authorities. These counter-narratives challenge not only the dominance of biomedical models but also the underlying assumptions about gendered, racialized, and marginalized bodies, as well as broader onto-political frameworks. The panel will address how alternative health cultures critique and “unwrite” dominant medical discourses by offering forms of counter-knowledge rooted in embodied experience, community, and non-institutional expertise.

Some of the questions this panel aims to address include: how do alternative health cultures and practices, whether rooted in traditional approaches or supported by contemporary technological interventions, challenge and destabilize the biomedical narrative? How do these practices provide avenues for agency and empowerment, especially for those whose bodies or symptoms have been marginalized by mainstream medicine? What are the implications when personal experience and self-experimentation take precedence over established scientific authority in alternative health and wellness cultures?

Additionally, the panel will explore how the global wellness industry appropriates and commodifies vernacular and traditional practices, potentially “unwriting” their cultural specificity while simultaneously reinforcing neoliberal ideals of self-optimization and individual responsibility. We will also consider how collective, community-based practices may act as counter-narratives to contemporary emphases on individual agency and personal responsibility.

Ultimately, the goal is to offer critical perspectives on how health, wellness, and therapeutic knowledge are constructed, contested, and reconfigured in contemporary and historical contexts, while addressing the ways these discourses intersect with issues of power, identity, and autonomy.

This Panel has so far received 5 paper proposal(s).
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